The Clothed Maja

ALL ABOUT OGUN

Another longer text, this time in the form of a small tribute to my favourite record label, Ogun Records. Formed in 1973 by the great expatriate South African bassist Harry Miller and his then wife Hazel after the major record companies’ tax loss honeymoon with contemporary/free British jazz/improv had ended, its purpose was to record as comprehensively as possible the music from the small circle of musicians who had formed around the nucleus of what were the Blue Notes, with major additional input from the Keith Tippett/Elton Dean axis of musicians and the various alumni of Mike Westbrook’s bands.

It formed a couple of years after Incus, whose output it paralleled throughout the ‘70s. But while many of these musicians recorded for both labels, they were in nature very different. Incus had been formed by Derek Bailey, Evan Parker and Tony Oxley with a view to documenting developments in the hardcore improv scene. Incus, to put it very facilely, was the head of Brit improv, but Ogun was its South African heart. I loved the label for its distinctive look, its reliability – with very few exceptions, an Ogun logo presupposed music of the highest quality – and because it seemed to unite the elements of music which I, as a young teenager growing up in Glasgow, found most attractive; the danceability and melodicism of the music coupled with its uncompromising advances into more abstract and – yes, noisy – areas. Such amazing tunes, such a bloody blessed racket.

The following words concentrate on the albums issued by Ogun in its heyday, spanning the years 1973-79. By the end of the ‘70s Harry Miller had separated from his wife and relocated to Holland, where he tragically died at the end of 1983 from severe injuries sustained in a road accident, driving in treacherous conditions on the way home from a gig, aged just 42. Of the nucleus of South African musicians, only drummer Louis Moholo is still with us today, all the others having passed on at absurdly early ages, haunted and perhaps cursed by the legacy of what Moholo once described as “the divine hellhole that is South Africa.”

Consequently Ogun was put on pause until the mid-‘80s, since when Hazel Miller has continued, as perilous finances allow, to put out new issues by the likes of Moholo’s Viva La Black and the Dedication Orchestra as well as periodically reissuing old favourites. Sadly much of this catalogue remains out of print, and the average cost of second-hand vinyl copies is now likely to send a chill through your bank balance; regrettably, until an enterprising philanthropist materialises to finance a full-scale CD reissue programme, this is likely to remain the case. Nevertheless, as I say, here is my little tribute to a label whose music roared with love.

OG 100
CHRIS McGREGOR’S BROTHERHOOD OF BREATH
Live At Willisau
(date of release: 1974)
McGregor (piano); Harry Beckett, Marc Charig, Mongezi Feza (trumpets); Nick Evans, Radu Malfatti (trombones); Dudu Pukwana (alto sax); Evan Parker, Gary Windo (tenor saxes); Harry Miller (bass); Louis Moholo (drums).

The original derivation of the term “kwela” for the form of South African township music previously known as “penny whistle music” comes from the exclamations of the policemen who would periodically come to arrest, take away, beat up and/or kill various township residents who had the temerity to be black. As they were being rounded up and cattle-prodded into the police vans they would exclaim “Kwela! Kwela!” meaning “Get up! Move it!” Thus a symbol of oppression was turned into a symbol of defiant celebration – the words “Get up! Move it!” now meaning “let’s dance.”

With the Brotherhood of Breath, Chris McGregor was able to marry his love of kwela music, the Protestant hymns with which he had grown up as a child and post-Ornette all-comers free jazz in a large, sprawling band with a South African core and involving, at various times, virtually everyone of consequence on the British modern jazz and improv scene. They were capable of producing the most atonal and demonic of improvisations, yet the imperturbable rhythm section of Louis Moholo and Harry Miller anchored their explorations at all times, such that you were dancing as you flew into post-Sun Ra outer space. Frequently, in concert the “traffic jam” syndrome would make itself apparent, with all of the dozen or so horn players queuing up to solo, or just storming in anyway; often musicians would wander around the stage at their own free will, or jam the bells of their horns into microphones to produce overtones. Somehow it all held together and gave us the most glorious group of musicians of any genre ever to exist, a band who seemed to provide everything I wanted in music, post-Ellington in make-up and yet also strangely proto-punk in attitude.

Their two studio albums for RCA were generally well-behaved affairs, even if the second was somewhat looser than their Joe Boyd-produced debut. But their three live albums from the ‘70s – and there’s another double CD package due shortly from Cuneiform Records, comprising more newly-found tapes of gigs from 1971 and 1975 – present a far more raucous and anarchic assemblage.

Live In Willisau was recorded in Switzerland in January 1973 on the same tour which also produced the Radio Bremen broadcasts reissued in 2001 as Travelling Somewhere, and both should be heard in tandem if possible. The Radio Bremen gig has a slightly different line-up – Mike Osborne, who was too ill to perform at the Willisau gig, appears on second alto, and Malcolm Griffiths deps for Malfatti on second trombone – but both sets of music are equally wild.

Live At Willisau, even with CD remastering, still sounds as though it were recorded at the back of a bus queue, and while this necessarily means that some of the finer details of the improvised ensembles are lost – the trumpets and saxes seem a distant blur, while the two trombonists are in your face – the rawness of the music seems to be a good match for the basic sonics. Those still trying to figure out what Evan Parker was doing in that duo with Paul Lytton would do well to listen to his contributions here – his tenor feature on “Do It” is, however abstract it becomes, still fundamentally relevant to the rhythmic and melodic momentum of the piece. The breakneck pace of the Brotherhood compels Parker towards emotional directness, and his retention of the latter while still utilising his jaw-dropping technique is brilliantly achieved. Malfatti provides a suitably droll commentary on the mock march of “Kongi’s Theme” while Evans blows suitably mournfully on “Ismite Is Might.”

Hovering above all of this, however, is the ghost of Mongezi Feza, a musician who would have been a core regular on Ogun albums had he lived; as it turned out, this is the only Ogun album on which he appeared in his lifetime, and his main feature on “Tungi’s Song” is perhaps the best solo he ever recorded, full of casually astonishing technical brilliance and a goodly portion of sheer cheek and deep emotion.

Happily this album is one of the few which have been reissued on CD, in this case with over half an hour of extra material from the gig. Interestingly the performance of the ballad “Davashe’s Dream” is more restrained than the explosive take recorded for the band’s debut, while the version of “Andromeda” gets a little too messy (you can hear an audibly vexed McGregor trying to cue the horns back in halfway through), but nonetheless this is an absolutely vital record.

OG 200
HARRY MILLER
Children At Play
(1975)
Miller (multitracked bass, with occasional flute and percussion effects)

Recorded at the edge of a cliff (well, almost) in Hastings on a dark and stormy autumn night in 1974 - Miller was playing on one side of a wall, engineer Keith Beal was on the other side, Miller had to rap on the wall to signify that he was ready to record – this was only the second solo album by a bassist, the first being 1969’s Unaccompanied Barre: Journal Violone by his sometime co-bassist in the larger Westbrook bands, Barre Phillips. Indeed, throughout the ‘70s the solo bass album remained a rarity, the only other two examples which spring to mind being Barry Guy’s mindblowing Statements for Double Bass and Violone (Incus, 1977) and Dave Holland’s Emerald Tears (ECM, 1978).

Miller overcame the potential risk of sonic monotony by overdubbing his bass to enable intricate improvisations on his wandering tunes. The general air is heavy and rather oppressive, light only really shining forth on the charming kwela tribute “Homeboy” where he adds a wonderfully naïve flute line to his bass riffing. It was reissued as part of the 1999 3CD Miller boxset tribute, which sadly was only a limited edition – copies do occasionally turn up in Ray’s Jazz Shop on the first floor of Foyle’s, so keep your eyes open – together with reissues of OG 310, 320 and 523 (see below) and the 1983 Vara Jazz recording Down South.

OG 300
MIKE OSBORNE TRIO
Border Crossing
(1975)
Osborne (alto sax), Harry Miller (bass), Louis Moholo (drums).

Although having retired from the music scene for well-documented health-related reasons over 20 years ago, Osborne is still the greatest alto saxophonist ever to come out of Britain (that of course being separate and distinct from all the great alto players who came into Britain, such as Bertie King, Joe Harriott, Dudu Pukwana, Bernie Living, Ray Warleigh and Ntshuks Bonga) and this album of highlights from one of the trio’s many continuous performances at Stockwell’s Peanuts Club of the early-to-mid ‘70s is the unassailable proof of that assertion. He came out of Jackie McLean and Eric Dolphy via Ornette, but Osborne quickly found and established his own level of intensity, never better documented than here. As the three musicians move from tune to tune, the intensity of the music is stoked up to such a degree that side two of this album in particular is an emotionally exhausting adrenalin rush of music, easily up there with Ornette at the Golden Circle, Osborne, Miller and Moholo existing in absolute and blissful telepathy as they threaten to break all manner of sound and space barriers. This record, more than most in the Ogun catalogue, is urgently in need of reissue. Anyone fancy putting up the cash for an Ossie boxset tribute?

OG 400
S.O.S.
S.O.S.
(1975)
John Surman (baritone & soprano saxes, bass clarinet, synths), Mike Osborne (alto sax, percussion), Alan Skidmore (tenor sax, drums, percussion).

Before WSQ or Rova, there was SOS, one of the most startlingly original and certainly one of the most popular acts to appear on Ogun. Surman, Osborne and Skidmore had long since contrived to work together in each other’s respective musical environments, and when hired for big bands (Brotherhood, Westbrook, Gibbs) they always came as a unit. They worked brilliantly and naturally together.

While much of this album is naturally given over to ruminations and explosions by the three saxophones – as tender as Ellington on “Where’s Junior?” – Surman also uses liberal doses of his then new electronica, and Skidmore takes a rare turn behind the drumkit, such that the awesome “Goliath” virtually invents prog-improv, Osborne’s alto howling over Surman’s stately synth chords, like ELP, only good. And the closing, lengthy “Calypso” investigates an area of candidly troubled electronic music which would not be properly followed up until Autechre two decades later.

OG 500
SCHWEIZER/CARL/MALFATTI/MILLER/LOVENS
Ramifications
(1976)
Irene Schweizer (piano), Rudiger Carl (tenor sax), Radu Malfatti (trombone), Harry Miller (bass), Paul Lovens (percussion).

I guess that only Miller’s presence qualifies this as an Ogun release, as otherwise it seems to be a misplaced FMP session, and not a very productive one at that. Schweizer I have always found to be an acquired taste which I’ve never quite acquired, and as far as I’m concerned Rudiger Carl is the Reg Varney to Brotzmann’s Tony Hancock. He is very noisy and cliched throughout this record, and the frustrating intelligence of the contributions of Malfatti, Miller and Lovens makes one regret that this wasn’t a trio session.

OG 600
OVARY LODGE
Ovary Lodge
(1976)
Keith Tippett (piano, recorder, zither, maracas, vocals), Julie Tippetts (vocals, sopranino recorder, er-hu), Harry Miller (bass), Frank Perry (percussion, hsiao, sheng, vocals).

And this is a visionary classic, perhaps the best and most concentrated music that the Tippetts have yet made. You have to love a record whose track titles include “A Man Carrying A Drop Of Water On A Leaf During A Thunderstorm,” of course, but this is proto-New Age improvisation (Frank Perry in particular was doing New Age for at least two decades before anyone else) which makes mincemeat out of all offal released under the banner of New Age; limpid, beautiful and genuinely transcendental music which isn’t afraid to raise the temperature/passion when required – the closing sequence of side one constitutes some of the most violent music you are likely to hear on any Ogun release, Julie screaming, Keith hammering, Harry throbbing and Frank pounding his sacred Tibetan gong into the next universe.

OG 700
MIKE OSBORNE TRIO
All Night Long
(1976)
Same personnel as OG 300.

Recorded live in Willisau and therefore considerably lower-fi than Border Crossing, this album isn’t quite as intense as its predecessor – few albums are – but still worthwhile to hear what Ossie does with the venerable “Round Midnight” without ever suggesting Dolphy.

OG 800
HARRY BECKETT’S JOY UNLIMITED
Memories Of Bacares
(1976)
Beckett (trumpet, flugelhorn), Ray Russell (guitar), Brian Miller (electric piano), Daryl Runswick (electric bass), John Webb (drums), Robin Jones (percussion).

Interesting but rather frustrating record. Of course, this group with a couple of differences in personnel also constituted the Ray Russell group, and it’s something of a quantum leap from the scalding intensity of Russell’s Live At The ICA to the comparatively polite and bland jazz-funk of this record, enlivened mainly by Russell, then on the cusp of ceasing his Sharrock-ish noise torrents and turning towards quieter musical waters, but here still relatively unshackled, as is keyboardist Miller. “Can’t Think About Now” does work up a fair amount of steam, but when you consider what Miles was doing with the same basic elements at the same time it’s all a bit flat.

OG 900
ELTON DEAN’S NINESENSE
Oh! For The Edge
(1976)
Dean (alto sax, saxello), Harry Beckett (trumpet, flugelhorn), Marc Charig (trumpet, tenor horn), Nick Evans (trombone), Alan Skidmore (tenor sax), Keith Tippett (piano), Harry Miller (bass), Louis Moholo (drums).

Strictly speaking, Eightsense, as second trombonist Radu Malfatti was down with the ‘flu and couldn’t make the 100 Club gig recorded here (one possibly apocryphal story goes that the various possible deps – Rutherford, Griffiths, Nieman – were contacted, but all had a prior engagement across the road the same night - as part of the orchestra backing Shirley Bassey at the London Palladium) which is sadly characteristic of the gulf between the awesome power of this group witnessed in concert and their unsatisfactory legacy on record. Only “Forsoothe” with Dean’s saxello speaking in its own tongues and the rest of the band teetering on the abyss of chaos behind him goes any way towards indicating how powerful the band could be. The second side is understandably given over to an extended tribute to the recently deceased Mongezi Feza, one of the band’s original trumpeters (after his death he was replaced by Beckett), mostly in the form of a leisurely and elegant stroll through Feza’s tune “Friday Night Blues” with fine solos from Dean (on alto), Beckett and Charig (on tenor horn). Don’t get me wrong; it’s a good record with a superb Dick Whitbread cover – but I have the feeling that they were capable of much better.

OGD 001/002
BLUE NOTES
Blue Notes For Mongezi
(1977)
Dudu Pukwana (alto sax, whistle, percussion, vocals), Chris McGregor (piano, percussion), Johnny Dyani (bass, bell, lead vocals “and most of the words”), Louis Moholo (drums, percussion, vocals).

This, however, is one of the greatest of all records, and one of the hardest to listen to, for it comprises four sides of an improvised lament for the fifth Blue Note, Mongezi Feza – following his memorial service, the surviving band members immediately went into the studio, picked up their instruments, switched on the tape and just started playing. It is one of the rawest and most honest expressions of grief and bereavement ever articulated in musical form. Feza was just 30 when he died in December 1975 of double pneumonia, neglected and unattended to in a distant corner of a ward of a hospital in southwest London, where he had been admitted following a violent nervous breakdown in the back of a taxi. His lifespan was almost exactly that of Steve Biko, and many people still feel that he died in a not entirely dissimilar fashion.

So the four musicians pluck, pound and blow their grief. Side one in particular is near unbearable in its emotional candour; Dyani throwing out monstrous basslines, chanting Mongezi’s name, improvising reminiscences and expressing uncensored emotions, Dudu’s alto sounding on the point of collapse – when Dyani takes a Hadenesque bass solo near the end of side one I would challenge anyone’s eyes to still be dry.

And yet, in the gruelling arena of this music, hope does eventually reassert itself, so much so that Dudu briefly visits the tune of “Yellow Rose Of Texas” halfway through side three, and by the end of side four we have reached the “acknowledgement” stage of this musical Kobler-Ross cycle, and the work ends with a simple, major key kwela melody to confirm that life, somehow, will continue.

OG 010
NICRA
Listen/Hear
(1977)
Nick Evans, Radu Malfatti (trombones), Keith Tippett (piano), Buschi Niebergall (bass), Makaya Ntshoko (drums).

In his Melody Maker review of this album, Richard Williams approvingly referred to Evans and Malfatti as “the bootboys of the trombone.” And they were a terrific team. Those frustrated by Malfatti’s recent vow of silence (well, it might as well be, eh? I am aware of Ad Reinhardt) are frustrated because they remember just how mischievously powerful and romantic a musician he once was, especially when paired with Evans, who always seems to have drawn the short straw in terms of graduates of the Keith Tippett school – Elton Dean is venerated, Marc Charig is doing fine in Holland, but Evans has been somewhat neglected (and indeed is now practically retired from the scene).

Anyway, the pair worked wonders in the Brotherhood of Breath, Ninesense and Moholo’s Spirits Rejoice!, and here they team up with an international rhythm section for a radio session recorded in Innsbruck. Terrific stuff it is too, from its hilarious sleevenote by fellow ‘boneman Paul Rutherford, detailing how the lads just missed getting on Des O’Connor Tonight (yes, right) to the music itself – starting with an ominous low-key modal drone, the music quickly blossoms into a highly entertaining freeform romp, Malfatti’s charmed insolence nicely balanced by Evans’ relatively straightahead post-bop approach.

OG 110
VOICE
Voice
(1977)
Brian Eley, Phil Minton, Maggie Nicols, Julie Tippetts (vocals).

Much played on Derek Jewell’s Sounds Interesting programme on Radio 3 at the time, as I recall, the pedigree of this quartet is unarguable but the music never really connects. The eternal problem with improv vocalese is how to prevent it descending into comedy or mind-numbing scat, and all these musicians do their best here, but have proved their undoubted brilliance in better environments elsewhere.

OG 210
MIKE OSBORNE/STAN TRACEY
Tandem
(1977)
Osborne (alto sax), Tracey (piano).
Mainly comprising their live set at the Bracknell Jazz Festival in 1976, annotator Steve Lake gets it right when he compares Tracey’s opening reveille of stabbing piano chords with an alarm clock awakening the sleepy crowd from their Ralph Towner-induced torpor. And the 30-minute “Ballad Forms” is duo improvisation of as high a quality as I have ever heard anywhere; the intensity of the interaction is astonishing, but the music is always approachable, even if obliquely. The piece’s final minutes, where Osborne’s alto meditates mournfully over Mingus’ “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” will move the listener to awestruck worship.

OG 310
HARRY MILLER’S ISIPINGO
Family Affair
(1977)
Miller (bass), Marc Charig (trumpet), Malcolm Griffiths (trombone), Mike Osborne (alto), Keith Tippett (piano), Louis Moholo (drums).

South African bassist Miller’s group Isipingo – named after a South African berry – had been in intermittent existence since 1973, but Miller was so busy with commitments to other groups, notably Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath and the Mike Osborne Trio as well as the various ensembles of Keith Tippett, Bob Downes, Elton Dean, etc. – not to mention his running of the Ogun label, a full-time job in itself – that he scarcely had any time left for his own music. The rhythm section of Tippett, Miller and Moholo – certainly the finest in Britain, and one of the finest in Europe, throughout the ‘70s – was in place, but innumerable combinations of horn players were tried before Miller finally hit on a compatible line-up, which struck a fine stylistic balance not only with Tippett and Osborne’s own groups (and of course the Osborne Trio exists here as a group within a group) but also those of McGregor and Miller’s previous employer, Mike Westbrook (Miller, Osborne and Griffiths were all members of Westbrook’s groundbreaking ‘60s sextet which launched John Surman’s career).

Although the above line-up existed for two years, they only ever had one opportunity to record; a concert at Battersea Arts Centre on a freezing snowdrift of a winter evening in early 1977, less than a fortnight after the Buzzcocks had recorded their Spiral Scratch EP. The BAC piano available on the evening was very audibly a glorified and slightly out-of-tune pub piano. And yet, despite, or maybe because of, these risk factors, something special happened on that Thursday evening. Family Affair is one of these jazz albums which just magically clicked into place; the personnel and chemistry were absolutely right, and it’s one of the highlights of recorded British jazz/improv in the last 30 years.

Much of this is down to the pub pianist himself, Keith Tippett. Although on the title track he comps absolutely deadpan behind Griffiths’ and Charig’s solos, you can hear Miller and Moholo slowly but surely turning up the heat behind him and gradually increasing the tension, which by the time of Osborne’s exuberant entry has become almost unbearable. All of a sudden the tension snaps, and Tippett careers away into rhythmic and harmonic adventure while Miller and Moholo hang on right behind him.

But the undoubted highlight of this album is its 15-minute centrepiece “Jumpin’.” Beginning with a straightforward post-Ornette boppish theme, Osborne begins his solo, Tippett ceaselessly nagging at him from the piano. And then there is revealed an awful, unspecified pain in Osborne’s playing. The exuberance turns into franticity; Osborne is literally blowing as though someone is holding a gun at his head. His figures become harsher and more abstract. Finally he screams out a top C on his alto. Tippett echoes it immediately and develops it into a devastating out-of-tempo modal lament on top of which Osborne’s alto sounds as grief-stricken as Dolphy on George Russell’s setting of “Round Midnight” but somehow more English – a barely remembered folk song motif which Tippett’s cascading sustained harmonics will not leave alone. It is one of the most shattering and devastating moments in all of improvised music, and ends with Tippett’s curlicues (decension?) streaming around Osborne like the fires of heaven, before Tippett lays off the sustained pedal and turns the same notes into a jittery pointillistic sequence to accommodate Griffiths’ quickfire contorted trombone solo. Tippett’s own solo is full of endless ideas; the procedural development of motifs, the lower register staccato sequences oddly reminiscent of Balinese music – one can only concur with Richard Williams that as a display of creative piano playing on a British jazz/improv record, its only peer is Chris McGregor’s epic solo on “Joyful Noises Of The Lord” from the second Brotherhood of Breath album.

“Eli’s Song” is a brief, mournful waltz which again spotlights a terrible grief on the part of Osborne. In his almost barbaric honks and screams his solo conveys something very dreadful indeed, as though he were blowing himself out of existence, a prophecy of the subsequent complete mental and physical collapse which necessitated his early retirement from the jazz/improv scene in 1982.

OG 400
EDQ (ELTON DEAN QUARTET)
They All Be On This Old Road
(1977)
Dean (alto sax, saxello), Keith Tippett (piano), Chris Laurence (bass), Louis Moholo (drums).

Why is Paul Morley my favourite music writer? Might have something to do with the second review that he did for the NME, which was of the Elton Dean Quartet live at Manchester’s Band On The Wall, back in early 1977. In his review he enthusiastically argued that the likes of Dean, Tippett, Trevor Watts, Derek Bailey, etc. were as punk as the punks, if not more so, in their quiet radicalism. As an extremely impressionable 13-year-old reader, I reckoned that if Morley could be so right about improv, then he must be equally right about the subject of his first review for NME – the Buzzcocks. Thus are new doors opened.

This particular album was recorded at the Seven Dials pub in Covent Garden and might be subtitled The Popular Elton Dean. Side one is given over to a 20-minute take on Coltrane’s then untouchable “Naima,” with which the quartet manage to do remarkable things. But the wild card here is Chris Laurence, depping for Harry Miller, as he brings something of a new perspective to the group’s music. Laurence really plays on career-peak form here, forever seeking out unexpected harmonies and accents, and the other three musicians are noticeably affected by his imagination.

Side two sees the quartet tackling some standards, including “Easy Living” and “Nancy With The Laughing Face,” but the highlight is a storming version of Dean’s own “Dede-Bup-Bup” where Tippett plays with such intensity in his solo that it’s a surprise that he didn’t demolish the piano. Amazing stuff.

OG 510
LOL COXHILL
Diverse
(1977)
Coxhill (soprano sax) – solo on side 1, and accompanied by Colin Wood (cello), Dave Green (bass) and John Mitchell (percussion) on side 2

This has been reissued on a two-for-one Ogun CD which also includes all of Coxhill’s second Ogun album, The Joy Of Paranoia (OG 525), but it’s very much a record of two halves. The solo recital on side one is typically intelligent and concentrated improvising, but the improv quartet on side two never really gets going – embarrassingly, there’s a point about halfway through side two where Wood, Green and Mitchell grind to a halt and Coxhill has to blow manfully to get them going again – SME man Wood being the only one of the three even trying to engage in a meaningful dialogue with the saxman.

OG 610
DEAN/WHEELER/GALLIVAN
The Cheque Is In The Mail
(1977)
Elton Dean (alto sax, saxello), Kenny Wheeler (trumpet, flugelhorn), Joe Gallivan (drums, percussion, synths).

An exceptionally strange record, one which if released on Warp Records next week would cause quite a few feathers to ruffle; despite the sleeve billing, Gallivan – he of the extraordinary trio Love Cry Want with the enigmatic guitarist Nicholas and the great Larry Young on organ, and also a key member of Gil Evans’ band on There Comes A Time – is very much the dominant voice here. Ten three-minute (or so) episodes of dislocated electronica, where Dean and Wheeler circle rather forlornly around Gallivan’s drones and loops like reluctant moths. Strangely compelling, however, and probably more in tune with contemporary electronica now.

OG 710
MARC CHARIG
Pipedream
(1977)
Charig (cornet, tenor horn), Keith Tippett (church organ, piano, zither, bell, voice), Ann Winter (voice, bell).

Recorded at St Stephen’s Church, Southmead, Bristol, just over a week after OG 310, this is perhaps the most sheerly beautiful record Ogun ever released, comparable with Beaver and Krause’s Gandharva in terms of unhurried and deeply spiritual improvisation. Charig at his fieriest is a trumpet innovator to rival Lester Bowie, at his quietest conveys a gorgeous lyricism worthy of Miles. Here his cornet intertwines brilliantly with Tippett’s ruminative, stately organ meditations – imagine the little duet coda which closes Centipede’s Septober Energy extended and magnified to 40 minutes. If this had been on ECM everyone would hail it as a classic. This demands reissue.

OG 810
MIKE OSBORNE QUINTET
Marcel’s Muse
(1977)
Osborne (alto sax), Marc Charig (trumpet), Jeff Green (guitar), Harry Miller (bass), Peter Nykyruj (drums).

Osborne’s final album – there is a BBC Jazz In Britain session from 1980 with a quartet featuring old Westbrook colleague Dave Holdsworth on trumpet, Tony Marsh on drums and (I think?) Chris Laurence on bass (though it might have been a very young Paul Rogers), but it’s never been commercially released – this finds him expanding his sonic palette somewhat. It doesn’t have the directness and immediacy of his trio recordings, nor the all-hands-on-deck franticity of the 1970 Outback quintet sessions (with Beckett, McGregor, Miller and Moholo), but by 2004 standards it’s a remarkably sprightly and discursive session, most notable perhaps for the endlessly inventive commentary throughout by the under-recorded and undervalued guitarist Jeff Green – at some points his comping/soloing interface is worthy of comparison with Ray Crawford on Gil Evans’ “La Nevada.”

OG 910
ELTON DEAN’S NINESENSE
Happy Daze
(1977)
Same personnel as OG 900 but add Radu Malfatti (trombone); Charig is credited with playing cornet rather than trumpet (though to these ears he has only ever played the cornet!).

The second Ninesense album, a studio recording of a suite commissioned for the 1977 Bracknell Jazz Festival, and sadly rather frustrating. Not sure how much of recorded British jazz has been scuppered by the sometimes overbearing need to compose “suites” (as this is the only way musicians or bandleaders seem to be able to get an Arts Council grant to fund recordings and performances), but this session never really catches fire, weighed down perhaps by its “suiteness.” “Nicrotto,” a feature for the ‘bone bootboys highly reminiscent of the introductory minutes of OG 010, is a noticeably damp squib when compared to the torrential version released on last year’s Live At The BBC compilation, but Tippett gets the man of the match award yet again for his intelligent piano commentary on the lovely ballad “Sweet F.A.”

OG 020
HARRY BECKETT’S JOY UNLIMITED
Got It Made
(1978)
Beckett (trumpet, flugelhorn), Ray Russell (guitar), Peter Lemer (keyboards), Roy Babbington (bass), Alan Jackson (drums), Martyn David (percussion).

On the cover Beckett is pictured leaning against a drawing of a Cadillac. That kind of sums it up. Russell is the only band member retained from OG 800, and in the interim seems to have undergone his Damascene conversion. No more atonal passion; now his guitar is depressing in its politesse, as though he’d been lobotomised, and the music generally is the blandest and most MoR stuff Ogun ever put out. Guess those royalties from Rock Follies must have had their effect.

OG 120
JOHN STEVENS/EVAN PARKER
The Longest Night Vol 1
(1978)
Stevens (percussion, cornet), Parker (soprano sax).

Recorded on 21 December 1976 – the longest night, as it were – this session represents a major reconciliation. In the late ‘60s the SME had briefly been ideologically stripped down to a duo of Stevens and Parker; then there were further ideological arguments, with the result that the two musicians essentially didn’t speak to each other for about five or six years. This session represents the first time they played together in an open context since the Karyobin sessions of 1968 (though Parker did appear in the expanded ranks of the SMO for 1973’s SMO +/= SME set, whose line-up also included future ‘80s pop star Stephen Luscombe – one half of Blancmange - among the violinists). It’s a typically terse and concentrated set which, over its two volumes, seems to offer a dozen or so variations on the same initial melodic/rhythmic fragment.

OG 220
BLUE NOTES
Blue Notes In Concert Vol 1
(1978)
Same personnel as OGD OO1 / 002, though credited only on their principal instruments.

Sadly Vol 2 seems never to have materialised. Still this set finds the surviving quartet on demon form at the 100 Club, gleefully abseiling between different tunes and explosive interplay. Worth comparing with 1968’s Very Urgent (and will someone at Polygram please GET OFF THEIR ARSE AND REISSUE THE LATTER ON CD????) to note the progressive deformalisation of the group’s musical model over the intervening decade.

OG 320
HARRY MILLER/RADU MALFATTI
Bracknell Breakdown
(1978)
Miller (bass, etc.), Malfatti (trombone, etc.).

A sly and oddly sensuous improv session with the South African and the Austrian (they were occasionally billed on gigs as “Twice”) interweaving at very low frequencies and not a little humour. The use of silence throughout is of course an interesting pointer to the philosophy which Malfatti subsequently went on to develop(/invent?).

OG 420
JOHN STEVENS/EVAN PARKER
The Longest Night Vol 2
(1978)
Personnel as OG 120.

The final track of Vol 2 is perhaps the most spellbinding of these performances; beginning with a long drone improvisation (Stevens providing the bass continuo on his cornet!), the duo then devolve into a slower, more considered, almost balladic improvisation. Of this final track Max Harrison once wrote, memorably: “at times the music hovers beautifully on the verge of existence.”

OG 520
LOUIS MOHOLO OCTET
Spirits Rejoice!
(1978)
Moholo (drums), Kenny Wheeler (trumpet), Nick Evans, Radu Malfatti (trombones), Evan Parker (tenor sax), Keith Tippett (piano), Johnny Dyani, Harry Miller (basses).

My favourite Ogun release (although OGD 003/004 runs it to a very close finish), recorded the day before my 14th birthday, this record, as with things like Blues And The Abstract Truth, is one of these rare records where everything just went right. Recorded while the band was on a high from a reportedly devastatingly euphoric gig at the 100 Club, this is possibly the quintessential Ogun line-up, a perfect balance of musicians, including both of the great South African bassists, finally together. Large enough to sound like a big band when needed, small enough to dovetail into micro-improvisation when required.

Everyone’s game seems to have been upped for this session. Parker delivers some of his most explicitly emotional improvising on record with his solos on “Khanya Apho Ukhona” (ecstatic tongues) and “Tears Of Sorrow” (surprisingly conventionally boppish until the horns drop out and Tippett prods him into freer territories); the trombonists have a field day generally – Malfatti declaiming in best Roswell Rudd style over Feza’s immortal tune “You Ain’t Gonna Know Me ‘Cos You Think You Know Me” - maybe the best-loved of all the Blue Notes-penned tunes, it certainly got the biggest cheer at the Dedication Orchestra gig at the 100 Club on Ne’erday 1992 – Evans and Malfatti swooping round each other like pacifist falcons on Dyani’s “Ithi-gqi,” Wheeler’s typically beautifully poised ballad moods on “Wedding Hymn” and Tippett’s astonishing piano solo on the same track, wherein he seems to invent a new tune altogether (you can hear the bassists scratching their heads momentarily, trying to keep up), although the solo itself seems to have been rather abruptly truncated – perhaps we could have the full version when the record gets a CD release?

OG 521
CHRIS McGREGOR
In His Good Time
(1978)
McGregor (piano).

There are also two volumes of Piano Song, on the long-defunct Musica label, but here we get a rare chance to hear the great composer and bandleader improvising as intelligently and passionately as he can on a number of old favourites. Note especially his conversion of Pukwana’s “The Bride” into a stately hymn.

OG 522
AUSTIN/BABBINGTON/GALLIVAN
Home From Home
(1978)
Charles Austin (saxes, flutes, oboe), Roy Babbington (bass), Joe Gallivan (drums, percussion, synths).

Austin and Gallivan were a regular working duo in the ‘70s. This session is considerably earthier and more jazz-based than the ethereal OG 610, but weighed down somewhat by Babbington’s rather unnecessary bass.

OG 523
HARRY MILLER QUINTET
In Conference
(1978)
Miller (bass), Willem Brueker (tenor & soprano saxes, bass clarinet), Trevor Watts (alto & soprano saxes), Keith Tippett (piano) and Louis Moholo (drums), with Julie Tippetts (guest vocals on side 2).

Recorded just three days after OG 520, this album demonstrates a long-standing ambition of Miller’s; to develop Ogun into a platform for international improvisers. He talked of getting Brotzmann or Mangelsdorff or even Braxton to come and record for the label, but before any of that could happen, life changes happened and he ended up moving to Holland – practically the first thing he did when he got there was to help form the wonderful trio with Brotzmann and Moholo which ended up recording for FMP.

Here, however, he brought together two notable saxophonists who had never previously played together – and by previously, that included before the tapes started rolling on this session – the explosive Dutchman Brueker and the more considered Englishman Watts. And the fusion worked brilliantly. “Traumatic Experience” sees both men on soprano, snaking and howling around each other as the unbeatable rhythm section spurs them on to do so; “Orange Grove” is a fantastic kwela groove which Brueker, on tenor, does his best to deconstruct as Watts’ alto yodels towards the stratosphere. “Dancing Damon” (named after Miller’s son) finds Brueker’s bass clarinet underscoring and flirting with Julie Tippetts’ voice in a very Gunter Hampel/Jeanne Lee fashion; while on “New Baby,” with Breuker back on tenor, we could almost be listening to Billie Holiday and Ben Webster waking up in a spaceship. Watts in particular takes to the South African/free interface environment effortlessly throughout.

OG 524
CHRIS McGREGOR’S BROTHERHOOD OF BREATH
Procession
(1978)
McGregor (piano), Harry Beckett, Marc Charig (trumpets), Radu Malfatti (trombone), Mike Osborne, Dudu Pukwana (alto saxes), Evan Parker (tenor sax), Bruce Grant (baritone sax, flute), Johnny Dyani, Harry Miller (basses), Louis Moholo (drums).

Recorded live in Toulouse in May 1977, the absence of Feza from the line-up was palpably evident – though check the band’s glorious freewheeling take on Feza’s “Sonia,” which you would like to go on forever – but, perhaps because of this, the band concentrate ferociously on the music at hand and deliver a blistering performance (Dyani finally agreed to play with the Brotherhood on this particular tour, and Miller kept his place in the band to provide a two-bass hit). Parker again provides some of the highlights – his passionate tenor outburst on “Sunrise On The Sun” (as Osborne’s alto comments in tandem) and his sudden explosion in the midst of the systematically repeating motifs of “Kwhalo.” Malfatti also performs his most passionate solo on record, multiphonics and all, on “Sunrise,” while the 18 minutes of Pukwana’s “Kwhalo” – a tune also known, and recorded, as “Diamond Express” – might be the band’s finest moment on record. Is it pop? Is it minimalism? Is it kwela? It’s all those things and far, far more. On his sleevenote Keith Beal observes how, by the track’s end, every instrument in the band is a drum – it’s astonishing, fiercely danceable and the finest of testaments to this greatest of all bands.

OG 525
LOL COXHILL
The Joy Of Paranoia
(1978)
Coxhill (soprano sax) solo (multitracked), in a quartet with Ken Shaw (electric guitar), Richard Wright (acoustic guitar) and Paul Mitchell-Davidson (bass guitar), and in duos with Veryan Weston (piano) and Michael Garrick (electric piano).

A kind of Coxhill miscellany; side one is devoted to a long, fairly funky workout with various guitarists, while on side two we find bleak, spacious duets with the then up-and-coming Weston, a brief spell of multitracked soprano Dixieland minimalism (the title track) and finally typically considered improvisations on “Perdido” and “Lover Man” with Garrick, live at his local.

OG 526
TREVOR WATTS STRING ENSEMBLE
Cynosure
(1978)
Watts (alto & soprano saxes), Dave Cole, Steve Hayton (guitars), Steve Danachie (violin), Sandy Spencer (cello), Lindsey Cooper (bass), Colin McKenzie (bass guitar), Liam Genockey (drums).

Indifferently recorded, but an absolutely phenomenal record which seems to have been criminally overlooked in the rush towards Prime Time (which this record, among other things, seems to anticipate directly). A sort of expanded version of Watts’ jazz-rockish band Amalgam and also a kind of prototype for his later Moire Music ensemble, this record, if you’ll pardon the unpardonable linguistic lapse, rocks like a muthafucka. Particularly noteworthy are “No Waiting,” which develops and evolves a Charlie Christian figure (the intro to his famous solo on Goodman’s “Waiting For Benny”) into total ecstasy, and the devolution swing of “We’ll Talk About It Later” which MUST be listened to in conjunction with Ornette’s Dancing In Your Head. Someone remaster this and get this out again quicksnap!

OG 527
DEAN/GOWEN/HOPPER/SHEEN
Rogue Element
Elton Dean (alto sax, saxello), Alan Gowen (keyboards), Hugh Hopper (bass), Dave Sheen (drums).
(1979)

Evidently one of the most popular of Ogun releases, as this has made it onto CD. Good, fruitful fusion/free improvising from the quartet – and good to hear the late Gowen in any context – but…I dunno, maybe I was still missing Robert Wyatt; it doesn’t quite get to me.

OG 528
TREVOR WATTS’ AMALGAM
Closer To You
(1979)
Watts (alto & soprano saxes), Colin McKenzie (bass), Liam Genockey (drums).
Finally, Amalgam itself got to record for Ogun. Although 1984’s devastating four-LP Fall Out set, which added Keith Rowe’s tabletop guitar to the line-up to astounding effect and acknowledged that some of these improv chaps had been listening to punk, is the definitive Amalgam statement, this trio session is pretty choppy and compelling in itself – especially the lengthy threnody “Dear Roland” (for the then recently-deceased Rahsaan Roland Kirk) in which Watts’ alto achieves puncta of passion comparable with Gato Barbieri at his least nonsensical and perhaps even within touching distance of Ayler.

OGD 003/004
KEITH TIPPETT’S ARK
Frames – Music For An Imaginary Film
(1978)
Tippett (piano, harmonium), Stan Tracey (piano), Marc Charig (trumpets, tenor horn, Kenyan thumb piano), Henry Lowther (trumpet), Dave Amis, Nick Evans (trombones), Elton Dean, Trevor Watts (alto & soprano saxes), Brian Smith, Larry Stabbins (tenor & soprano saxes, flutes – in the case of Smith, alto flute), Phil Wachsmann (violin, electronics), Steve Levine, Rod Skeaping, Geoffrey Wharton (violins), Tim Kramer, Alexandra Robinson (cellos), Harry Miller (bass), Peter Kowald (bass, tuba), Louis Moholo (drums), Frank Perry (percussion), Julie Tippetts (vocals, lyrics), Maggie Nicols (vocals). In one sequence all the musicians except for the saxophonists are heard dragging their fingers around wine glasses, while in the closing sequence everyone attends to flutes, whistles, percussion, game calls, etc.

Thankfully this is available on CD, remastered by Steve Beresford from Hugh Hopper’s original production. And it’s Tippett’s greatest artistic statement. His previous big band experiments with Centipede have been consolidated, and here he scales down the band from 55 to 22 musicians without any loss of power and considerably more concentration – here there aren’t three thrashing drummers cancelling each other out, for example, and the instrumental pairings (hence the name Ark) are inspired, for example Miller’s bass with Kowald’s tuba, and the sacred (Perry’s proto-New Age percussion) with the holy profane (Moholo’s drums). As with Centipede, it brings together all of the regular groupings with which Tippett was then working, at the core of which is Ovary Lodge (see OG 600 above) – everything radiates out from the central quartet.

The double album’s highlight is the brilliant fusion of Guilliaume de Machaut and Mingus which constitutes the opening half of side three – over a drone (almost a Dowland-esque continuo), Julie Tippetts sings of a new dawn, a new hope, rising to face the world. Then Keith Tippett’s piano enters sadly to harmonise the melody. Nicols then returns with the string drone to sing the second verse, following which Tracey essays a mysterious (“Mysterioso”?) and beyond-enigmatic piano commentary, ending emphatically at the bottom end of the keyboard as though he’s closing a tomb.

The awakening of Blake’s Jerusalem in England? An alternative soundtrack to Penda’s Fen? It could be. Slowly, each pair of instruments enters to state the melody and improvise briefly on it. As more pairs join in the improvising becomes more animated and the mood more deeply pronounced. As with Mingus, intonation seems to be deliberately loose (NOT sloppy) to emphasise the underlying humanity. Finally, as the trumpets climax over the now passionate, slowly-detonating explosion of the orchestra, we are left with an ecstatic climax every bit the equal of Coltrane’s Ascension. Miller and Moholo subtly introduce a steady 4/4 beat as the musicians scream and swoon above, below and around them. It numbed me and stunned me to the core when I first heard it at teatime on Charles Fox’s Jazz Today programme on Radio 3 in the late autumn of 1978; when I got hold of a copy of the record, with its brilliant Dick Whitbread collage of unforeseen tentacles swallowing up a panoramic view of North London – the natural reclaiming the manmade – on its cover, I thought it was the greatest record I had ever heard. Sometimes when listening to it, and many of the other masterpieces released on Ogun, I still do.

SUFJAN STEVENS – GREETINGS FROM MICHIGAN: THE GREAT LAKE STATE

When you’re vulnerable, you sense that some manifestations of vulnerability in music speak more to you, and/or are truer, than others. It’s a tricky emotion to carry convincingly – or at least to convince me that your head is crying to be put on my shoulder. Some expressions of vulnerability make me want to hug the singer forever, while others provoke me to fume inwardly about the suddenly realised benefits of reintroducing conscription. And at the moment I feel vulnerable, I feel that everyone’s run off somewhere else, somewhere brighter, somewhere that agrees more with them, and I also feel bemused. Bemused particularly at what exactly I seem to be missing in something like the Junior Boys, a group which more than anything in grime make me feel that I’m lacking a fundamental premise of writing about music, because everyone else is hailing them as The Proud, Cold Future whereas, try as I might, and have, all I can hear is Bobby Rydell cooing over old John Foxx backing tracks, an exhausted, defeated WHINNYING which brings to mind Lord Byron impersonating a jellyfish and is just CRYING to be packed off onto a ‘plane to Basra.

But with Sufjan Stevens I hear something different and more wanting of love. A delicate and fragile counter-tenor which is something of a cross between Elliott Smith and the guy out of the Boo Radleys, and who is singing more directly towards the emotions which I am currently feeling. And all this with a concept album about the state of Michigan, the first of 50 such albums which he is planning to do, one for every United State. I suppose that if Gillian Welch dreamt a highway, someone would eventually have to travel down it. But Greetings From Michigan (although Stevens warns us of the ambivalence of his concept in the song “Say Yes! To Michigan!” when he sings: “Tried to change the ‘Made in Michigan/I was raised, I was raised/In the place, in the place’ part to remind me”) is a concept album in itself, not quite what it pretends to be.

I’m not going to speculate about any reality that might lie behind the story Stevens seems to be telling with this album, except that it would seem to be about someone, someone Stevens might have known, or just made up, maybe even his own father, but certainly a father, who gets made redundant from his car plant job in Flint, loses his home and ends up committing suicide but tries to establish some form of bond with his son, in spirit if not in the flesh; even if he is not strong enough to live himself, he can try to leave something behind by which his son will be enabled to live.

Whatever. “Flint (For The Unemployed and Underpaid)” is an infinitely more devastating and cutting (because quieter) attack on free market economics as they affect Michigan than anything Michael Moore could pretend to conjure up; a campfire song where the singers seem to be slowly setting themselves alight (Stevens more or less sings and plays everything on the record, except for a couple of brass players and various friends and family members who contribute harmony vocals throughout). Over funeral parlour piano Stevens declaims: "I pretend to cry, even if I cried alone…Since the 1st of June, lost my job and lost my room…I forget the part, lose my hands to use my heart/Even if I died alone.” He takes his time to sing and play the song, seemingly to an evacuated Langley Schools assembly hall. When the brass comes in towards song’s end they sound detached, as though they were the brass band on the Titanic, already half-drowned, gurgling through their mouthpieces. The same approach is used, only with banjo instead of piano, on “For The Widows In Paradise, For The Fatherless In Ypsilanti” – hear the subtly violent mood alteration from “I’ll do anything for you” to “I did everything for you” as the song becomes electrified at the same moment.

Stylistically the songs vacillate between gently grieving ballads – the never more desolate harmony vocal refrain which climaxes “Holland,” the quiet tirade against an unfit mother on “Romulus,” in its way as bluntly anti-illusionist as Kanye West’s “Family Business,” – and ironic uptempo songs which decry industrialism as their music seems to celebrate it; very Robert Wyattesque in their marriage of Chomskyism and post-lounge soundtracks sounding like Bacharach detoured into John Adams’ bathroom. “Oh Detroit, Life Up Your Weary Head (Restore! Rebuild! Reconsider!)” is the most striking of these with its choir chant straight out of Act II of Philip Glass’ The Photographer (“Pontiac, Pontiac!/Feed the poor, feed the poor!”), its wayward organ which suddenly explodes into fiery atonality before equally suddenly being cut off before it consumes the track in flames, and its crisscrossing brass lines which owe more to Music For 18 Musicians than Brian Wilson (and the Reich effect becomes more pronounced in these little cyclical marimba/vibraphone instrumental interludes such as “Tahquamenon Falls” or “Alanson, Crooked River”). Even on the stately “The Upper Peninsula,” note how Stevens’ lead guitar abruptly detonates into tears of rage behind the wept words “I lost my mind, I lost my life, I lost my job, I lost my wife.”

But the final third of this album brings us, virtually literally, to Godhood. I don’t think I’ve heard anything this year as emotionally devastating as the ten divine damaged minutes of “Oh God, Where Are You Now?” – a direct descendent of “Long, Long, Long” and a similar attempt to find transcendence as one’s life draws voluntarily to a close. A simple hymn which repeats and deepens with every verse – “Oh God hold me now/Oh Lord hold me now/There’s no other man/Who could raise the dead/So do what you can/To anoint my head” – and as more and more voices systematically add themselves to the melody. One realises that we’re all sinking in the same boat. It’s a vulnerability which shatters me because it is a commonality of vulnerability, something we can all recognise and something from which we are all suffering. A song which weeps out from the epicentre of the state of Michigan to the rest of America, to the remainder of the world, a song which moves precisely because it sounds like a hymn you would have sung at primary school, because nobody shouts or screams their deep and palpably real emotion, in fact are scarcely singing it, but rather murmuring it, asking quietly to be heard. And halfway through the song, transcendence occurs – the brass take over the melody but now sound as though it has been mixed behind a wall of gauze, something just beyond our grasp, as though it has already moved into the next world. A feat which has rarely been achieved in recent music – think of how Spiritualized tried something similar, but failed, on “Feel So Sad” – and therefore inclines the music towards the holy.

A brief, hesitant, delayed pedal echo piano chord sequence, naggingly familiar, is played, Cat Power-style, in the brief instrumental “Redford” before hope is regained in the finale “Vito’s Ordination Song,” where the father figure smiles down on the son he has left behind on Earth, promising a future for him (“When the bridegroom comes, there will be noise, there will be glad, and a perfect bed”) even if it is at the expense of his own.

At the end, Stevens turns to us:
“I’ve made amends between father and son. Or, if you haven’t one…” and begins the long “Hey Jude”-style singalong farewell: “Rest in my arms, sleep in my bed, there’s a design to what I did and said” – again, as quietly as possible with as many voices as possible, he plucks a future out of the eager jaws of death. The hidden strength that lies within true vulnerability.

“His daughter Madeleine still holds her father’s hand. And suddenly both of them are in wedding dress, and herself as a little girl comes running down the carriage with a candle. ‘It’s not reincarnation,’ the little girl says. ‘It is like the flame passed from old candles to new.’

“Bodhisattva.”
(from 253 by Geoff Ryman)

TO THOSE WHO KNOW WHO THEY ARE AND WHO DESERVE IT
“I’m your friend until you use me,
And then be sure I won’t be there.”
(From “The Great Valerio” by Richard and Linda Thompson)

FENNESZ – VENICE – FINISH

At the end of The Shawshank Redemption, Tim Robbins escapes from jail via a tunnel. He emerges in a quiet but unusually lush country lane which is quite unlike anything else seen in the film, follows some clues left by his former cellmate Morgan Freeman and ends up finding him again on the beach, busy building a boat. This coda has variously been interpreted as a metaphor for death, or for the Resurrection of the Christ. The country lane into which he emerges is uncannily reminiscent of the route one has to take from the main street in Headington, Oxford (London Road) to reach Headington Cemetery.

Saturday was the hottest and brightest day of the year so far, and therefore the best sort of day on which to visit Laura’s grave. Whenever I visit Oxford I try to pick as good a day as possible, weather-wise (even that latter expression causes me stress; coming down the steep road towards Cromer, Sinatra on the car stereo: “Weather-wise, it’s such a lovely day”), because I need to be reassured that she is resting in as sunny and idyllic a place as possible. Somewhere where she can't be hurt any more.

And when I cross over London Road and head northwards, it really is like stepping into another world, an enclosed, secure world. Appropriate that the main supermarket in Headington should be Somerfield – there used to be a Co-Op a little further up London Road, but that is long gone – for the whole street represents a kind of middle-class make-do-and-mend environment. Heine’s shark facing away from the Iron Bed Company the other side of New High Street. Somewhere where life doesn’t quite occur. You proceed past Somerfield, past the closeted entrance to Bury Knowle Park, past the white-picketed, lily-covered cottages lining the narrow pavement.

Headington Baptist Church coming up on my left to mark the crossing. Larkin’s Way due right, heading nowhere in particular. A couple of pubs; that on my right more populous, drenched in St George’s flags, that on my left a small, scarcely noticeable affair where I spent a rather unhappy 39th birthday. As I cross and turn left into St Andrew’s Road I note the newish coat of paint which seems to have been applied to the string of interconnected white cottages; less homely than their previous, more natural colour with a palpable absence of the wind chimes and bird sanctuaries which used to adorn their frontages. Then a church, with a cemetery, but neither is mine. Onwards and due right, downhill into Dunstan Lane.

Once you get past the entrance to Ruskin College the lane begins to look strangely enchanted. The bilateral lines of trees heighten, darken in colour and lean more towards the road. It feels exactly like entering a tunnel. The treelines are of almost Edward Hopperish intensity (that gas station in Cape Cod). As you pass through it you feel that you are entering sacred territory, a paradise of some kind which only you know how to reach. Reminders of humanity persist, however; there the Headington Parish Hall on my left, and you feel slightly affronted, if not violated, when the occasional car pushes through, blasting out Ibiza ’97 Mix; it’s out of place, almost an insult.

Nevertheless, I push on through what seems an eternity of country lane, passing a few grandish houses and some noticeably less grand council estates on my right as I approach the cemetery. But that doesn’t really matter; the cemetery marks the boundary between the unreachable land and the return to Oxford. I could see the clouds hovering uneasily over the approach to Marston, but the sun was shining unhindered where I was walking.

As usual, when I stood by Laura’s grave I no longer felt part of this world, had transcended earthly boundaries. The view over the Elsfield hills was as cosy as ever, if cosy is the right adjective to use in such circumstances, which it isn’t. Another imposing line of trees keeping the neighbouring John Radcliffe Hospital invisible. Alan Clark staring at the church steeple in Tiverton. If I could afford it, I would hire one of the last two remaining Lancaster jets to do a flypast over the cemetery on 25 August and 5 December of every year.

As usual, I was in something of a state when I quit the cemetery, knowing, as I always do, that there was nothing and no one waiting for me in Oxford. After my last visit I thought that the last remaining ghosts had fled and did not think I would be coming back here. But life is not so firmly set. The emptiness of the departure, past Thornhill Park and Ride, to find nothing but the blasted Oxfordshire countryside, all the while separating me from the fragments of a life which I had once known. As usual, someone at the “Headington shops” Oxford Tube stop asked me if I was OK, and as usual I had to reply in the faux-affirmative – must be the heat. As usual, London looking and feeling subtly different when I returned to it. The sunlight which seems to penetrate with an unusual intensity. Everywhere looking utterly alien to me. It happens and it’s going to keep on happening. To anyone who’s fed up with me going on about this over and over again – well, I’m not keeping you here, I’m not holding a gun at your head, feel free to go and read other, happier blogs.

In such a state did I listen to Venice, the new album by Fennesz. The Wingco in the Wire is right – this is the colour which Fennesz’ music turns when the Endless Summer turns out to have an end, and that end is autumn (cf. side two of New Gold Dream). So the guitar ripples on “Circassian” might be ecstatic, but now they sound as if they have been buried, or are drowning – playing from a place we can no longer reach. Jon Wozencroft’s sleeve images of distorted countryside and architecture, all looking as though it’s already drowned, contrasted with the glum realities of a bleak-looking airport in the middle of winter.

More than anything, when listening to Venice I am reminded of Aphex’s SAW II; those same scarcely graspable ribbons of gorgeous melodies, the same deliberate distant mangling by untraceable sonics. There is a strangely fulfilling emptiness to tracks like “Rivers Of Sand” or “City Of Light” – all boats, all streets abandoned, melodies ringing out on extended delay, the shifting, whispering sands. There are traces of redemption - the way in which “Chateau Rouge” shifts at 1:56 to allow a synth choir (very “I’m Not In Love”) to introduce a major key into the tune, for example.

And there is David Sylvian, on the song “Transit,” as he reaches the terminus of the journey on which he set out with “European Son” a quarter of a century ago. “Say your goodbyes to Europe,” he croons divinely, “Swallow the lie of Europe/Our shared history dies with Europe/Follow me…won’t you?” Great momentary swathes of crunching guitar smash into the otherwise elegantly sedentary song like - well, like collapsing new buildings. And sometimes it goes quiet: “The future’s hinting at itself/Do you feel what I feel?/All those names of ancestry/Too gentle for the stones they bear.” Notification of the terrible annihilation to come: “Somewhere someone wants to see you/Someone’s travelling towards us all.”

And then, with the second “Follow me…won’t you?” the mist clears at 4:00 and we are led into the next, new world, escorted into the antechamber of the room in which the future awaits. “The lights are dimming/The lounge is dark/The best cigarette is saved for last/We drink alone/We drink alone.”

We drink the water to save ourselves from drowning.

“The Point Of It All” is indeed an almost unspeakably gorgeous melody, yearning yet in full knowledge of its imminent demise. In “Laguna” we suddenly hear a simple, melancholy guitar progression – one is almost waiting for Devendra Banhart to start his strange Bolan-esque crooning over the track – the guitar(s) alone for the only time on the album.

And then a sudden, final desperate lunge for life – “The Stone Of Impermanence” (if we are talking about cemeteries) where, in its first two minutes, Fennesz’ guitars roar with barely controlled rage as if to cling on to this Earth, fighting for life – but then, realising the game is lost, the music recedes into reluctant quietude. You can hear the last glimmers of life being coaxed from Fennesz’ sonics just before they are immersed and entirely overwhelmed by the rising waves (cf. Bauby’s The Diving Bell & The Butterfly). And it’s by listening to records like this – and also to the impossibly gorgeous sadness of records like Blonde Redhead’s astonishing Misery Is A Butterfly, the best record to be released on 4AD since Blue Bell Knoll – that I am left with the melancholy reminder that nothing is going to bring Laura back, and also that everyone dies twice – once when they physically die, and again when their name is forgotten. I’m here to do my best to make sure that the second death will never happen.

INFINITE LIVEZ – BUSH MEAT

FACTFILE

Spike Milligan of Britrap. Not Roots Manuva, who is now the Michael Bentine.

Real name: Steven Henry
Imaginary accomplice: Barry Convex, one-eyed teddy bear
Who does the intro. Sheep and rain noises rescued from “It’s Grim Up North.” String bending. Could be Derek Bailey or koto. Sounds like Mercedes McCambridge in The Exorcist. “Rocked in the BUSH!” shrieks “Barry.” Now sounds like John Lydon being stretched on a rack of crocodiles.

“Worcestershire Sauce”
Varispeed music. Rhymes ballerinas with semolina. Chorus goes “Worcestershire Sauce, Cheese and Onion/I got the ready salted.” Key lyric: “Slit my throat and shower rubies/All for the one I love truly.” Making OutKast sound cautious, this is. Second key line: “The art of being a hip hop MC is to eat more crisps.”

Richard Maxfield jamming with THF Drenching:
Those strange instrumental interludes between tracks. Outdoes Spektrum doing Ligeti tributes.

“The Adventures Of The Lactating Man”
Bloody brilliant. “Chewing on my nipples/You know it feels great.” Wistful music, could be Talkie Walkie. “I swear on my life/I squirt milk in her eyes.” He goes to the doctor who orders him to “come back in the morning with a pint of semi-skimmed.” Protests: “I’m a lactating man!/Have a look, my shirt’s soaking!” But he uses the disability to his advantage. “Squeezing at my nipples for that white gravy…/I got ‘em queuing up outside my house with a smile and a bowl of Rice Krispies…/Chewing on my tit as though it was made of Wrigley’s.” Ventures into shambolic crooning at fadeout – “I’ll lactate for you BAY-BEEE!” – sounding uncannily like David Essex.

“Claati Bros”
Chris Ofili pisstake. Liberating African art from museums and exhibiting “elephant doo doo” in others. Sloaney girl (Sir Ster) sings the chorus – “Then go kiss my arse!” Bitonal, like all the choruses throughout the album. “It’s all getting TOO smelly in here Geoffrey and I want to go home.” What the fuck’s happening here? “If you wanna see the whole picrue, then stand back from the canvas.”

“White Wee Wee”
Cavernous post-Yello echoing synth/dance soundscape. That Sloane woman back again: “Infinite Livez you rap so dreamy/Ooh you make my panties creamy.” “It’s good for your teeth and it takes like Colgate.” Don’t get this with Ludacris. This is true ludicrosity.

“Brown Nosh”
The sequel. Featuring Bouncement Queen. “You ain’t got the dosh/Get down with the brown nosh/Lick it! LICK IT!”

Oh you are so not going to get this.

“Drilla Ape”
He’s turned on by Wildlife On One. He gets it on with “an immaculate lady primate…/Looking like a hairy Naomi Jordan.” Gives the astonished “Rude boy!” chorus motif a new veneer of urgency. Ending similar to that of “Funky Gibbon” by the Goodies.

You really are NOT going to get this.

“Coco Pilots”
Bit over-literal, this one. A fleet of black Bomber Command pilots attacking Westminster. “808 hit Perla Eartha Kitt.” Give up explaining. “Kamikaze pilots target Ridley Market.” Slightly too long.

“Cock ‘n’ Roll”
cLOUDDEAD!! Only bETTER!!!!

“Suckkrill”
That unconfident piano refrain (a twisted reflection of “The World Is Yours” by Nas). “Life support machines go blip” (a moment’s silence on that “blip”). “You see me in the desert chasing an ostrich.” Glad someone else remembers Earthling. “Play that beat for me” chorus as desperate as David Essex’s “DO THE HOKEY COKEY!” in the fadeout of “Just Wanna Dance” (“I WANNA DOOOOO THE…UH…SHUFFAAAALLLLLLLE!”)

“UK Krap”
Sinister Carpenter Casiotone.

“Tek Fi Joke”
“GET YOUR FUCKING HANDS OFF ME YOU FUCKING GIBBON! YOU FUCKING CHRISTIAN! YOU FUCKING RIGHT-WINGER!!” Market where none comes to buy. Jamie Oliver is cited and dethroned. “Marry a white woman, you’ll have Pot Noodles for the rest of your life/ONLY JOKING!/Get it open, like the vicar said to the nun.” “WHAT’S UP WITH ALL THIS FUR IN MY FOOD?”

“Spade Invaders”
Proves beyond doubt that I Livez is the UK Dr Octagon, das kapital’s Kool Keith. “Attack you with tedious details.”

Right, you’ve got it now, haven’t you?

“Wide-eyed Manga/Hypnotherapist.” It’s Friday night and he’s just got paid, but this is a long way away from the sneakily exuberant joy of Little Richard. He’s sitting, isolated from humanity, in an arcade of machines, played by virtual machinery. “All of you nignog purple traitors…/Neo-Tokyo in Harlesden…/Experiments on brown-eyed blemishes making it hard to focus on who the Devil is…/A ouija board joystick…/Livez can be lost and gained when you’re in front of a screen.”

So I’ve got to stop doing it so much. Death and the Devil. Dreams of futurism ending up in a banal, garish tomb.

At 2:44 the music breaks free of beats and there is just his voice with the machines. Abstract the abstractable. “The ultimate Afro-futurist…/Wonder Woman’s clay clitoris…/Ridiculous as blue eyes on an African mutant.” The flow is there and he could keep going on forever, trying to find his perfection again, which he never had in the first place – “Jiminy Christmas 64 Luke Cage!”

Because “Life’s depleting/What passes for eating.”

That wan cry of “ST NICHOLAS”! Bring back my childhood. “(Fuck It) I Don’t Want You Back.”

“You lack tactile integrity.”

“Identity. IDENTITY. Changing DENSITY.”

The music never returns. It’s long since been lost.

“Pononee Girl”
But wait! What’s this? A delicate electro intro (think the Black Dog’s “Cheah”) but then…”Hey, can I get you a bale of hay?” Never mind apes, he’s fallen for a plastic My Little Pony toy! “I’m willing to ride you like Frankie Dettori.”

Are you still here? Will you be getting it?

“You’re the best looking thing to come out of Hasbros!” “Do it like they do it down on the stud farm.”

WHERE THE FUCK IS HE GOING WITH THIS?

Galloping hooves as a rhythm track. Remember the satyr story of Rob’s Satyred Love (does anyone else?).

He can even look forward to “having kids/A family od super-deformed equids/I could watch them graze out back.”

Can you go any further?

“Last Nite”
It’s a corpse he’s found in the street. It could be one of a million corpses. Wrists cut? Abusive boyfriend? Neglectful father? “Teenage boy with a head of grey hair.” Oh no, you’re not telling me…OK, I could perhaps understand the ape thing, the My Little Pony thing took some getting used to, but…are…you…serious…?

The chorus goes “Last night I nearly took me life/Baby BLUE!”

No, even I Livez can’t become that infinite. He is now faced with the reality which he’s spent the rest of the record trying not to see. The reality of violent death, or ignored death, left to the worms in the street. Perhaps it’s the only way the record could have ended.

“Nutta’s Chance”
Do you want to give him one?

Is hip hop getting interesting again? Not just K West and I Livez, but terrific records from Madvillain and Cee-Lo Green and not-half-bad ones from Usher and Eamon either?

Even if it were, is Bush Meat going to be just another Maxinquaye, a record upon which we can all agree but won’t change anything, precisely because we all agree on it? Well, it’s more colourful, funny and affecting than Wiley, better than Beta, more mordant than Morrissey. But I have the sinking feeling that it’ll end up the same way as Earthling’s Radar – dumped in the bargain basement of undeserved worthiness. Buy it, popularise it and prove me wrong.

THE COLLEGE DROPOUT – THE BEST HIP HOP ALBUM IN THE WORLD…EVER?

This website has many subsidiary functions. I might use it to warn you of important new music that is forthcoming; at other times I might use it to recommend old music that could be more important than previously thought (my view is not so much expending time reading about music to which you’re never going to listen, but rather writing about music to which you might want to listen). But sometimes I have to stand back, let the dust from other critics settle down, take time to consider the situation and then come back to you and say “this is brilliant” or “this is dreadful.” I have taken great care to avoid reading what other people have written about Kanye West’s The College Dropout as I felt the record significant enough to stand on its own and I did not want it to be diluted by received opinions from elsewhere, however valid. And having now lived with the record for three months, and having listened to it more often than any other record so far this year, I feel sufficiently confident to say that The College Dropout is the latest example of that rarest of phenomena, the immaculate, faultless pop record. Sometimes, as with A Wizard/A True Star, or The Lexicon Of Love, or Steve McQueen, we are simply compelled to shut up and worship; certainly I would say that the last time we were in this territory was with Since I Left You, three years gone.

More than that, I suspect that The College Dropout might well be the wisest and best of hip hop albums. That’s a big claim, and I’ll do my best to substantiate it.

Firstly, bear in mind that the essence of rap depends to a degree on how far the rapper can impose and extend his character on the music and towards the listener. In other words, to make us listen to him, the rapper has to (a) speak or shout loudly and interestingly enough, and (b) have a life and history sufficiently interesting to engage us. An average life will spawn an average rapper, and an average mind will engender average music. The whole point of rap is that the rapper is above average, on a par with Godhood; and that in itself might be the whole point of pop music, or art – the idolatry and worship of people who can do things that we can’t. Thus the best rap album ever made, in terms of directness of vocal projection, of vocal dexterity and an engaging life about which to rap, is still The Marshall Mathers LP – as with Coltrane at his most molten prolificity, we have no option but to be knocked back and gasp at Eminem’s inarguable technical brilliance as a rapper, and the devastating and palpably real pain and hate of which he raps. He matches the almost casual vocal artistry of Jay-Z but blends it with the spitting daggers of the Notorious BIG, and therefore becomes the greatest of rappers because you cannot, as a listener, hide from his screams and blood – like Judy Garland, he is compelling because you always feel that he is on the verge of smashing himself up. But there are other ways of telling interesting stories than in such bald rage, while still preserving the integrity of the story and the rapper’s own irreducible personality.

That latter observation brings me to the second point, namely that hip hop (as opposed to rap per se) is frequently a communal, collaborative art. From the days of the Sugarhill Gang and the Furious Five onwards, the collective has also had an important role to play in what was, after all, originally the music of a community. Often the message and impact which a group of rappers deliver will supersede the significance of any individual group member – the totality, in all senses, is what counts (if you have any doubt on this matter, consider which record you would prefer to listen to – The Autobiography of Chuck D or Fear Of A Black Planet?). Thus, even though every rapper is an individual, in non-verbal areas they generally tend to leave much of the groundwork to a supporting team – DJ, producer, remixer, guest vocalists and musicians, etc.

Kanye West is of course still primarily considered a producer rather than a rapper. But on The College Dropout he has achieved what I feel is the perfect synthesis of the above two approaches; the importance of the rapper’s central story and the coordination of an impeccable supporting team. So, while there are an array of guests on the album, including Jay-Z, Ludacris, Mos Def, Talib Kweli and others, we are never at any point distracted from the notion that this is West’s story that is being told, that he as a human being is holding the entire project together.

In other words, The College Dropout works because West approaches it, not simply as a producer, but as a director; as with, say, Howard Hawks, he knows exactly what sounds and words to put where, and who will best say or play them. But, as with Gil Evans, he is always discreetly centre stage, modestly (or immodestly) running things.

The story itself is the third reason why this record is so powerful. You have to remember that one of the primary purposes of pop is to allow a misbegotten misanthrope to seize a microphone and demand that you pay attention to him and worship him just for breathing. He has to reiterate to you, as a listener, how life-and-death important his life is and why it is so important, more important than the life of anyone else who has ever lived, including yours. It’s about screaming and restating the fact of your existence to the world. The pop singer’s story has to be the greatest story ever told; why else would they want to be popular?

(This, amongst other reasons, is why Eamon works so well as a pop star; interpret “(Fuck) I Don’t Want You Back” as a petulant, arrested-infant whine, the latest descendent of a pop line which stretches back to Johnnie Ray and forward to Justin Timberlake, taking in the younger Michael Jackson. Perhaps interpret “(Fuck) I Don’t Want You Back” as what the 11-year-old Jackson really wanted to sing instead of “I Want You Back.” It might have saved an awful lot of subsequent trouble. But Eamon…it’s “Waaaa! Gimme Back My Underpants” and therefore on a par with Iggy Pop)

But West takes a far more subtle approach to his story. Heard superficially, his might sound like a standard story of raising himself up from nothing to become Top Person. But it’s far more complex than the weary Tebbit-style I-got-on-my-bike-why-doesn’t-anyone-else-it’s-life-not-books-that-taught-me-all-I-learnt spiteful yea-saying.

For instance, there’s the album’s opening song, “We Don’t Care,” a brilliant satire about unthinking, unfettered capitalism sung by a cheerful-sounding children’s choir – Sesame Street, Chomsky-style. “Drug dealing, just to get by…We weren’t ‘sposed to make it past 25/The joke’s on you – we’re still alive.” Note that “just to get by” rather than “to get rich” (and die trying? – “They favourite 50 Cent song’s 12 Questions”) and further note that the whole song is an unambiguous attack on those who would lazily and arrogantly claim that getting rich off the back of drug dealing is in any way morally superior to staying in school, and also an attack on how the two activities have been forced into symbiosis by The System (“This dope money here is Li’l Tre’s scholarship/’Cause ain’t no tuition for having no ambition…You know the kids gonna act a fool/When you stop the programs for after school”). That fragile trace of indecision at the song’s end – “Sometimes I feel no one in this world understands us/But we don’t care what people say.” All the while, West sardonically sneers at the chorus: “Kids sing! Kids SING!” And the song ends up being deconstructed by The Man (Deray) with abrupt savagery – “You throw your hands in the air and say GOODBYE TO EVERYTHING!” Cue John Legend’s sublime weeping vocoder on “Graduation Day” – a lament for a spent youth, the end of being taken care of. Look at West in the sleeve photos – “POETRY CONTEST – NEVER WON”; “BASKETBALL – NEVER PLAYED”; “HOMECOMING – NEVER CHEERED”; “GRADUATION – NEVER WALKED.” In every picture he is alone, unsmiling, isolated within a throng of “happy” people (cf. the cover to Sinatra’s No One Cares) – but is he really feeling alone, or is he quietly plotting, secretly smiling at the knowledge that he, the reject, the DROPOUT, will ultimately trump all of these other smug bastards?

Capitalism a desirable and good thing? Try “All Falls Down,” in which vocalist Syleena Johnson agonises in mock-glee over a Lauryn Hill guitar soundtrack – the tragedy of the joy of something like Inner City’s “Good Life” lies in the probability that all goodness in life will forever lie within the singer’s imagination. For this is a tighter take on Big Brovaz’ “My Favourite Things,” a vast improvement on Heaven 17’s “Key To The World,” as West talks about how he is happily branding himself into financial and moral ruination – that near-whisper at song’s end: “I got a couple past due bills, won’t get specific/I got a problem with spending before I get it.” So Johnson’s joy is actually a cry of laughter at the soon-to-be-poor mug.

And capitalism can go up as well as down – thus the brilliant 6/8 thrust (Gaye’s “Distant Lover” the sample) of “Spaceship” with its wordplay worthy of Gilbert O’Sullivan – the juxtaposing of “grave shift,” “slave ship,” “space ship” and “I ain’t made shit.” I don’t think that this song’s effect would have been so striking without the plain piano-driven gospel of “I’ll Fly Away,” the record’s moral core, its “soul.” The ambition to discard all your ambition and just be happy with a simple and unexamined life. But hear the brutality of West’s opening line: “If my manager insults me again I will be assaulting him!” And later, guest rapper Comeuppance considers his, as it were, comeuppance, having descended from a cameo in an old Busta Rhymes video to working for peanuts in Gap (the embarrassment of having his workmates recognise him from his past, pinprick glory). “So many records in my basement, I’m just waitin’ on my spaceship.” But did the grave shifts at Gap pay for those records? “I’m gonna be takin’ no days off/’Til my spaceship takes off.” Observe also the wry despair of Comeuppance’s voice as it winds round and hammers down the words “naturally,” “actually,” factually” and “catastrophe.”

“Jesus Walks,” meanwhile, sounds like war. Jackboots march to a stirring hymn – but just how much shit is it stirring? There are machine gun punctuations, a weirdly high-pitched vocoder-through-a-Casio motif which sounds like the ghost of Roger Troutman trying to find his way back to Earth, while West declares war on all those who would declare war on him and his (the ANGUISH in that “down” which closes the line “The devil try to break me down”!) It’s a hymn of devotion sung by someone who isn’t entirely sure whether he deserves to have anything devoted to him – “I wanna talk to God but I’m afraid ‘cause we ain’t spoke in so long.” And buried halfway through the song, the stark giveaway couplet: “We rappers are role models/We rap, we don’t think”).

The sudden ascent of spirituality into the heart of The College Dropout is quite overwhelming in its unambiguous, unironic sincerity. So “Never Let Me Down” might musically be based on a Michael Bolton song, but the cadences of the chorus recall mid-period Lindsey Buckingham more than anything else, and, as West notes in “Jesus Walks,” the top floor of this view alone leaves this writer breathless. As with Coltrane’s Ascension, the track starts at a level of intensity where most other tracks finish, and the momentum just keeps building up and up, right from the opening refrain of “Get up, I GET!” as West declares that all he wants to be is a Good Man – “So I promise to Mr Rainey, I’m gonna marry your daughter…And I know that you was smilin’ when you seen the car I bought her/And you sent tears from heaven when you seen my car get balled up/But I can’t complain what the accident did to my left eye…/’Cause look what the accident did to Left Eye.” It’s the most moral pop song this side of the Osmonds, but really takes off into the stratosphere when guest rapper (or preacher, more like) J Ivy suddenly takes off in the middle of the track with a violently ecstatic sermon – “I’m not a miracle! I’m a heaven sent instrument” – then doubling up the rhythm, speaking in those tongues (“navigating melodic notes”) before he screams out his moral:

“IF I WERE ON THE HIGHEST CLIFF! ON THE HIGHEST RIFF! AND YOU SLIPPED OFF THE SIDE! AND CLIPPED ON TO YOUR LIFE IN MY GRIP! I WOULD NEVER! LET! YOU! DOWN!” (those final words in rhythmic parallel to the backing singers). And then he intrudes into Saul Williams territory, frantically proclaiming “I TOO DREAM IN COLOUR AND IN RHYME!…’COS WHEN I OPEN MY HEART! MY SOUL! OR MY MOUTH! THERE’S A TOUCH OF GOD IN MY SOUL!”

And right on target, as if it were a folly to think that you couldn’t get higher than God, in slams Jay-Z to raise the stakes even higher (note the whooping and cheering which virtually drown out his opening lines) – “Six Hail Marys, please Father, forgive me…The Archbishop! Pope John Paul!…The Pope is a living legend and I’ll tell you why/Everybody wanna be Hova and Hova’s still a-LIVE!” (a little chuckle right at the end)

“Get ‘Em High” gives West a chance to get his breath back so that he can expend it on people who are Not Worthy, as he, Talib Kweli and Common toss around ideas like semi-eaten pancakes over a relatively subdued electro backdrop (but check those “Ow”s, and especially the triple-ply crosstalk which momentarily halts the track – “Get her high!” “Yeah?” “OW!!” – as well as the frequent instrumental dropouts as if the music can’t quite keep up with the verbal imagination. There are mild jibes at Beck (“My teacher said I’m a loser/I told her why don’t you kill me”), Eminem (“You ain’t gotta guess who’s back”) and considerably less mild jibes at Modern Music (“And that’s why I hear your music in fast forward/’Cause we don’t wanna hear that weak shit no more”) and would-be Others who email Our Kanye out of the blue at 11:26 (“W-H-I-T?/It’s getting’ late, mommy!/Your screen saver say Tweet/So you got to call me!”).

And there is also comedy – when it needs to be, The College Dropout is also amongst the funniest of hip hop albums. Consider the fantastic “The New Workout Plan” which starts out with a crazily careering string arrangement (and arranger Miri Ben-Ari has to be singled out as a contributor of especial importance throughout the album; her string lines are always intriguingly askew yet strangely relevant) like a jacked-up Ivo Papasov as Our Kanye mischievously and sardonically tries to get the ladies turned on – but how to turn them on with lines like “Ooh girl, your breath is harsh/Cover your mouth up like you got SARS” or, better still, “Four door do you know the difference between a 5, 6, 7, 8/All the mocha lattes, you gotta do Pilates.” And then, in a gesture which beats anything that Zappa did in this mode – probably because there’s love at the centre of West’s world rather than cynicism and contempt – we are bombarded with a series of rapid-fire, hilarious testimonials from satisfied customers (“I’m Ella Mae from Mobil, Alabama, and I wanna say that since listening to Kanye’s workout tape, I’ve been able to date outside the family!”). Then the music changes at 3:29 into a vocoder/metal guitar crunch sample-led Acid House workout in the good old ’87 style.

Then there is “Slow Jamz.”

It is one of the most perceptive and sublime dissertations there has been on the relative role of the male and female psyches in our perception of music and what effect it has upon us, what functions it can serve or surpass. Moreover and beyond this, it is one of the finest meditations on how we view music of the past, what we allow it to mean to us when we are not exhausting ourselves pursuing the ghost of newness. It nails with fearsome accuracy exactly what Hornby was trying to get at with the Solomon Burke vs Art Garfunkel argument in High Fidelity (regular readers of the Maja will not be surprised to hear that this writer tends to come down on the side of Garfunkel, and is exceptionally sceptical about Hornby’s attempt to equate “Garfunkel” with “naff” and thereupon with “femaleness”).

It is a song happy to deconstruct itself at the same time as it celebrates its own spectacle. It even starts off with a semi-scripted dialogue extremely reminiscent of “This Is What She’s Like” where Jamie Foxx meditates on why women can’t get the same thing out of music as men can, or do but in different and opposing ways – “[The music is] All fast in the club…She’ll dance to, like, 9200 songs back to back…but ain’t nobody really tryin’ to find out what she’s feelin’, HOW she’s feelin’…

…and you know what she told me?”

“Tell me what she’s like.”

Then the song starts proper. The sample is a speeded-up Luther Vandross (“A House Is Not A Home” indeed! And a man is not a woman) which in itself is a demonstration of simple genius – the maleness erased, sped up beyond the level of asexuality, towards the female, towards the genderless. And what does she like? “A little Marvin Gaye/Some Luther Vandross/A little Loleatta…/She wants some Ready For The World, some New Edition, some Minnie Riperton…”

You see? She doesn’t give a damn about newness. She wants the songs that turned her on when she was a kid, or the songs which still speak to her most brightly and directly. Now imagine how any of these horrendous Jools Holland Real Music Real Ale dwellers would have handled the same topic – there would have been craven, nauseating genuflecting to Real Soul Not Plastic Cocktail Crap (because most of the time, you know, most pop lovers are perfectly happy with plastics and cocktails). When was the last time you saw Paul Weller proclaiming the greatness of Ready For The World? (And even if you have only heard “Oh Sheila,” then “greatness” is a very apposite noun to apply). Not radical? Only speeded-up old soul samples? You think that any lady is going to be wooed by cLOUDDEAD?

Again and again, as the song progresses, ghosts from the past are summoned up joyfully – the ecstatic scream which accompanies “Al Green,” the momentary beatless drift into limbo after “Smokey Robinson.” But finally the subtext leers her inquisitive head, as the lady pleads, demands, “Can’t you PLEASE do it faster?” – and note how the underlying conga rhythm suddenly veers into prominence here and doubles up. And the inevitable punctum comes as West beams: “Damn baby, I can’t do it that fast – but I know somebody who CAN!” And, straight in with an Exocet at 2:53, thrusts Twista to babble ecstatically about how sex is so much more than a substitute for music – “GetyoursheetswetlisteningtoKeithSweat!” I doubt whether I would want to hear much more of Twista other than this priceless moment of pop, but in this environment, at this precise time, he is exactly what is needed.

But we have to remember the title of this album – The College Dropout – for next – after the relatively carefree “Breathe In, Breathe Out” where Ludacris sounds a bit grandiloquent coming off Twista’s comet, but which again is sent into a strange orbit by Ben-Ari’s querulous strings, keening like economy-sized question marks - comes an extraordinary tetralogy which debates the precise worth of that thing called “education.” At its centre is “School Spirit” which grumpily rolls along on a distended Aretha Franklin sample as West glumly declaims “Alpha STEP, Omega STEP, Kappa STEP, Sigma STEP/Gangsters walk, pimps gonna talk/Ooh hecky-ya that boy is raw!” (“Ooh hecky-ya”? Has someone at PBS been screening old episodes of The Wheeltappers’ and Shunters’ Social Club on the quiet?). Musically it’s another march which very subtly reverses the perspective of “Jesus Walks” to emphasise the banal and destructive unimportance of earthly temptations – hear that whimper of “Everything I want, I gotta wait a year, I WAIT A YEAR!” But then he reflects on how his schoolmates who did play by the rules ended up getting equally nowhere – “The nigga graduated at the top of our class/I went to Cheesecake, he was a muthafuckin’ waiter there!” And there is also one of many references dotted throughout the album to the near-fatal car accident in which West broke his jaw and was lucky to survive; thus his immortality is confirmed (“Cracked my head on the steering wheel and I ain’t even dead/If I could go through all that and still be breathing/Bitch, bend over…I’M HERE FOR A REASON!” Note how the word “Lexus” is spoken more softly and caressingly than many of the other female names which crop up throughout the record).

The song is bookended by savage ruminations on education. In the first skit (Deray performs all the skits) we hear how playing by the rules and listening to what the teacher tells you won’t necessarily get you anywhere beyond the contemptuous bottom rung of the career ladder – “You’ll spend all your money on crack cocaine but it’ll be YOUR money!…You could get to be the secretary’s secretary! Taking messages for the secretary who never went to college! She’s actually the boss’ niece!…I was a hall monitor! This was MEANT to be! No, I’ve never had sex, but you know what? My degree keeps me satisfied. When a lady walks with me and say, “Hey you know what sexy?” I say “No, I don’t know what it is, but I could add up all the change in your purse very fast!””

“My friend he was a wise as Mr Wise-owl
He could count from one to ten, from A-Z
My friend he was so wise he got religion
That’s why I’m alive today and he is dead.”
(“Mole In A Hole” by Richard Thompson, from the 1975 Richard and Linda Thompson album Hokey Pokey)

The second and third skits, which follow the song, are notably darker. Now the focus switches to the role of the “intelligent” person in relation to society, and how the pursuit of “knowledge” can end up being just another drug. “Yeah I’m 52!” says the character defiantly. “So what?…When I die, buddy, you know what’s gonna keep me warm? That’s right – those degrees!” Busy amassing degrees and “learning” while everyone else around him gets on with making a living and raising a family.

The consequences follow as a gloomy-sounding son takes over. “My dad died and he left me his degrees (a gospel lament slowly starts up in the background)… He was so greedy with degrees, he took my degree! And now I’m just glad he left me these, ‘cos all the regular homeless people have newspaper – and look what I have!…I’m gonna get super-smart, so I can die without money, but I’ll be the smartest dead guy! Who has that?”

That recitation is delivered in a tone not entirely dissimilar to that of Bill Hicks (“Hey honey I think I smell a dead guy!”) and in the wrong hands could sound like a grumbling Sun columnist moaning about sponging students who never attended The University Of Life. But there’s an underlying sadness which reminds us of the subsidiary message – what kind of society is it where people with degrees end up homeless, and specifically what kind of society is it when black people with even one degree end up waiting at Cheesecake or slaving away on minimum wages at Gap? Doesn’t it suit The System so much better if they stick to being bad-mouthed rapping motherfuckers? Isn’t that how They want You to see Us?

“If you happen to be educated
Time it marches on,
Oh time it marches on.
If the end there is a sacred show
Delivers every song.
Delivers every song.”
(“They Also Mourn Who Do Not Wear Black” by Sufjan Stevens from his 2003 album Greetings From Michigan)

So it is time for spiritual rage again with the astonishing “Two Words,” where West and Mos Def fire out bisyllabic bullets, damning and drowning America in their anger, as the rock guitars of Freeway and the vocals of the Harlem Boys’ Choir rage behind them and a harpsichord sadly underscores the spittle (“Big Macs! Fat folks!”…”FUCK YOU! PAY ME!”). It’s all very reminiscent of the elementally grandiose emotional collapse of Eternal’s “Don’t You Love Me,” one of the greatest singles of the ‘90s. Eventually one of Ben-Ari’s violins breaks free and trills a rueful coda (cf. the Checkmates’ “Love Is All I Have To Give”) and the long sustained final choral chord sounds as though the world has been frozen by a neutron bomb.

Out of death comes life. So “Through The Wire” transposes Chaka Khan from female to angel as West reminisces, with only the faintest trace of self-satisfaction, about his escape from an early death (“The doctor said I had blood clots/But I ain’t Jamaican, man…They thought I was burnt up like Pepsi did Michael”). And, for the second time on the album, he observes that there must be an angel looking down on him. “But I’m a champion, so I turned tragedy to triumph/Make music that’s fire, spit my soul through the wire” (but note that sotto voce aside: “Half my jaw was in the back of my mouth”).

Was there something about a community? Well, how strong is any community? Is the family a respite? Hardly, if the song “Family Business” has anything to say about it. A darkly humorous dissemination of the essential phoniness which lies behind any standard concept of “the family,” landing somewhere between Godfather II and Franzen’s The Corrections (“Somebody please say grace so I can save face”), over a disturbingly benign Bruce Hornsby-style piano riff and echoing voices (“All the diamond rings…They don’t mean a thing”) West tears with obvious relish into Grandma (“Aw naw, don’t open the photo book up”) and aunts with Alzheimer’s (“I got a Aunt Ruth that can’t remember your name/But I bet them polaroids a’ send her down memory lane/You know that one auntie u don’t wanna be rude/But every holiday nobody eatin’ her food”) before realising that his friends are a truer family than his family could ever be (“All my niggas from the Chi is my family dog”…”You ain’t gotta get heated at every house warming/Sittin’ here grilling people like George Foreman/Why Uncle Ray and Aunt Sheila always performing?” (a timely reversal, and probably a far realer reflection, of the Uncle Frank and Auntie May of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “We Will”).

“And act like everything fine and it isn’t.”

“We could go on as though nothing was wrong.”

“LET’S GET STEVIE OUT OF JAIL!”

Finally, the coda – “Last Call.” It took me a while to get under the skin of this particular song, but when I realised that one could sing (or narrate) Momus’ “Closer To You” to its backing track, things became far clearer. For this track starts out with West standing alone, vindicated, triumphant (“I take my chain, my 15 seconds of fame/And came back next year with the whole fuckin’ game”) and unapologetic about the status which he has achieved entirely by means of his own effort. It is not witless Thatcherite crowing – rather it’s the arrogance which arises naturally from someone who has been kicked in the face all their life, but nevertheless comes through to win and knowing that they will win – “Some say he arrogant. Can y’all blame him?/It was straight embarrassing how y’all played him.” Capitalism on his terms: “Oh my God is that a black card?/I turned around and replied why yes/But I prefer the term African American Express.” Behind him there are sung “la-la”s, sweet in their implied arrogance – and note how the refrain of “raise your glasses to the sky” mirrors the hapless “raise our hands to the sky” of “We Don’t Care,” which world West has now succeeded in transcending.

Then at 3:55 the tension finally relaxes and West begins to launch into an extended stream of consciousness monologue (in large part) about how he managed to get where he is today. Rather than nine minutes of self-advertisement, this is a curiously floating and quietly ecstatic babble of biography, as he breaks the bounds of the bar lines and goes into what is virtually abstract verbal free association – there is a queerly ethereal bliss to his talking voice comparable to similar outings by Van Morrison or Kevin Rowland. As with the key moments on Don’t Stand Me Down, West is content to step out of the song form, comment on the song while the song is still playing, to talk with the music, against the music, to the listener, if just for a chat, or an explanation. There are occasional asides from his mother, executive producer Damon Dash and others (again, very similar to Billy Adams’ interjections throughout Don’t Stand Me Down) as he endeavours to assemble his own Ikea-bought bed, talks about The Blueprint, about rapping (that point where he gleefully breaks into an impromptu rap which actually represented his first attempt at rapping), about how Capitol wanted to sign him but eventually didn’t – and when they don’t the music suddenly grinds to a halt – but no we’re not dead yet because Roc-A-Fella are still interested and you don’t get rid of me that easily and it’s only then that you realise that this is in delivery and in emotion a Molly Bloom soliloquy and it can go anywhere you like because it doesn’t really matter if you’re listening to my life story because you’re bewitched spellbound by my words because it crosses the point where it stops being documentary and starts becoming well spiritual if that’s the right word and I’m sure it isn’t but it’s getting to a yes yes yes and that yes yes yes is Roc-A-Fella’s yes yes yes because you don’t want him to stop and he could talk forever and is probably still talking somewhere out in that ether so won’t you raise your glass won’t you

because fourthly, The College Dropout takes us somewhere else and leaves us there. And that somewhere else might be the hand of God.

“’Danger,’ he said, and again, ‘danger. Danger deliberately and yet lightly accepted. Danger shared with a friend, a group of friends. Shared consciously, shared to the limits of awareness so that the sharing and the danger become a yoga. Two friends roped together on a rock face. Sometimes three friends or four. Each totally aware of his own straining muscles, his own skill, his own fear, and his own spirit transcending the fear. And each, of course, aware at the same time of all the others, concerned for them, doing the right things to make sure that they’ll be safe. Life at its highest pitch of bodily and mental tension, life more abundant, more inestimably precious, because of the ever-present threat of death. But after the yoga of danger there’s the yoga of the summit, the yoga of rest and letting go, the yoga of complete and total receptiveness, the yoga that consists in consciously accepting what is given as it is given, without censorship by your busy moralistic mind, without any additions from your stock of second-hand ideas, your even larger stock of wishful phantasies. You just sit there with muscles relaxed and a mind open to the sunlight and the clouds, open to distance and the horizon, open in the end to that formless, wordless Non-Thought which the stillness of the summit permits you to divine, profound and enduring, within the twittering flux of your everyday thinking.’”
(Aldous Huxley, Island. Chatto & Windus Ltd – London:1962, chapter 10)

“What if you never come down?”
(Jarvis Cocker)

1969 IN MY SUNSHINE

I was five years old in 1969, so knew nothing of Manson, Altamont or the My Lai massacre until much later, not to mention the Stooges or the MC5. It is the first year of my life which I can vividly remember, as it was also my first year at primary school. I remember the daily walks there and back with my mother through streets long since demolished, full of dark grocer’s shops and newsagents which seemed to have remained unchanged since the ‘30s, their dirt-opaqued windows covered with yellowing Tudor Crisps packets and week-by-week encyclopaedias – All About Science, The Story Of Pop. A Galbraith’s supermarket where there used to be a cinema at the turning of Spindlehowe Road, and then, on the horizon, the impossibly exotic-looking, Thunderbirds-shaped constructions of the Tannochside Industrial Estate, looking like a painted film studio backdrop as you approached the turn into the road which led to Muiredge Primary School, and then, from the vast view from the large rear area of the school playground, looking like a different world altogether, an invisible barrier preventing me from accessing or touching it. The little corner shop directly across the road from the school with its ‘20s Tizer metal plates, and which was demolished before our eyes during playtime one morning in 1973.

Memories of the school itself have faded somewhat – essentially we had standard elementary Janet and John/two plus two lessons, and my recall of the names of my classmates at the time now fails me, with the exception of Chris Thomson, who went on to become frontman with Friends Again, and eventually metamorphosised into The Bathers – but I do recall Helen McLullish, the deputy headmistress and my first and second year teacher, who, intrigued by my premature interest in music, decided in 1969 to start me on piano lessons. I went through eight books of a series called Ministeps To Music, a kind of primer to getting to Grade I proper, and through innumerable afternoons of mastering the likes of “My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean” and “Oh! Susanna.” My dad was naturally very keen for me to nurture and develop this particular skill, and few weeks went by without watching Oscar Peterson on BBC2 and my dad methodically pointing out to me what the great Canadian was doing and how he managed to do it. Or indeed The Piano Can Be Fun, a tutorial series for kids which went out on ITV on Saturday mornings, compered by Robert Farnon and Cyril Ornadel, with which I was always compelled to play along. Eventually my dad weaned me onto Tatum and Brubeck – the latter’s Rachmaninoff block chord solo on “You Go To My Head” off the live Jackpot LP stuck particularly in my mind – and ultimately onto this curious chap named Cecil Taylor, who played kind of what I’d wanted to play all along. A right elbow or a right knee to the upper register – smashing! Then I witnessed Jerry Lee Lewis on This Is Tom Jones doing exactly the same thing.

Saturday morning was comic morning – Whizzer and Chips, Cor!, Valiant, a few DC titles – while Sundays were for weightier material. My dad always took me over to the newsagent’s across the road from our house on a Sunday morning to pick up a Sunday Times (for himself/myself), a Sunday Mail (for my mum), a pack of Golden Virginia ready rubbed for his pipe and a bar of Turkish Delight for myself after breakfast. That Sunday morning smell – so warm and comforting, so irretrievable – has never escaped my memory. If the weather was nice we’d all go for a walk through the woods around the base of Bothwell Castle; my dad would take the transistor radio with him, merrily blasting out Berg’s Lyric Suite on Radio 3, or maybe Walton’s Portsmouth Point (he was definitely a Radio 3/4 man). If the weather was a bit drear my dad and I might hop on the 56 bus going towards the Barrowland market in Glasgow, browsing for old Marvel comics or Slim Gailliard 78s. Back in time for Sunday lunch, the tumultuously tantalising smell of cooking always raising our spirits.

But always there was music. On Sunday afternoons I’d break off from piano practice in my bedroom, lie on the bed and listen to Alan Freeman running down the week’s Top 40 on Pick of the Pops. The concept fascinated me. Records in some sort of order. Order was still a relatively new idea to me and I was still trying to take it in. Obviously the best record was at number one, the next best at number two, etc. I eventually worked out that it was based on sales, and that the general public’s buying habits didn’t always correlate with the quality of individual records as I perceived them. I remember stretching out on the bed, the five o’clock shadow of the sun coming in from the left window and casting a luminous sepia shadow on the entire room, listening to things like “My Way” and “Oh Happy Day” and feeling something seeping into my system, my being.

There were two newsagents across the road from our house; the other was RS McColl’s, and in those days it had a little record section at the back of the shop where you could go in and purchase singles and LPs, although the stock they had mostly consisted of names which I had never heard in the Sunday afternoon chart rundown and which I already guessed belonged to another era – the Seekers, Dickie Valentine, Eden Kane. Nonetheless, presented with my frankly inexplicable passion for all things to do with music, and specifically with the singles chart, with which I had quickly become incurably besotted, my dad arranged for them to keep aside a copy of every music-related weekly for me. He already took the Melody Maker, of course, as in 1969 that was still primarily a jazz paper which covered pop with some sufferance, as well as Gramophone and Jazz Journal, but also arranged for me to get the NME, Record Mirror, Disc and Music Echo, Music Now and even the trade paper Record Retailer (which later became Music Week, to which I still subscribe) with its red-bordered centre-page pull-out Top 50 chart list which I always stuck on my bedroom wall and subsequently filed in some lever arch files which my dad brought home from work. My God, a Top 50, with ten more records than you got on Sunday afternoon! And if that weren’t enough, another chart for albums! And American charts as well! I was hooked on this hock instantly.

So 1969 marks the starting point of everything that ended up as being The Naked Maja, and to me it seemed a wonderful and idyllic time, as any year appears to anyone fortunate enough to live through it at the age of five. And yet, looking at the songs which made that Top 40 throughout the year, the initial question in my mind was: why so much death? So much of the following list seems preoccupied with the apocalypse, or with non-existence, or with revolution. OK, so it’s 35 years down the line and now I know the history and context and realise that 1969 was, objectively, a pretty horrible year for everyone. But it still comes as a shock to see that the end of the ‘60s seemed to be equated with the end of everything. I wasn’t aware of Woodstock either until Matthews’ Southern Comfort had their number one in 1970, so knew nothing of Hendrix at ten o’clock on Monday morning screaming out “The Star Spangled Banner” to the few remaining stragglers there; nevertheless it’s the one piece of music whose troubled mind permeates virtually every piece of music discussed below.

Note: the following list is constructed exactly like my 1985 exercise. Artists have been listed alphabetically or grouped together wherever I felt it appropriate; thus, for example, some readers may baulk at my bunching the Stones’ one 1969 hit single together with all Beatles-related material, but the story would otherwise be far more awkward to tell if I hadn’t done so.

Herb ALPERT
Without Her (18 Jun – 36)
NILSSON
Everybody’s Talkin’ (11 Oct – 23)

“If not, I’ll just…die.”
“I’d rather die than live without her.”
Not a lot of people know this, but Bacharach and David wrote “This Guy’s In Love With You” originally with Chet Baker in mind. However, as Chet was, shall we say, clinically indisposed at the time of the planned recording date, that other trumpeter and reluctant singer Herb Alpert was sent for, and did the job brilliantly.

“Without Her” was Alpert’s next vocal hit. It’s a Harry Nilsson song more or less about bereavement, certainly as bereaved-sounding as Newman’s “I Think It’s Going To Rain Today.” Instead of the Left Banke-ish crisscrossing harpsichord and string arrangement of Nilsson’s original version, on Alpert’s version the musicians are playing as quietly and minimally as possible (compare, for example, “Pink Frost” by the Chills) except for the three strategic moments where a full orchestra and choir suddenly veer into view, as if someone had accidentally opened the back door of a cathedral, in full grief-expressing volume, and before they can climax they are suddenly cut off again/the door is closed again (compare with how Bacharach’s piano cuts off the orchestra at the apex of “This Guy’s In Love” to introduce the element of doubt or unfulfilment). This song tells us what happens when “If not” ceases to be a possibility and becomes the truth. “You go inside and set the table for one/It’s no fun.”

The attendant irony of Nilsson’s own biggest hit (a) being entitled “Without YOU” and (b) not being written by him, but by a man who eventually did commit suicide, need not be commented upon here, though “Everybody’s Talkin’” (again, a major hit for Nilsson not written by Nilsson) clearly has to. “I don’t hear a word they’re sayin’/Only the echoes in my mind…I’m going where the sun is shining” – all set to a fairly jaunty finger-picking guitar and yearning high strings, the anonymous good humour of the coach taking Ratso Rizzo to Miami as he’d always wanted. But of course he doesn’t get there alive (compare with Jonny Kennedy on the train back home to Alnwick). The song would have lost all of its poignancy had he survived to sing that other Fred Neil song about yearning, “Dolphins.”

AMEN CORNER
(If Paradise Is) Half As Nice (29 Jan - 1)
Hello Suzie (25 Jun – 4)
A crack Welsh band with a horn section as guitar lead who only needed a Kevin Rowland. Instead they had the cracked, vulnerable, straining voice of Andy Fairweather-Low, which in itself was no bad thing. “Half As Nice” was a natural number one, perfection being rejected for human co-existence (“Who needs paradise? I’d rather have you”). They even slow the song down to a church organ drone towards the end so that Fairweather-Low can spell it out clearly and unambiguously. That Thomas Tallis variation again.

“Hello Suzie” was a Roy Wood-penned uptempo stomper which sounds like the Bureau. Shortly thereafter Amen Corner split up, Fairweather-Low went on to pen a handful of smart hits (“Natural Sinner,” “Wide Eyed And Legless”) before opting for a regular guy session guitarist career. A better fate than Hendrix had.

The ARCHIES
Sugar Sugar (11 Oct – 1)
The CUFF-LINKS
Tracy (29 Nov – 4)
“Sugar Sugar” was the first single I felt like owning, and I pestered my dad accordingly until he came home one Thursday evening with a copy from a long-gone record shop in St Vincent Street. Cartoons, you see; I loved them. Pop groups were a new and exciting viewpoint on the world for me and the fact that they could exist in cartoon as well as human form was almost too ecstatic for me to cope with.

And the Monkees – I knew about the Monkees (their show was transmitted on BBC1 kids’ TV for years) before I knew about the Beatles, and for some considerable time I preferred them to the Beatles. They seemed so much more fun and had slightly more catchy tunes. Then one day my dad brought home Sugar Sugar, the album, with its dayglo cover (blue and orange lettering against a red background) and its wearisomely literal cover shot of – a bowl of sugar cubes (UK issue only). I still have that album and still play it; lots of lovely teenpop songs like “Bicycles, Roller Skates & You” and “Feelin’ So Good (Scooby-Doo)” (and yes, I thought it was about the dog – well, they had a dog in their line-up!) as well as slightly harder-edged things like “Love Light” and (for shame!) “Don’t Touch My Guitar,” the latter’s threat being a bit akin to Timmy Mallett asking Steven Macintosh’s character in England Expects to aim his micturition in a slightly different direction. But I still feel that there are at least ten things on this record from which Busted could learn – and on the back of the sleeve I saw a name which I had seen on the closing credits to The Monkees, Don Kirschner. My dad explained that Mr Kirschner “invented” both groups and that for the Archies he had opted for cartoon characters because cartoon characters couldn’t walk out of the band.

In fact the Archies as comic book characters had existed since the ‘40s, and even through the Archie Comics of the ‘70s they still seemed stuck there, hanging out at Pop’s Soda Shop, despite their pasted-on sideburns and bell bottoms. Nonetheless “Sugar Sugar” is a brilliantly blank pop single, quite callously assembled (by Jeff Barry and Andy Kim) to fulfil its market target, with that soft shuffle and marimba suggesting a slight ska influence, also doubling up as exotica (I love marimbas on pop records – “Just My Imagination,” “And I Love You So,” “Vincent” - it’s like being caressed or cuddled).

It was number one for eight weeks, the first single to stay that long on top of the charts since “Wonderful Land” by the Shadows seven years previously, and every week TOTP showed the beyond-primitive cartoon promo film. I do believe that the key line in the song – that female “I’m gonna make your life so SWEET!” which helps build the song towards its climax – was given to THE DOG to sing!

Then not long thereafter I heard “Tracy” by the Cuff-Links and realised IT WAS EXACTLY THE SAME GROUP. The same vocals, same sort of song, same everything. Dad, why does the same group have two different names? My dad looked understandably weary at this conceit of mine and tried to explain to me the concept of “session musicians” but that particular idea took a couple more years to sink in. As it happens, it was the same lead singer, one Ron Dante, who later became Barry Manilow’s producer and helped construct the irreducible brilliance of “Could It Be Magic.”

Long John BALDRY
It’s Too Late Now (29 Jan - 21)
Predictable punchline coming; strangely enough, it was. Former street-cred R&B shouter (Steampacket etc.) opted for the easy bucks in ’67, immediately went to number one with “Let The Heartaches Again” which even managed to out-ham Tom Jones, and got stuck in the roughshod rut of substandard balladry.

The BEACH BOYS
I Can Hear Music (26 Feb – 10)
Breakaway (11 Jun – 6)
The CONSORTIUM
All The Love In The World (12 Feb - 22)
HARMONY GRASS
Move In A Little Closer (29 Jan - 24)

Seems rather obscene to have anything by whatever constituted “The Beach Boys” in any 1969 list. The group was a wreck, tearing itself apart physically, mentally, financially and artistically. Even through this seemingly fallow period, however, they still managed to produce little stems of greatness like Friends, 20/20, Wild Honey and Sunflower, though on listening to any of these albums one is usually left with the sense of frustration that they could have been so much greater had…well, had Brian Wilson been a bit harder, you might say, but if he had had a harder soul would his music be so visionary in its gentility? No, fuck it, he was ill, Mike Love just wanted to get out there and sing about cars and girls until he was 90 (and still seems on course to achieve that), the Wilsons stood about moodily and momentarily hung out with Manson. Consequently these two Beach Boys singles are perfectly reasonable pop, but scarcely the pop of visionaries rather than competent artisans, just keeping the name in view of the punters, keeping the income coming in.

Another mistake we must be extremely careful not to make is to mistake everything else influenced by Brian Wilson being great, or even good, purely by the virtue of that influence. Just because Joy Division were great doesn’t provide sufficient grounds for lionising Crispy Ambulance or the Stockholm Monsters. Similarly, there is a tendency to harness together anything done in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s with close-knit harmonies and a couple of “poignant” chord changes as Wilsonian visions. Two examples of the latter might be the Consortium – significantly, their name was slimmed down from the original West Coast Consortium – and Harmony Grass. Both “All The Love In The World” and “Move In A Little Closer” are nice but dime-a-dozen barbershop post-hippy pop in a kind of sub-“I Can’t Let Maggie Go” way, and investigation of their respective back catalogues simply reveals a couple of Vauxhall Conference pop groups trying different hats on, but failing to capture anything of the punctum of the last three tracks on Surf’s Up, or even Jack Rieley weeping the line “if all this world can give” on “A Day In The Life Of A Tree.” Fittingly, Harmony Grass’ mainman Tony Rivers went on to become the vocal arranger for Cliff Richard. The shadow of Smile hung over all of this music – I was not around to see the recent concerts at the Royal Festival Hall, but some who did tell me that it was visionary and transcendental, others (whom I am more inclined to believe) mentioning the name David Helfgott as a meaning comparison. And of course the voices for whom the songs on Smile were originally tailored are no longer alive to sing them. So I am anticipating a well-meaning but studium-laden exercise on the level of Mingus’ Epitaph, but will have to wait for the music to become commercially available to have this confirmed or belied.

The BEATLES
Get Back (with Billy Preston) (23 Apr – 1)
The Ballad Of John And Yoko (4 Jun – 1)
Something/Come Together (8 Nov – 4)
The PLASTIC ONO BAND
Give Peace A Chance (9 Jul – 2)
Cold Turkey (1 Nov – 14)
Billy PRESTON
That’s The Way God Planned It (2 Jul – 11)
The RADHA KRISHNA TEMPLE
Hare Krishna Mantra (13 Sep – 12)
The ROLLING STONES
Honky Tonk Women (9 Jul – 1)
TRASH
Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight (25 Oct – 35)

As a Christmas present in 1969 I was given a little Dansette record player of my own – black and grey rather than primary coloured, but I felt as if I’d been given the keys to Fort Knox. My own record player to play my own records! – such luxury! such imperial decadence! - and inside the box which opened to reveal the turntable, there were also contained within the box copies of two LPs; Abbey Road by the Beatles, and Let It Bleed by the Rolling Stones. Thus did it turn out that Abbey Road and Let It Bleed were the first two records I had in “my” record collection and therefore the two records which I have known longer and more intimately than any other. It should therefore be taken into account that criticising either of them feels to me akin to criticising my parents. It is not something which can be done lightly, and something which makes me regret that the subsequent 35 years had to happen, that I couldn’t just stay five and be content with that.

Nevertheless, these are troubled and partially neurotic records made by musicians who, at the time, could barely stand the sight of each other and sometimes drugged themselves up in order to avoid even acknowledging each other. And, as if to emphasise this can’t-be-arsed attitude, these singles listed above are some of the most lo-fi, make-do-and-mend singles this side of Lonnie Donegan and that side of the Buzzcocks. With one obvious exception, they are scarcely produced; simply knocked out for – for what? Emotional directness? No more hippy bullshitting? Back to basics? What basics? As painfully substantiated by the Let It Be film, the Beatles had been away from “the basics” for so long that they had no idea of how “the basics” worked. The Beatles of 1969 could never have returned to doing Gene Vincent covers in Hamburg strip joints. Despite Lennon’s protestations following the collapse of Apple Corps that “we’re down to our last £50,000,” there certainly was no pressing need for the Beatles to do anything, let alone play.

So, with “Get Back” they get up on the roof of their office and do a bit of windy busking, with Billy Preston’s Fender Rhodes to provide some “authenticity” (the Fender Rhodes! How far back do the roots of the Fender Rhodes go back? “What’d I Say?” was, what, 1959? A decade of “roots”). No mention of the song’s genesis as “Commonwealth Song” as unheard on Anthology 3 but available on any half-decent Beatles bootleg from Camden Market – “Don’t dig no Pakistanis/Taking all the people’s jobs” croons McCartney “ironically,” a month or so after Enoch’s foaming Tiber. Actually it seems to have been more a dig at Yoko – yes, isn’t it awful, those inconvenient women breaking up pop groups? (Preston, meanwhile, an old crony of the band from their Hamburg days, was briefly signed to Apple and scored his only UK solo hit single with the rather good gospelly soul of “That’s The Way God Planned It”)

“The Ballad Of John And Yoko,” meanwhile, the Beatles’ last UK chart-topper, performed by just John and Paul, is a display of self-referential arrogance as nauseous as anything in the mid-period canon of Adam Ant (“Friend Or Foe” etc.). “Christ! You know it ain’t easy/You know how hard it can be,” whines Lennon at the undernourished citizens of Biafra. Is there a less enticing opening line to a pop song than “Standing in the dock at Southampton”?

But then, like Robbie Williams, Lennon seemed to think that breathing was sufficient reason for us to applaud him. Thus "Give Peace A Chance,” in its way as merrily unproduced as any British pop single since Donegan’s “Gamblin’ Man,” recorded in the Toronto hotel room with backing vocals from the Smothers Brothers, Timothy Leary, and even Petula Clark, a song which, in its obsessive lists (ha! Dear Pot Carlin, Yours Sincerely Kettle) admirably fails to nail itself to ANY OPINION WHATSOEVER other than “Give Peace A Chance.” Well, who could argue with that? Your next-door neighbour could say as much if you have your stereo on too loud. But a chance to do what?

“Cold Turkey” is often described as proto-punk, though set next to something like “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” recorded in the same month, it seems rather bloated and otiose. Clapton’s buzzsaw guitar never seems to know when to shut up – the main musical interest is in Alan White’s drums dropping out at key moments in the song’s second half. Meanwhile Lennon relives withdrawal symptoms, screaming, shouting, and yes this probably was pretty astonishing for a 1969 Top 20 single, though it certainly didn’t have any impact on me at the time – it wasn’t banned, just not played very much on Radio 1, and I never really noticed the screams of primality – but set next to something like the Specials’ “The Boiler,” or even if you’ve witnessed people doing it for real, in a drug dependency unit or on a cancer ward, then I’m afraid “Cold Turkey” doesn’t impress me much. To paraphrase the good burghers of Salzburg in Amadeus: “You are not the ONLY drug addict in the world, Mr Lennon.” Typically, the B-side, Yoko’s “Don’t Worry Kyoto” is far more terrifying and far more genuinely adventurous, as was generally the case with John and Yoko’s work between ’68 and ’71. George Harrison seems to have had the much better deal – instead of theatrically mailing back his MBE, he simply got his Hare Krishna mates onto TOTP and into the Top 20 with an undiluted ritual chant.

How, in the midst of all this, does Abbey Road stand up? Unsteadily, I think. The double A-side “Something/Come Together” was rush-released, against the group’s wishes (but by then they had already secretly split up), about a month after the album’s release, thus its relative underperformance in the singles chart. It was the only single to feature a Harrison composition as an A-side, and even then he had to share it with Lennon’s typically facile “Come Together” – you might note that on the fade of the latter, he starts going into exactly the same primal whooping in which he indulges in “Cold Turkey.” “Something,” however, is by far the greater song – so precise in its minimalism that it left pretty well everyone in a state of “am I overwriting?” confusion. Note the detour into loud, agonising uncertainty in the middle eight – “You’re asking me will my love grow? I don’t KNOW, I DON’T KNOW!” howls Harrison before his guitar restores calm. Compare with “I may not always love you” in “God Only Knows” – and note the subtle reference to that song with the organ riff which appears behind the line “I don’t want to leave her now.”

Otherwise, what’s left to say about Abbey Road? Knees-up vaudeville numbers about serial killers, songs which seem to have no purpose other than arsing about (“Oh Darling” which 10cc did so much better three years hence as “Donna”) – and yes there’s the 20-minute medley which concludes the album/their life, but even that was a last-ditch device to use up fragments of songs which they couldn’t find a way of completing properly, mirrored by McCartney expecting us to cry for him because he and the Klein boys can’t agree on a contract (though former Glaswegian beat combo The Poets reinvented themselves as “White” Trash and scored a hit with a quicksnap cover of two of the medley songs). Fair enough, I note the little gasp of liberation in “You Never Give Me Your Money” where Macca whoops “But oh, the magic feeling – nowhere to go.” Monday morning when you’ve been fired, lost everything and therefore can do anything you like. I know that feeling, and it’s a better feeling than most of us care to admit. And yes, it is moderately poignant to hear all four trading solos in "The End” (they’re waving goodbye!). But the discipline which still welded together all the disparate elements of the White Album so magnificently seems to be largely absent here. Apart from Harrison’s two contributions – “Something” and “Here Comes The Sun,” which every schoolboy knows, and which admirably (in this context) don’t pretend to be anything other than simple articulations of love and wonder – the only songs I really come back to are “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” which, although basically a ponderous blues, does gain some momentum when alternating with the song’s proto-Goth guitar line, and the ending, where the song is gradually drowned under a tide of Moog feedback and then abruptly cut off, would have made a better ending to the album as a whole than the soppy “The End,” with its stupidly crass joke false ending.

Ah yes, that Moog. It appears most prominently on “Because” – which is less “Moonlight Sonata” played backwards but the proto-Goth guitar line of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy}” tinkered about with and slowed down – the Beatles’ attempt to be the Beach Boys. Although it substitutes sub-Milligan wordplay for the genuine emotion of “’Till I Die” (“Because the wind is high/It blows my mind” indeed!), it is quite poignant in its emptiness, the Moog intimating a potential future for a life cut off in its prime. And I wouldn’t have argued with the words, “Because the sky is blue/It makes me cry” on the August Bank Holiday weekend of 2001.

The best way to sum up the difference between Abbey Road and Let It Bleed is perhaps to point out that whereas the former had “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” the latter had “Midnight Rambler,” that there is a world of mischievous difference between the can’t-be-arsed let’s just take the cover picture outside the studio and throw in some silly in-jokes cover of Abbey Road and the Delia Smith cake on the cover of Let It Bleed, that the Beatles play like four pissed-off office workers forced to share space with each other whereas the Stones are still playing like a BAND, that there is NOTHING on Abbey Road which chills the blood as speedily and drainingly as Merry Clayton’s scream of “BLUE MURDER!” on “Gimme Shelter,” that the politicising of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is as naïve as “Come Together” but that the use of the French horn and Bach Chorale on the former beats anything in the long medley on Abbey Road in terms of musical invention, that the Stones, with the death of Brian Jones and the wreckage of Altamont, had real issues to worry about…and, finally, that, foolishly released in the same week, and in direct competition, “Give Peace A Chance” was kept off the top by the irresistibly cocksure “Honky Tonk Women” – definitely the 1969 equivalent of Usher’s “Yeah!” if you’re talking unreconstituted, unapologetic laddish sexism – the only occasion on which the Stones stopped the Beatles from getting to number one. The message from the public – “thanks, but we’d rather give life a chance.”


The BEE GEES
First Of May (19 Feb – 6)
Tomorrow Tomorrow (4 Jun – 23)
Don’t Forget To Remember (16 Aug – 2)
Robin GIBB
Saved By The Bell (9 Jul – 2)
Another year of wreckage for the Bee Gees; Robin quit over disagreements about issuing “First Of May” as the single from Odessa – although the song is gracious grieving for a past irrevocably eclipsed and nullified by an uncomfortable present, and packs even greater emotional impact as the final vocal track on the album – threatened his parents with concrete socks, recorded the bizarre-but-not-as-bizarre-as-the-album-he-can’t-even-remember-making-namely-Sing-Slowly-Sisters Robin’s Reign album, from which the impenetrably brilliant “Saved By The Bell” was taken. In his absence, Barry and Maurice briefly sunk into an MoR/C&W swamp (that absurd Nashville accent on the verses of “Don’t Forget To Remember”). But in 1970 Robin kissed and made up and they went on to prevail.

Jane BIRKIN and Serge GAINSBOURG
Je T’Aime…Moi Non Plus (30 Jul – 2)
Je T’Aime…Moi Non Plus (re-issue) (4 Oct - 1)
SOUNDS NICE
Love At First Sight (Je T’Aime…Moi Non Plus) (6 Sep – 18)
In case it ever comes up on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, the answer to the question “Which record managed to be number one and number two in the singles chart in the same week?” is “Je T’Aime…Moi Non Plus.” How so? Originally it was released on the Fontana label, but by the time it got to #2 – and, of course, it was banned from TV and radio play – the Mary Whitehouse brigade were pressurising Fontana to find some moral sense. Unforgivably, Fontana caved in and sold the rights to the MoR indie label Major Minor, whose previous successful chart acts included the Dubliners and Malcolm Roberts, but under chart rules the Fontana and Major Minor issues had to be counted as separate records. Thus, the week after the mastertapes changed hands, the Major Minor issue whooshed straight in at #1, and the get-them-while-stocks-last Fontana issue stuck at #2. The crazy world of the British singles chart, eh? In addition, an instrumental version by “Sounds Nice” (really Sounds Orchestral of “Cast Your Fate To The Wind” fame) was speedily rushed out so that at least TOTP would have something to play at the end of the programme rather than the embarrassing “we’re not allowed to play it” hole-digging (see also Frankie’s “Relax” of course, not to mention the moral Real Number One In Jubilee Week, the Pistols’ “God Save The Queen”).

All in all the “Je T’Aime” white elephant probably dealt Gainsbourg’s career a mortal blow in Britain, where he wasn’t particularly known other than as a cult French oddball to a few knowledgeable souls, as opposed to the elemental force of nature which he was perceived as being by the French. Certainly any given three minutes of Gainsbourg’s work of the ‘60s and ‘70s is enough to shame the comparative timidity of British pop music over the same time – we can’t afford to be seen as TOO CLEVER (Jesus wept), huh? And typically, no one really “got” him until he was safely dead, after which the Becks and Airs of this world confirmed that it was OK to like Serge (although lonely voices like Momus and Mick Harvey had been arguing that, and more besides, for many years, not to mention The Entire Career of Jarvis Cocker). The cultural gulf is best encapsulated by the fact that, whereas France had Jane and Serge, the inevitable British parody cover version was recorded by…Frankie Howerd and June Whitfield (and there’s another thing for you – the Britain of 1969. I mean, Barbara Windsor? Was that the best we could do?).

And yes, “Je T’Aime” is a great record, deserves to be considered much more than a record for dirty old men, a pop On The Buses, because it is the direct ancestor of “Moments In Love,” because of the quiet mischief of Birkin’s breathing “entre mes reins,” because it’s rather gorgeous, if fully aware of the art of Gainsbourg’s particular noise. But there’s so much more to be discovered in Serge’s world, and not just Melody Nelson, either…even in terms of outraged grannies, “Je T’Aime” doesn’t hold a candle to 1985’s still astonishing “Lemon Incest” where Serge does exactly the same thing with daughter Charlotte. A massive hit in France, of course, but in the Britain of 1985 hardly noticed – far worse than being banned, it was simply ignored. I definitely need to write more about the man Gainsbourg on The Naked Maja, even if only because Jane Birkin is more often than not my ideal vision for what, or who, Goya intended to immortalise.

Cilla BLACK
Surround Yourself With Sorrow (12 Feb – 3)
Conversations (9 Jul – 7)
If I Thought You’d Ever Change Your Mind (13 Dec – 20)
Of the five major British female pop careers of the ‘60s, I think that Cilla’s is my favourite. This isn’t to downgrade Dusty Springfield, whose catalogue is beyond question one of greatness – and yet it’s that “beyond question” which bothers me, the easy purchase found by Rock’s Rich Tapestry; in other words, we use Dusty’s work as an excuse to berate the work of the other four. Petula Clark’s run of hits with Hatch and Trent are at their best divine, but at their worst laden down by rather heavy-handed moralising (“The Other Man’s Grass”). Lulu and Sandie Shaw I have dealt with below. But Cilla’s was in my view the most inviting voice of the five; soft enough to plead and caress when needed, but also with a hard edge which was flexible enough to accommodate despair and forthrightness. For instance, I can’t imagine anyone else handling Bacharach’s “Alfie” with as much dramatic import as Cilla – but then her version was recorded in the presence and under the direction of the composer himself, who, Wilson-like, put her through hundreds of takes to get it exactly right. Listen to that tiny cry at 1:32 which follows the declaration “Something even non-believers can believe in” and how it so naturally leads to the quieter “I believe in love.” And again, at 1:55 with the climactic cry of “ALFIE!” – how she forces that “FIE” syllable out of herself, like a tear. Similarly, her reading of Randy Newman’s “I’ve Been Wrong Before” scores over Dusty’s, not just because of George Martin’s far more effective (because quieter, more sinister) string arrangement, but because Cilla can switch from crying to whimpering in a nanosecond; hear that middle section, with its stylistic vocal nod to PJ Proby, and how the “He broke my heart in TWO!” escalates to something but instantly and instinctively dies down to “Seeing your face” – the “TWO!” and “Seeing” are enunciated in the same breath.

And special consideration needs to be given to the extraordinary trio of hits Cilla had in 1969, a trio of isolationism to rival Walker or Morrissey. First, “Surround Yourself With Sorrow,” written by Bill Martin and Phil Coulter, with its fantastic intro (kudos to Mike Vickers for the arrangement) of Nine O’Clock News xylophone leading to “A Day In The Life”-style ascending strings, all of which cuts out to allow Cilla’s voice to enter – “Watch the water falling down”; the “Watch” as low down (accusatory?) as her voice can go, and starting by lengthening the “W” as if she’s snarling it. “Falling down outside your head.” Now there’s punctum for you – the Pavlovian lyricist would resort to the far less effective “falling down around your head.” Not here; the composers of “Puppet On A String” and “Shang-A-Lang” tailor what is effectively an answer song to Scott Walker’s “It’s Raining Today.” Nor does it explicitly tell the hapless protagonist of the song to snap out of it, get back to life; on the contrary, it seems to encourage her to revel in her misery: “What do you do when your love breaks down?/Do you fall apart like a buttercup?/Forget about tomorrow?/Surround yourself with sorrow?” I’m guessing the question marks on the last two lines as they are not explicitly implied in Cilla’s singing of the song.

Then came the Greenaway/Cook composition “Conversations” which seems to be built on a variation on the middle break of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” The first line: “Do you come here often?” And then “Could you like me more?” Then, more assertively, “Could you even LOVE me?” The conversation is, of course, only happening in her head; it’s the protagonist of “How Soon Is Now?” explaining why she goes to a club on her own and she stands on her own – “Make a move?/Try to speak?/Raise my eyes from the floor?” Like someone who’s forgotten how to do it; like someone who’s been forced to do it. How the scenario of Lynsey de Paul’s “Won’t Somebody Dance With Me?” really tends to end (although the sales of “Conversations” were aided to no small degree by its B-side, the sentimental but popular “Liverpool Lullaby”).

Finally, John Cameron’s “If I Thought You’d Ever Change Your Mind.” Here there is no hope left – “But what use are flowers in the morning/When the garden they should grow in is not mine?” Her dying cry on the word “cold” at the end of the line “And in the winter snow/My songs will keep you from the cold” is almost unbearable to hear – like Thomas Hardy’s dog walking around the parlour, offering its paw to everyone, the night before it dies, Cilla seems to be the one who’s colder than anyone else. Her voice merges mournfully with the oboe refrain at the song’s end. This is fantastic singing. I think you might need to reconsider Cilla ahead of anyone else on this list.

BLOOD, SWEAT AND TEARS
You’ve Made Me So Very Happy (30 Apr – 35)
The group were much derided at the time, but this rather gruff pop-soul-jazz confection actually works in a coarser-Roy-Ayers sort of way. Still, you can’t quite shed the feeling that Lew Soloff, Dave Bargeron and the boys are itching to pocket the pay cheques, get back to Gil Evans and do some serious shit.

BLUE MINK
Melting Pot (15 Nov – 3)
Greenaway and Cook enter into a marriage of convenience with Madeline Bell, Herbie Flowers and whoever else was in the band. Their later hit “Stay With Me” is a thing of unalloyed beauty, but this facile-even-for-1969 plea for racial tolerance (“turn out coffee coloured people by the score”??) still has too much of the Jools Holland worthiness for my ears – this is exactly the sort of thing over which folk like Sam Brown and Ruby Turner like to scream and howl as a facsimile of “soul.”

BOB and EARL
Harlem Shuffle (12 Mar – 7)
One of many instances of early Northern Soul crossover, originally out on Sue Records in 1964, finally a hit on Island five years later. Terrific, and yes when at dances I wish it’s this and not “Jump Around,” and yes I’m an old geezer, and no I’m not Nick Hornby. But I might be Dale Winton if you ask nicely. Oh, and as for the Stones’ version of this…

BOOKER T and The MGs
Time Is Tight (7 May – 4)
Soul Clap ’69 (30 Aug – 35)
“Time Is Tight” was another biggie at the Twisted Wheel, and most fondly remembered by me as the backing music to Johnnie Walker’s chart rundown at Tuesday lunchtimes. Also for the curious correlation in my mind between Steve Cropper’s opening guitar figure and the old crisscrossing British Rail logo outside Uddingston station.

David BOWIE
Space Oddity (20 Sep – 5)
Imagine, as a parallel, Momus having a hit in 1989 about the Berlin Wall. Thus was the Bowie of ’69; arty-ish bloke, been on the margins for years, always threatening to break through the Anthony Newley barrier…and yet when “Space Oddity” was originally out, Bowie was resolutely sticking to his sensible folk singer’s perm, so much so that the sleeve of the Space Oddity album had to be changed in later years. As with so much else of Bowie’s work – and I acknowledge that that is kind of the point of Bowie’s work – the distinction between the “reality” signified (does he really mean this or is he just cashing in on the moon landing?) and the “construct” signifier (is he being ironic about our viewing this as a cash-in?) is blurred and that is why we remained interested in what he did until around 1983. Despite Rick Wakeman’s mellotron, the sliding Stylophone and the final atomisation of the music as Major Tom goes into his black hole (and I always visualise his ashes as rematerialising as the disconnected Esperanto-speak of “Subterraneans”), this record ensured that for a good three years Bowie existed in the view of the general public as a one-novelty-hit wonder. Then he did this other record about space…

The BOX TOPS
Soul Deep (23 Aug – 22)
Weirdly, the Searchers wanted to put out their cover of Big Star’s “September Girls” as a single but their record company nixed it. As it is, for a good 35 years Alex Chilton has existed in the view of the general public as that guy out of the Box Tops who sung like a Real Soul Singer. I mean, Badfinger and Teenage Fanclub managed to have hits – why not Big Star?

Eric BURDON and The ANIMALS
Ring Of Fire (15 Jan - 35)
Last chart entry for the Novocastrian piss artist who does an unremarkable job with the old Johnny Cash chestnut which doesn’t hold a candle to the radical reshaping that Wall Of Voodoo gave it in ’83.

Max BYGRAVES
You’re My Everything (5 Mar - 34)
Extraordinary that Max Bygraves was still registering hits as late as 1969. Even more extraordinary that in Britain he was one of the biggest album acts of the ‘70s, with innumerable Singalongamax records, capped perhaps by 1975’s preposterously-titled 100 Golden Greats (see, that’s what Keane should call their first album – 100 Golden Greats! No point taking half-measures!). Oh, and there was his 1973 Top 20 version of “Deck Of Cards” which ends, not with “And friends, I know…I was that soldier” but with “All the charges against him were dismissed.” Bloody British reserve.

Glen CAMPBELL
Wichita Lineman (29 Jan – 7)
Galveston (7 May – 14)
The balance between work and life. Do we use work as an excuse to avoid thinking about life? Do we work ourselves to death because we fear thinking about death?

“I hear you singing in the whine.” Not “in the wine.” In his overwork, the telegraph lines become one spectre with the voice of the Other he has left behind.

Left behind? Jimmy Webb says that the song was intended as a sequel to “By The Time I Get To Phoenix,” but the British public wouldn’t have got this because “Phoenix” was incredibly never a hit in the UK. But you have to hear “Phoenix” to understand “Wichita.” Because he’s left her – for whatever reason, and not necessarily the ones Isaac Hayes lists in his version – and he is on his own, out on some deserted toll road, miles above the ground. No one can see, hear or feel him.

“I think I need a small vacation…but it don’t look like rain/And if it snows, that stretch down south/Won’t ever stand the strain.”

So either he is being worked to death by an ungrateful employer, or more likely is looking for excuses not to work, excuses not to think about what he’s lost. Is there even an employer? He’s out there fixing the lines, left alone to get on with it as efficiently as he can, and he doesn’t seem to mind it that much. It keeps him out of trouble.

Heads down at the desk or behind the terminal. Don’t let them see you cry. It’s counterproductive. Selfish. Unthinking.

So much thought to think in spaces unoccupied by humans.

He is tinkering with modes of communication in order to avoid communicating.

And what does he want to communicate? Or need to communicate?

“And I need you more than want you.
And I want you for all time.”

It is the greatest lyrical couplet in 20th-century song because of everything it doesn’t say, all that it leaves out.

Because it doesn’t mention the word “love” yet could not exist without “love.”

I would like to think that I could detect this basic emotion in the song even when I was five.

“Wichita Lineman Is A Song I Heard Once”
(The KLF, Chill Out)

“No sooner had Lydgate begun to represent this step to himself as the easiest than there was a reaction of anger that he – he who had long ago determined to live aloof from such abject calculations, such self-interested anxiety about the inclinations and the pockets of men with whom he had been proud to have no aims in common – should have fallen not simply to their level, but to the level of soliciting them.”
(George Eliot, Middlemarch, Chapter 64)

“I can hear the sea waves crashing/As I see the cannons splashing…
I’m so scared of dying.”
In “Galveston,” Webb switches the perspective – from dry desert to populous battlefield, from an imagined woman to a woman he has actually, and involuntarily, left standing, from peace to war. An anti-war song so subtle that it passed the staunch Republican Campbell right by; Glen probably still thinks of it as a “We’ll Meet Again”-type flagwaver. And there is a fourth song in the tetralogy – “Where’s The Playground, Susie?” – set after the apocalypse.

That pained and anguish cry of “GalvesTON!” at 1:29 is the only moment in any of these four songs where Campbell makes the emotion explicit.

The most fitting summary of “Wichita Lineman” might be: “I will drink the whine while it is warm and never let you catch me looking at the sun.”

Pat CAMPBELL
The Deal (15 Nov – 31)
Well, I warned you that this was coming up. An Irish death disc beyond the perceived boundaries of tackiness, and yet everyone in 1969 was either dying, or scared of dying, so somehow it fits the tenor of the year. Thus our Pat sacrifices himself to “my Lord – tonight” so that his wife and about-to-be-born child can both survive (“It might be an old girl!”). Daniel O’Donnell will cover it someday, if indeed he has not already done so, as I must confess to an incomplete familiarity with Mr O’Donnell’s extensive oeuvre, current top three album The Jukebox Years included.

CANNED HEAT
Going Up The Country (1 Jan - 19)
I liked “On The Road Again” which came across like Ravi Shankar doing John Lee Hooker (that drone going all the way through it, that harmonica sounding like a sitar). And most of them have long since passed on, so will it hurt or offend if I point out that Al Wilson’s vocals always reminded me too much of Kermit the Frog?

Vikki CARR
With Pen In Hand (26 Mar – 39)
She cried, mechanically, through all of her songs, rather than singing them. Her big hit was “It Must Be Him” in 1967. She’s probably still crying out in some Las Vegas lounge, Tuesday nights only.

Johnny CASH
A Boy Named Sue (6 Sep – 4)
Live at San Quentin, this was JC’s biggest UK hit as he tackles Shel Silverstein’s meditation on deliberate gender confusion and how, in the end, A Man Has To Be A Man. Thankfully, unlike Tony Marchant’s Passer By, Cash has sufficient sense of the song’s absurdity and enough genuine bonhomie with the prison audience to pull off the performance very successfully. Must admit that I come back to this, and the Folsom Prison and San Quentin live albums in general, much more than those Rick Rubin ones. Life being better than death, you see.

CHECKMATES LTD
Proud Mary (15 Nov – 30)
The RIGHTEOUS BROTHERS
You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ (12 Feb – 10)
Ike and Tina TURNER
River Deep, Mountain High (12 Feb – 33)
Strangely, although Spector had set out to make “Proud Mary” his ultimate kitchen-sink production, it doesn’t even appear on the Back To Mono box set, and listening to it in 2004 one can see why; there are so many layers of nothing-in-particular on this track that the song is barely perceptible, and Sonny Charles’ vocals are buried far too deeply in the mix. The approach worked well on their previous single “Love Is All I Have To Give,” there being a greater dynamic balance (Charles’ upfront vocal and the absurd but oddly appropriate violin which materialises towards the song’s end). I am presuming that the simultaneous reappearance of two old Spector hits in February was part of a reissue programme – perhaps to remind the public that he existed.

CHICKEN SHACK
I’d Rather Go Blind (7 May – 14)
Tears In The Wind (6 Sep – 29)
Of historical interest only. You can see where the artist then known as Christine Perfect has come from and where she is going. Can’t imagine why anyone thought of her as a blues singer, though – on this evidence she was more like the Jo Stafford of Brit blues, earnest but never entirely convincing. Infinitely more suited to her next band, needless to say.

Lou CHRISTIE
I’m Gonna Make You Mine (13 Sep – 2)
She Sold Me Magic (27 Dec – 25)
Look, I was only five at the time, and yes I was aware of things in slightly unnatural ways at the time, but at the time I honestly thought that Lou Christie was Lou Costello! I kept visualising the fat guy in the Panama hat yelling “HEY ABBBBOOOOTTTTTTT!” Still, Lou CHRISTIE did do “Lightning Strikes” and the fantastic bubblegum of “I’m Gonna Make You Mine” – harpsichord-driven bubblegum at that!

The Dave CLARK FIVE
Put A Little Love In Your Heart (25 Oct – 31)
Good Old Rock ‘N’ Roll (6 Dec – 7)
Not far away from the end of their chart career, the Flowered Up of the beat boom were floundering. “Put A Little Love…” is the Jackie De Shannon chestnut, while “Good Old Rock ‘N’ Roll” is a – er – medley. Not in the same dungeon of debasement as “We Are The Boys (Who Make All The Noise)” by that “right bunch of reprobates, to be sure” The Rockers, but…it was Christmas time. 1969. Not 1959. Or 1989.

Jimmy CLIFF
Wonderful World, Beautiful People (25 Oct – 6)
“The Harder They Come” – not a hit. “Many Rivers To Cross” – not a hit. This harmless bog standard pop-reggae confection – a hit. “I Can See Clearly Now” from Cool bloody Runnings – a hit. Harrumph.

Joe COCKER
Delta Lady (27 Sep – 10)
“With A Little Help From My Friends” could be the most extreme vocal performance on a number one single; those multiphonic screams are practically Pharaoh Sanders in all but instrument. And its similarly-titled album is definitely worth revisiting, including as it does “Marjorine” as recently sampled by the Audio Bullys (remember THEM?). But by the time of “Delta Lady” he had retreated to jam session, Jools Holland nitty gritty land. Urrgh.

CRAZY ELEPHANT
Gimme Gimme Good Lovin’ (21 May – 12)
One-off US bubblegum carpetbaggers who seem to forget that this song is called “Gimme Some Lovin’.” Wonder if they ever got sued?

CREAM
White Room (15 Jan – 28)
Badge (9 Apr – 18)
Pretty much wound up by the time these two singles came out, and the subsequent total absence of Jack Bruce from the UK singles chart is a disgrace, but “White Room” is an album track trying unsuccessfully to compress itself onto a single. George Harrison did better when he helped out with writing and playing guitar on their final single “Badge,” with its deliberately inscrutable lyric (“She’s cried away her life since she fell out the cradle”) very efficiently shadowed by the deadpan piano and Psycho violins of Felix Pappalardi.

CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL
Proud Mary (28 May – 8)
Bad Moon Rising (16 Aug – 1)
Green River (15 Nov – 19)
No two ways about it, John Fogerty makes it perfectly clear on “Bad Moon Rising” that We’re All Doomed. “Don’t go out tonight/It’s bound to take your life/There’s a bad moon on the Right,” and I’m not guessing that capital R, over Creedence’s jolly rockabilly rave-up. “Hope you are all prepared to die.” Yep, it sounds like it was written and recorded last week, and flattening that it got to number one in 1969, and there’s no questioning Fogerty’s integrity and ingenuity or Creedence’s undoubted musical power…but I never feel that they are speaking to me. Again, it’s that Q Magazine good-time boogie barrier of – yet again, I’m sorry, but – “authenticity,” i.e. not the Archies. That having been said, “Fortunate Son” really is a fucking great and justifiably angry song.

CROSBY, STILLS and NASH
Marrakesh Express (16 Aug – 17)
Surprisingly the only UK hit single for CSN (or for that matter for CSNY, though of course both sold truckloads of albums in Britain), and typically it’s the one which sounds most like the Hollies.

Dave DEE, DOZY, BEAKY, MICK and TICH
Don Juan (5 Mar – 23)
Snake In The Grass (14 May – 23)
On a dying commercial fall, and still trying to recycle “Legend Of Xanadu.” Their peak period hits such as “Zabadak” are still worth your consideration, however – something of a cross between Rolf Harris and the Fun Boy Three.

Desmond DEKKER and The ACES
Israelites (19 Mar – 1)
It Mek (25 Jun – 7)
Yet when hardcore hit, it hit big. “Israelites” was about as uncompromising and cutting-edge as reggae got in 1969, at least this side of Lee Perry – and yes it’s more warnings about the apocalypse of poverty – and its reaching number one was the equivalent of, say, “Ground Zero” getting to number one now (it could still happen!).

DELANEY and BONNIE and FRIENDS featuring Eric CLAPTON
Comin’ Home (20 Dec – 16)
A pity that Blind Faith didn’t put out any singles. “Can’t Find My Way Home” would have been an appropriately bleak addition to 1969 chartpop, but instead Clapton teamed up with the Bramletts for this unremarkable R&B workout which anticipates certain elements of Exile On Main Street (including the same horn section) but sadly without its essential elements, namely the Rolling Stones.

The DELLS
I Can Sing A Rainbow/Love Is Blue (16 Jul – 15)
Phenomenal colour-coded medley and the only UK hit single for this soul group. Really over the top orchestration and voices trying to drown each other out with their relative passion. Undoubtedly heatrical but oddly effective.

Neville DICKIE
Robin’s Return (25 Oct – 33)
It really is weird that anything like this was still charting in 1959, let alone 1969; an unashamed throwback to the days of Winifred Atwell and Russ Conway, a cheerful pub piano romp, it’s my round now, was this the theme to anything?

Ken DODD
Tears Won’t Wash Away These Heartaches (30 Jul – 22)
Another in the long list of identikit doleful ballads from the Schopenhauer student who once got confused about self-assessment.

Joe DOLAN
Make Me An Island (25 Jun – 3)
Teresa (1 Nov – 20)
Jesus, talk about chest beating! “TAKE me and BREAK me and MAKE ME AN ISLAND – I’M YOURS!” What the fuck is he on about? Joe Dolan was and probably still is a huge star in Ireland – the Irish Sydney Devine, if you will – but he definitely barges into this ballad lustily; would that the likes of Westlife could do the same.

DONOVAN and The Jeff BECK GROUP
(Goo Goo) Barabajagal (9 Jul – 12)
Very strange hippy jam with some ace percussion and both Donovan and Beck verging on “The Creator Has A Master Plan” territory towards the end.

Bob DYLAN
I Threw It All Away (14 May – 30)
Lay Lady Lay (13 Sep – 5)
“Lay Lady Lay,” possibly the starting point of alt. country, was Dylan’s last top ten hit, and one of his biggest. The neurotic, erotic counter-tenor had deepened into a baritone, but it’s certainly the last of his records which could be construed as “pop.”

Billy ECKSTINE and Sarah VAUGHAN
Passing Strangers (12 Mar – 20)
A hit originally in 1957 and brought back by public demand after saturation plays on Radio 2’s Housewives’ Choice. A grand old civilised ballad which has 1957 etched through it like a stick of rock, it's hard to ascertain what place this had in the pop world of 1969, unless (see Donald Peers below) it was a reaction to something “nasty” that had happened in the interim.

Dick EMERY
If You Love Her (26 Feb - 32)
“Touch Me” by the Doors was not a UK hit in 1969, nor was “Hawaii Five-0” by the Ventures, nor even was “Time Of The Season” by the Zombies. And yet Dick ooh-he-WAS-awful-take-my-word-for-it Emery, the Harry Enfield of his day (note to overseas readers: Mr Emery was an inexplicably popular British TV “character comedy actor” of the ‘60s and ‘70s, all of whose characters were about as funny as spending a night in Rwanda. In 1994), managed to get a hit with this atrocious, straight-sung (except he couldn’t sing) ballad. He did manage another hit in 1973 with a song entitled, you guessed it, “Ooh You Are Awful.” For those sufficiently interested – don’t all rush at once – all you need to know about Dick Emery can be found on pages 351-3 of Roger Lewis’ The Life And Death Of Peter Sellers.

The EQUALS
Michael And The Slipper Tree (2 Apr – 24)
Viva Bobby Joe (30 Jul – 6)
Rub A Dub Dub (27 Dec – 34)
Eddy Grant’s old band, as was. “Baby Comes Back,” a 1968 number one, is great - a joyously irreverent, 2-Tone anticipating pop-ska record – but it wasn’t until 1970’s amazing “Black Skinned, Blue Eyed Boys” that they got the punctum back. In the meantime there were many inoffensive light-pop records like the three mentioned above.

FAIRPORT CONVENTION
Si Tu Dois Partir (23 Jul – 21)
Another act who weren’t big on singles. Our loss because “Who Knows Where The Time Goes,” the greatest ever performance by a British female vocalist, with maybe the greatest ever accompaniment by a British guitarist, and the song with which I would like to be buried, would have been one of the greatest of number one singles, an ideal balance to “Those Were The Days.” But the Fairports’ only hit single was this jokey French adaptation of Dylan’s “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” – a big hit for Manfred Mann in 1965 – and is probably as much of a millstone around their neck as “Je T’Aime” would have been around Gainsbourg’s.

Georgie FAME
Peaceful (9 Jul – 16)
Seventh Son (13 Dec – 25)
“Peaceful” has been revived in recent years by enterprising DJs (e.g. Bentley Rhythm Ace) and it’s easy to see why; it’s Nick Drake’s urban pastoralism gone pop with its much-sampled acoustic guitar line and its bucolic visions of, oh, spending one’s summertime lunch hour sitting in Brockwell Park. Waiting for you. Pity Georgie F didn’t do more of this sort of thing, as opposed to the cod-Mose Allison bloooz of “Seventh Son” which sort of thing he still does a lot.

FAMILY
No Mule’s Fool (1 Nov – 29)
Been listening a lot to the first two albums recently. “The Weaver’s Answer”; have there been many sterner defiances of death in rock? Roger Chapman’s voice remains one of the most startling in all of rock, far more so than his presumed spiritual heir Feargal Sharkey, because whereas Sharkey just wants to lick your face, with Chapman you always feel that he wants to bite your nose off.

FAMILY DOGG
Way Of Life (28 May – 6)
Another Greenaway/Cook closely harmonised ballad of utopia and wotsit sung by a group including Steve Rowland, Albert Hammond and Christine Holmes out of Crackerjack. “Tinker tailor soldier sailor” etc. Notable chiefly for the fact that the single involves all of Led Zeppelin as session musicians, including Robert Plant on backing vocals, as indeed did Tom Jones’ “Delilah,” which also had Reg Dwight at the piano.

Jose FELICIANO
And The Sun Will Shine (18 Oct – 25)
Feliciano’s slow-burning take on “Light My Fire” remains great, almost Tim Buckley in its seductive strokes. Here he tackled the Brothers Gibb, but rather more blandly.

The FIFTH DIMENSION
Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In (16 Apr – 11)
OLIVER
Good Morning Starshine (9 Aug – 6)
The Fifth Dimension never really had much commercial success in the UK; “Up, Up And Away” was a top ten hit, but in the guise of a cash-in British cover version by the Johnny Mann Singers. And the sublime “Love’s Lines, Angles and Rhymes” with its amazing chord changes and heroic lead vocal by Marilyn McCoo never even got played, never mind charted. Their only big hits were their version of Nyro’s “Wedding Bell Blues” in 1970 and the above medley from Hair.

Ah yes, Hair. Two big hits from the musical in the UK, several more in the US, including the title song gallantly performed by the Cowsills. Knocked together by a couple of cynical old Broadway hacks in an attempt to subvert subversion in a family-friendly way, it truly is a petit bateau of bilge, but at least did give Alex Harvey a day job playing guitar in the orchestra pit. Lloyd Webber did this sort of thing much better, but at least he didn’t pretend to have any ideas about Changing The World. Still, the terrific harmonies of the Fifth Dimension almost persuade me to believe what they are singing. I said almost.

The FLAMINGOS
Boogaloo Party (4 Jun – 26)
“I Only Have Eyes For You” wasn’t a UK hit, at least not until the arrangement was ripped off wholesale by Art Garfunkel, who promptly took the song to number one in 1975, and this Northern Soul favourite was the veteran doo wop outfit’s only chart entry in Britain. As you might expect, they sound rather uncomfortable trying to fit in with the New Thing (1964 model) and never quite convince me that they’re not “having a good time” at gunpoint.

FLEETWOOD MAC
Man Of The World (16 Apr – 2)
Need Your Love So Bad (23 Jul – 32)
Oh Well (Parts 1 & 2) (4 Oct – 2)
And once there was this fellow called Peter Green. A quiet chap and a sometimes quieter guitar. “Albatross” charted in late ’68 and hit the top in February ’69, almost wishing it were still 1959 with its nods to Santo and Johnny’s “Sleep Walk.” By mid-’69 the Mac were commercially very big indeed (1969 was their most successful year in terms of UK singles chart performance, subsequent editions of the group included) but Green wasn’t too happy about it. Think of the singer of “Man Of The World” murmuring to himself in the corner of a pub, or on Putney Bridge, musing, wondering about the value of his life

RAZOR SLASH OF THE GUITAR
“BUT I JUST WISH THAT I HAD NEVER BEEN BORN”

One shout. That’s all he needed. Then he quietens down again. The song builds up to that scream and climbs down again, because it will be the only chance he ever gets to scream. “I’m not a good man/But I would be if I could.”

“And I don’t want to be sad any more/And how I wish I was in love.”

Possibly meaning that he is unable to love. He wants it but isn’t really sure how to give it.

On “Need Your Love So Bad,” reissued by their old record company (and it did more or less the same commercial business as it did in 1968), you can hear Green building up to this scream, even then, even with the seemingly ludicrous “Stranger On The Shore” string section dubbed on. Because without those strings the backing is minimal and quiet, Green’s voice and guitar doing their own Little Willie John thing while McVie and Fleetwood offer just a heartbeat as a rhythm.

“Oh Well” is the record which paves the way towards schizophrenia. A frenzied semi-acoustic blues workout displays Green’s insecurity blossoming – “I can’t sing, I ain’t pretty and my legs are thin/Don’t ask me what I think of you/You might not get the answer that you want me to” – and, both musically and lyrically, points directly to where Buckingham would take up the slack in 1975. Then everything dies down to a strange medieval roundelay, all Spanish guitar flourishes and Chaucerian descant recorders – and here is the starting point for the Celtic mysticism which Nicks would bring to full fruition in 1975. How was poor old Peter Green to know that he was ensuring that another band would one day exist, even if he knew that he would have no place in it?

The FOUNDATIONS
In The Bad Bad Old Days (12 Mar – 8)
Clem Curtis had had a hissy fit and quit the band. They managed one more dull Tony Macauley hit and then it was chicken in a Batley basket.

The FOUR TOPS
Do What You Gotta Do (27 Sep – 11)
What Is A Man? (28 May – 16)
As the Temptations were forced by necessity to reinvent themselves around this time, so the more trad Tops were floundering slightly. They tried Jimmy Webb (“Do What You Gotta Do”) to reasonably successful effect, but Levi Stubbs’ cracked tenor is slightly too hysterical to portray the doubting questions of “What Is A Man?” which latter song the Watts Prophets extended and subverted to chilling effect a year later.

Inez and Charlie FOXX
Mockingbird (19 Feb - 33)
No, I’ve no idea what it was doing in a 1969 chart either.

Marvin GAYE
I Heard It Through The Grapevine (12 Feb - 1)
Too Busy Thinking About My Baby (23 Jul – 5)
Marvin GAYE and Tammi TERRELL
You Ain’t Livin’ ‘Till You’re Lovin’ (22 Jan – 21)
Good Lovin’ Ain’t Easy To Come By (4 Jun – 26)
The Onion Song (15 Nov – 9)
Martha REEVES and The VANDELLAS
Dancing In The Street (15 Jan - 4)
It’s the drumming. The unmistakable tribal drumming of war, of disquiet, of revolution. Marvin Gaye was the drummer on “Dancing In The Street,” a hit in 1964 and a bigger hit on re-release in 1969, when its subtext had altered irrevocably. Dancing in the streets of Watts, burning them down, a musical gesture as radical as anything Shepp or the Art Ensemble were laying down in Paris that summer (indeed it was Archie Shepp who pointed out the revolutionary signifiers of “Dancing In The Street” in the March 1969 issue of Downbeat).

And “Grapevine.” This isn’t just about losing one’s lover, this is about trying to hold on to a society intent on destroying you. No wonder Gordy was nervous about putting this out as a single; it was OK for Gladys Knight to turn it into a you-don’t-do-me-right uptempo stomper, but Gaye’s version is slower, darker and infinitely more sinister. It is about peeling back the “soul” to reveal the machete underneath. He will either kiss or kill you.

That same rhythm persists right through the otherwise sprightly “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby,” and contrasts through a glass darkly with the dying undying love of his duets with Tammi Terrell. The we’ll-be-together-forever thrust of “You’re All I Need To Get By” is unbearable considering what happened to both of them. And the Terrell on “The Onion Song” isn’t even Tammi, who by this time was ill with her brain tumour, but her sister and future Supreme Jean Terrell. Keeping up appearances to avoid thinking about death. As it turned out, it’s impossible now to listen to any of Gaye’s music without thinking about death. On “Grapevine” we hear the first indications of his struggle to avoid death.

Bobbie GENTRY
I’ll Never Fall In Love Again (30 Aug – 1)
All I Have To Do Is Dream (with Glen Campbell) (6 Dec – 3)
Gentry did follow up the darkness of “Ode To Billy Joe” by venturing into even bleaker corners of the human psyche – check out her indispensable Raven compilation An American Quilt: 1967-74 for proof of that – but the only other success she had here, or any place else come to that, was with a Bacharach and David song slightly too smug for its own good (though obviously her version micturates from a great level upon the abysmal dirge of a cover by Deacon Blue in 1990) and a so-what Everlys cover with an already fading Glen Campbell.

Rolf HARRIS
Bluer Than Blue (16 Apr – 30)
Two Little Boys (22 Nov – 1)
Rolf Harris gives the impression of someone who just wanders amiably into the chart whenever the mood takes him, whatever the decade. Someone secure enough not to need regular hit records. Thus he turns up in 1960 with “Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport,” then in 1962 has what was then the most avant-garde hit single this side of Joe Meek with “Sun Arise.” Then, in the classic Orson Welles/Peter Ustinov style, he continued with his career of pottering about. There was a rare straight (and boring) MoR hit with “Bluer Than Blue” in 1969.

Then he turned out to get the last number one of the ‘60s with a song written at the time of the Boer War and given a Boer War music-hall arrangement. And it was an appropriate song with which to close down the decade; he has said that he intended his interpretation of the song to be a comment on Vietnam, though in fact the song exists as a kind of bridge between the idealised childhood world forsaken in “Man Of The World” and the fear of dying in “Galveston;” children have to grow up, are obliged to go off to war, one is fatally wounded and his mate carries him back on his horse so that he might die with at least minimal dignity. It was the ideal song to mark the end of a decade which had begun with so much colourful hope for the future and ended in blood, gore and a possible return to medievalism. Freddie Clayton’s closing trumpet Last Post sounds as though the ‘60s have been buried and laid to rest; a far more subtle and cutting way of saying so than the Plastic Ono Band’s “God.”

Noel HARRISON
Windmills Of Your Mind (26 Feb - 8)
A song constructed like a collapsing windmill; the same melodic and chordal cycle proceeds gloomily down the scale as Harrison sings about – what? “Why did summer go so quickly? Was it something that you said?”

“Lovers walk along the shore and leave their footprints in the sand” – just like the final moments of Un Chien Andalou. They will end up buried in the sand.

It is B F Skinner’s theory of operant conditioning set to music – “the behaviour is followed by a consequence, and the nature of the consequence modifies the organism’s tendency to repeat the behaviour in the future.”

Thus “Windmills Of Your Mind” is a musical whirlpool which turns in and in upon itself until it has nowhere left to go except to sink into a dark, unreachable grave.

And suddenly it is 1969, and this song is singing to me at night, in the dark, alone with its eddying and ebbing tidal thoughts.

The HARRY J ALL STARS
The Liquidator (25 Oct – 9)
Fantastic organ-driven reggae instrumental and skinheads’ favourite which sometimes sounds as though it were made in the ‘50s AND the ‘90s. An early instance of the “functional” dance track which would ultimately lead to “Jack Your Body.”

The Edwin HAWKINS SINGERS
Oh Happy Day (21 May – 2)
Where Bobby Gillespie got it from on “Movin’ On Up,” still the only undiluted gospel song to become a major British hit single, and forever tarred when Bruno Brookes played it as the first song on his Radio 1 show in 1992, the morning after John Major had won the General Election.

The Jimi HENDRIX EXPERIENCE
Crosstown Traffic (16 Apr – 37)
Second single from Electric Ladyland for want of anything else to put out (it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if they’d gone with “1983” as the second single hmm?). That piano, though. What if the Woodstock “Star Spangled Banner” had been released as a single – would that have ended up being the Christmas #1?

HERMAN’S HERMITS
My Sentimental Friend (23 Apr – 2)
Here Comes The Star (8 Nov – 33)
Typically awful cabaret Merseybeat from the group whose story really can be summed up by the words “No Milk Today and that’s it.”

The HOLLIES
Sorry Suzanne (5 Mar – 3)
He Ain’t Heavy He’s My Brother (4 Oct – 3)
Typically awful cabaret Merseybeat from the group whose story really can be summed up by the words “Bus Stop and that’s it.” How important is Graham Gouldman anyway?
(Yes OK there was “King Midas In Reverse”…)

Mary HOPKIN
Goodbye (2 Apr – 2)
“Those Were The Days” was and is beyond great; but the rest of her Postcard album reveals her to be just another folky MoR purveyor. But what a provider of punctum on Bowie’s “Sound And Vision”!

HUMBLE PIE
Natural Born Bugie (23 Aug – 4)
The SMALL FACES
Afterglow Of Your Love (19 Mar – 36)
Actually, when thinking about the most lo-fi single to make the charts, I forgot about “The Universal,” Marriott’s bizarre goodbye letter recorded in his back garden, complete with barking dogs and traffic noises, in 1968. The Small Faces had already fallen apart by the beginning of 1969 anyway, and “Afterglow” clearly indicates the rockier style which Marriott wanted to pursue. Thus Humble Pie with Peter Frampton, Greg Ridley and Clem Clempson, and despite massive success in America throughout the ‘70s their only real British success came with this, their first and only UK hit single, a dim pub rock plod. Like they cared.

Engelbert HUMPERDINCK
The Way It Used To Be (5 Feb – 3)
I’m A Better Man (For Having Loved You) (9 Aug – 15)
Winter World Of Love (15 Nov – 7)
Is there any reason why this man should still be in the top ten album chart in 2004? Did we learn NOTHING?

The ISLEY BROTHERS
I Guess I’ll Always Love You (15 Jan – 11)
Behind A Painted Smile (16 Apr – 5)
It’s Your Thing (25 Jun – 30)
Put Yourself In My Place (30 Aug – 13)
The Isleys were never a major act at Motown, “This Old Heart Of Mine” aside, they seemed to be given castoffs or tryouts for songs later done by higher priority Motown acts. Thus Smokey Robinson’s “Behind A Painted Smile,” for instance, sounds like a warm-up for “Tears Of A Clown;” thus did they eventually quit Motown and set up their own T-Neck label. The first “new” Isleys hit, “It’s Your Thing,” sounded like Stockhausen in comparison, and begins to pave the way for the glory days of 3 + 3.

JEFFERSON
The Colour Of My Love (9 Apr – 22)
He was ex-Rockin’ Berries vocalist Geoff Turton. The song was written by Paul Ryan and is OK psych-bubblegum in a sub-“Fool On The Hill” kind of way but rather tame when set against the extraordinary stuff Paul did for his twin brother (see below).

JETHRO TULL
Love Story (1 Jan – 29)
Living In The Past (14 May – 3)
Sweet Dreams (1 Nov – 7)
Ian Anderson was (still is?) something of a grumpy old sod. The sentiment of “Living In The Past,” with its deliberate flute reference to “You Really Got Me,” wasn’t ironic; perusal of the lyrics to Thick As A Brick confirm that he really couldn’t stand the dirty hippy modern world and wanted standards to be raised somewhat, whether in a Penda’s Fen-type way or a Countryside Alliance-type way. Nevertheless the Tull at their best were as great an example of avant-pop as Super Furry Animals; the real revelation in the above trio of hits is “Sweet Dreams” with Anderson cackling at his would-be lover to grow up and run away with him, set against a berserk orchestral arrangement halfway between Ravel’s Bolero and Forever Changes.

Johnny JOHNSON and The BANDWAGON
You (5 Feb – 34)
Let’s Hang On (28 May – 36)
Weird how “Breaking Down The Walls Of Heartache” has gained a reputation as a Northern Soul classic, down to Dexy’s covering it, when it wasn’t actually played in any Northern Soul clubs until well after it was a hit. “Let’s Hang On” was the old Four Seasons hit, and neither of these sound capable of breaking down anyone’s walls.

Marv JOHNSON
I’ll Pick A Rose (For My Rose) (22 Jan - 10)
I Miss You Baby (25 Oct – 25)
He’d charted back in 1960 with “You Got What It Takes” and is probably the least remembered of Motown hitmakers. Pleasant enough trifles, both of these, but hardly “Grapevine” or “Cloud Nine.”

Tom JONES
Love Me Tonight (14 May – 9)
Without Love (There Is Nothing) (13 Dec – 10)
Oh put your trousers back on you silly old man. Actually, “Love Me Tonight” is beyond kitsch, an adapted Italian chestbeater with some nods to “Delilah” and a fantastic Pearl and Dean backing vocal choir. We need the equivalent of the Mike Sammes Singers in the pop world of 2004. “Without Love” with its never-less-sincere voiceover, proves that whatever else the Jones boy can do, he can never make us cry or root for him.

The KINKS
Plastic Man (16 Apr – 31)
Ray Davies didn’t really know what to do with himself in ’69 either. “Plastic Man” was the umpteenth rewrite of “Dedicated Well Respected Man Follower,” eating plastic food with a plastic spoon, etc. So low was their stock by the end of the year that the more lively “Victoria” wasn’t even as successful as the Fall’s cover version in 1988.

The LOVE AFFAIR
One Road (19 Feb – 16)
Bringing On Back The Good Times (16 Jul – 9)
A teenpop band with an inbuilt limited lifespan; neither Steve Ellis nor Morgan Fisher really wanted to be part of it – indeed on the early hits only Ellis’ vocals were any part of it – and in these identikit pop-soul-MoR songs you can sense Ellis straining at the leash, itching to get back to some good old pub rock.

LULU
Boom-Bang-A-Bang (12 Mar – 2)
Sometimes I think that the British music industry has never known how to handle female singers. Look at Olivia Newton-John – in the US, she had credible pop-C&W hits like “Let Me Be There,” in the UK she was deemed fit only for Saturday night duets with Cliff and oompah-oompah bilge like “Long Live Love.” As for Lulu, her case can best be summed up by the fact that her greatest record, “To Sir With Love,” an American #1 in 1967, was not even considered for release as an A-side in Britain. More typical was “Boom-Bang-A-Bang,” the British Eurovision entry of 1969. Writers Martin and Coulter continued the utterly cynical trail they blazed with “Puppet On A String,” i.e. that in order to win Eurovision the song would have to conjure up Bavarian bierkeller halls in the good old German-marks-fit-only-for-wallpaper days of 1923. The song ended up being one of four joint winners of the contest. One of many – how fitting.

No, since the days of “Shout” (whose arrangement Lulu copped more from Alex Harvey than she did from the Isleys), the lady from Dennistoun has drifted around, never knowing whether to be cheesy MoR (“I’m A Tiger”) or vaguely credible (“The Man Who Sold The World”) or just straight R&B (“Take Your Mama For A Ride”). Even when she finally got a number one with her cameo on Take That’s “Relight My Fire,” you might note how far down her voice is buried in the mix (rather unfairly) as if she were some sort of embarrassing auntie getting drunk in the corner. She undoubtedly deserved, and deserves, better.

Neil MacARTHUR
She’s Not There (5 Feb - 34)
Actually a pseudonymous Colin Blunstone revisiting his past to delay that return to the insurance office, “Care Of Cell 44” having failed dismally and “Time Of The Season” a huge hit everywhere except in Britain. Have I said in the past how unutterably great his 1971 album One Year is? Well, here I am saying it again.

MAMA CASS
It’s Getting Better (16 Aug – 8)
MARMALADE
Baby Make It Soon (11 Jun – 9)
Reflections Of My Life (20 Dec – 3)
No prizes for guessing the link here; Kevin Rowland’s My Beauty, where he tells his ignoble story through the songs with which he grew up. “It’s Getting Better” appears early on in the album – introduced by the sound of wedding bells – and Rowland’s voice enthusiastically wraps itself around the song’s foolishly daft optimism, whereas with “Reflections Of My Life,” which appears towards the album’s end, Rowland has been through the wringer, is tired of self-administered pain and wants to return to the world.

What’s that line Dean Ford cries out in the chorus? “Feel like dying.” Marmalade were the Travis of their day (“Flowers In The Window” could easily have been done by Marmalade), a bit darker than you might expect from things like “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” “Take me back to my own home” indeed. The party is well and truly fucking over.

MANFRED MANN
Ragamuffin Man (30 Apr – 8)
The band’s last hit single and the last in their series of askew nursery rhyme-esque bubblegum hits (“My Name Is Jack” is really a very disturbing record indeed when you think about it). Less than two months later, Manfred Mann Chapter Three were under way, co-opting more dangerous characters like Bernie Living into the line-up, and I thoroughly recommend both their albums, which sound like the Verve AND Spiritualized twenty years too early.

The MARBLES
The Walls Fell Down (26 Mar – 28)
Their big hit was with the Brothers Gibb song “Only One Woman,” stridently sung by future Rainbow vocalist Graham Bonnet. This wasn’t quite as good a song, or as big a hit.

Dean MARTIN
Gentle On My Mind (5 Feb - 2)
In which Dino proved that he could do pop C&W as well as any goddam Glen Campbell could. He luxuriates in John Hartford’s benign hobo lyric, delicately crawls and entrances around the jaunty curves ot the song as if he’s going to snag Ann-Margret or Angie Dickinson in that corner anyway.

MICROBE
Groovy Baby (14 May – 29)
It was the sound-effect of a kid in a jingle used by then Radio 1 DJ Dave Cash. Thus this was a Cash-in single.

James Carr never had a hit single in the UK. Neither has Solomon Burke.

Roger MILLER
Little Green Apples (7 May – 39)
Bit of a cheat, this one, as the song was a hit proper in 1968 but kept wandering in and out of the charts for the best part of a year. I never thought that the chorus line of “God never made those little green apples” should have been ironic.

The MOVE
Curly (23 Jul – 12)
Recently I read somewhere that the Idle Race donated the royalties from one of their singles to the Conservative Party. Well that’s Jeff Lynne’s colours nailed to the mast, then. The Move were not quite on their last legs in 1969 – indeed, “Blackberry Way” which charted in late 1968, gave them their only UK number one in February ’69 – but Carl Wayne was a bit pissed off and eventually pissed off. Thus “Curly” is another example of an album track desperately trying to pretend it’s a single; much rockier than their previous pop, but it’s clear that Roy Wood – who isn’t a Tory - was just counting the beans until Jeff Lynne came out of the Idle Race and they could get cracking with ELO.

Johnny NASH
You Got Soul (8 Jan – 6)
Cupid (2 Apr – 6)
The “acceptable” face of pop reggae for many years, Nash’s light tenor lent itself well to just about anything, be it “I Can See Clearly Now” or early intimations of Bob Marley with “Stir It Up.” It’s just that it’s so damned polite.

Des O’CONNOR
Dick-A-Dum-Dum (King’s Road) (7 May – 14)
Loneliness (29 Nov – 18)
I just love the sublime idiocy of Jim Dale’s “Dick-A-Dum-Dum” where 37-year-old Des manfully attempts to stay with it in an “Engerland Swings Like A Pendulum Do” style. It certainly conjures up more concrete memories of 1969 for me, a 1969 full of Bernard Bresslaw, Reg Varney and Robin Nedwell. But it’s also one of the great optimistic London songs (“Stay aboard ‘till the weather gets dry”) and even Our Des has long since given up keeping a straight face by the time the song ends (think of Brian Protheroe’s “Pinball” as a sequel; five years on, the dream gone, the protagonist “walks over Soho” as though it were a graveyard). Unfortunately he addresses the ballad “Loneliness” with the same cheerful grin, which isn’t quite the point.

Roy ORBISON
My Friend (30 Apr – 35)
Penny Arcade (13 Sep – 27)
Sad that the dreadful oompah-oompah of “Penny Arcade” was Orbison’s last hit record within his lifetime, Traveling Wilburys notwithstanding. Until his posthumous chart comeback in 1989, Orbison’s was the only major chart career to exist wholly within the ‘60s. A great shame and a terrible waste.

Don PARTRIDGE
Breakfast On Pluto (19 Feb - 26)
He was a busker on Tottenham Court Road tube platforms who had two very substantial hits in 1968 with “Rosie” and “Blue Eyes.” But the novelty was clearly wearing off by 1969; thus here he muses not very amusingly on what a funny old world the future will be (though Slim Gailliard on “How High The Moon” does it better). He wasn’t really bothered; he simply returned to busking. A better fate than that of Jimi Hendrix.

The PEDDLERS
Birth (23 Aug – 17)
Really gorgeous, hypnotic, slow-burning gospelly 3/4 ballad with a wonderfully sensuous yet generous vocal from keyboardist Ray Phillips. You know that How Cool Is Cool? 2CD anthology which is a staple of HMV clearout sales? You really ought to invest in a copy.

Donald PEERS
Please Don’t Go (30 Apr – 38)
Again, this is misleading, as the song originally charted in November 1968, was a massive hit, reaching #3 early in ’69, and briefly revisited the Top 40 at the end of April. Nonetheless it’s an important record to include in a survey of 1969 as it represents a possible reaction by the mainstream/establishment to what was happening to Their Beloved Music.

By 1969, as you will already have gathered, most major rock acts weren’t fussed about singles – indeed Led Zeppelin famously made a point of releasing no singles in the UK (how many weeks might “Stairway To Heaven” otherwise have spent at #1?) while Pink Floyd released no UK singles between 1968 and 1979 (and the latter ended up having the final number one single of the ‘70s with “Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)” which seemed as appropriate and downbeat a finale to a decade as “Two Little Boys”). Thus was the singles chart largely abandoned to slide-rule professional teenpop songwriters and several MoR acts resurfacing from oblivion. Some commentators noted the latter trend as a return to Proper Music with Proper Tunes You Can Sing Along To, perhaps even a return to the ‘50s of Vera Lynn and David Whitfield.

One of these Indian summer MoR acts was the Welshman Donald Peers, the Cavalier of Song, a fixture in British popular music since the late ‘40s with his lunchtime singalong Light Programme broadcasts from the Hammersmith Canteen and songs such as “In A Shady Nook (By A Babbling Brook).” Already well into his sixties when “Please Don’t Go” – an adaptation of Offenbach – returned him to the charts, the papers were full of uplifting stories about this former Plymouth Brethren (just like Jeanette Winterson) whose career had been wiped out by That Dreadful Rock And Roll Music and had to start all over again from the bottom (at least in Britain, though he was always popular in Australia).

Listening to the record now, it’s a song which would have been a surefire number one in 1929 and seemed remarkably out of joint in the world of the late ‘60s (this business of forty-year-old music being revived and getting into the charts – you’d never have that now would you?). Peers’ delivery literally seems to belong to another world, that of Webster Booth or Peter Dawson with their plummy, actorly vibratos. It might have seemed the most radical thing in the 1969 charts.

The PHILHARMONIA ORCHESTRA, conductor Lorin MAAZEL
Thus Spake Zarathustra (30 Jul – 33)
Clocking in at just over a minute in length, and obviously a hit because of 2001. Wonder what would have happened if they’d gone with Ligeti’s “Atmospheres”?

Wilson PICKETT
Hey Jude (8 Jan - 16)
No, no, no, no, no, no, NO.

The PIONEERS
Long Shot Kick De Bucket (18 Oct – 21)
Terrific proto-grime stomper about shooting people dead. It was not played on Radio 2.

Gene PITNEY
Maria Elena (5 Mar – 25)
Mind you, by 1969 Pitney’s overwrought melodrama was arguably as dated, if not more so, than the plumminess of Donald Peers.

Elvis PRESLEY
If I Can Dream (26 Feb – 11)
In The Ghetto (11 Jun – 2)
Clean Up Your Own Back Yard (6 Sep – 21)
Suspicious Minds (29 Nov – 2)
No room for the devastating “Long Black Limousine,” alas, but this was the first bona fide year of Presley’s comeback. Fuck the Colonel, it was back to Memphis, heads down and this music has GOT TO MATTER. Hear how he shrieks the words “with TOO MUCH RAIN” in the King eulogy “If I Can Dream” – it was controversial at the time – it’s as if he’s forcing himself to regain consciousness, to slip out of cosseted complacency and rediscover why he wanted to do this sort of thing in the first place. Conversely, he keeps the emotional tenor of “In The Ghetto” under sublime restraint, lets the orchestra and backing singers do all the overt emoting.

Wouldn’t it have been something for “Suspicious Minds” to get to the top, for the King to get the last number one of the sixties, to turn the whole thing into a loop? In the event it was kept off the top by “Two Little Boys” and in the greater event the song’s franticity mirrored the gradual collapse of Presley’s world – “We’re caught in a trap” indeed. Hear how the song crazily fades out and in again towards the end, as if Presley knows that he is dying and is desperately trying to cling on to life, or even onto his beloved trap.

Jim REEVES
When Two Worlds Collide (25 Jun – 17)
But You Love Me Daddy (6 Dec – 15)
The 2Pac of the ‘60s, Reeves had enough songs prepared to keep his chart career going for a full five years after his death. Easily the most nauseating of these excursions in cod-country was “But You Love Me Daddy,” a duet with a kid which these days would have the Operation Ore boys on your case immediately.

Cliff RICHARD
Good Times (Better Times) (26 Feb – 12)
Big Ship (28 May – 8)
Throw Down A Line (with Hank Marvin; credited as “Cliff and Hank”) (13 Sep – 7)
Through The Eyes Of A Child (6 Dec – 20)
1969 saw Cliff in full flowering of his Billy Graham/Festival of Light persona, which lasted well until “We Don’t Talk Anymore.” Thus these are all glutinous, facile, yea-saying stormtrooper recruitment songs, even the one which I quite like, “Throw Down A Line,” where he duets with the agonised-sounding guitar of Hank Marvin (“Throw down a line!/Help a poor boy who’s a-drownin’ in a stormy sea!”) and actually rocks out a bit. As for later abominations like “Living In Harmony,” “Goodbye Sam, Hello Samantha,” “Sing A Song Of Freedom”…you’re best out of it, trust me.

Malcolm ROBERTS
Love Is All (22 Nov – 12)
Another old-style crooner with a hairy chest to beat who was briefly popular because At Least He’s Not Jimi Hendrix (many feel that all this MoR was a conspiracy to keep the BBC playlist programmers happy, Not Like Those Terrible Radio Caroline Pirates). This song was the winner of the 1969 Rio de Janeiro Song Festival. He had no further hits after this but continued with his career, including – amazingly – writing “Contact” for Edwin Starr.

Smokey ROBINSON and The MIRACLES
Tracks Of My Tears (7 May – 9)
A hit in 1965, a bigger one in 1969. Not much left to say about this glorious internalisation of grief, except to note how Marv Tarplin’s guitar commentary is actually doing the crying while Smokey’s voice tries its best and mightiest not to break down.

Clodagh RODGERS
Come Back And Shake Me (26 Mar – 3)
Goodnight Midnight (9 Jul – 4)
Biljo (8 Nov – 22)
Briefly very popular – and even to these five-year-old eyes, very sexy - Irish singer. Her songs were written by the underrated Kenny Young, who went on to construct a similar series of hits for Noosha Fox in the mid-‘70s and co-wrote “Ai No Corrida” with Chaz Jankel, but “Come Back And Shake Me” was her first, biggest and best hit. Note how her voice appears to be pleading submission but in fact suggests that she’s the one brandishing the whip. Thereafter, however, it was workaday pop (“Don’t say goodnight midnight/You might turn into a pumpkin/Don’t go/We’ve only just said hello” which is about as far away from Cilla Black’s “Conversations,” I guess) and ultimately Eurovision purgatory with “Jack In The Box” and immortality of a kind as a cultural reference point in the early series of Monty Python.

Tommy ROE
Dizzy (16 Apr – 1)
Heather Honey (23 Jul – 24)
Another of the conveyor belt of vulnerable post-Buddy Holly teen balladeers of the early ‘60s (“Sheila,” “The Folk Singer”), Roe briefly made a comeback with this attempt to go psychedelic (those woozy strings!). Of course it simply has to settle for being straightforward bubblegum – and another natural number one hit. Infinitely preferable to the ghastly 1991 revival by Vic Reeves and the Wonder Stuff, where all the latter do is take the piss out of the song to indicate How Far Above This Sort Of Thing We Are. Twats.

Kenny ROGERS and The FIRST EDITION
Ruby Don’t Take Your Love To Town (18 Oct – 2)
“It’s hard to love a man whose legs are bent and paralysed.”

Even though “it wasn’t me who started that old crazy Asian war,” the narrator of this song still went out to “do my patriotic chore.” The result: a loss of mobility, an imminent loss of life, and a woman who, like Jill Farrell in Nighty Night, is impatient for him to die so that she can get on and fuck other men without it being on her conscience (the weariness and fatigue of that“Ruby I realise”). The clenched teeth of the side-strike of the snare drum as the door closes on him, like a tomb. “I’d shoot her to the ground.” See, world, humanity, this is what you’ve done to me, what you’ve turned me into, a living ghost, a hater of humanity, an enemy, a victim.

And then, instead of shooting her:
“For God’s sake turn around,” uttered as though it were his last breath. Don’t you even want to see me die? In this year of death?

Max ROMEO
Wet Dream (28 May – 10)
It was banned from the BBC of course, though every schoolboy knew it anyway. “Lie down girl/Let me push it up, push it up.” Worlds away from “War In A Babylon” and “Chase The Devil,” this is naff rock steady at its most gloriously naff, also worlds away from Judge Dread. On Pick of the Pops Freeman had to refer to it as: “a record by Max Romeo.” Good job the Righteous Brothers never released “Ebb Tide” as a single, isn’t it?

Diana ROSS and The SUPREMES
I’m Gonna Make You Love Me (with the Temptations) (29 Jan – 3)
I’m Living In Shame (23 Apr – 14)
No Matter What Sign You Are (16 Jul – 37)
I Second That Emotion (with the Temptations) (20 Sep – 18)
Someday We’ll Be Together (13 Dec – 13)
Goodness me, they had a lot of hits in 1969, didn’t they? None of them much cop either. I mean, “No matter what sign you are/You’re gonna be mine you are”?? No wonder La Ross wanted out of it. Nothing approaching the mystery of that bloody line in “I’m Still Waiting”: “But my eyes were blind/So he left me.”

Jimmy RUFFIN
I’ve Passed This Way Before (9 Aug – 33)
And you’ve had better records than this one.

Barry RYAN
Love Is Love (19 Feb – 25)
Hunt (4 Oct – 34)
Christ, what was in the Ryan boys’ heads? “Love Is Love” makes “Eloise” sound like Nick Drake (“And when I’m GONE!/There’ll be my SON!” Blood! Y! Hell! Talk about Oedipus complex!) while “Hunt” virtually defies description as our Barry shrieks “Tally ho!” over backward hound barks and bugle calls. Completely fucking brilliant, of course; the missing link between Scott 2 and Bat Out Of Hell.

SAM and DAVE
Soul Sister Brown Sugar (29 Jan - 15)
Sod it, Jools Holland can write about this one, or better still bury its Authencity within the avalanche of his Boogie Woogie Piano Fucking Magic.

The SANDPIPERS
Kumbaya (26 Mar – 38)
The SCAFFOLD
Gin Gan Goolie (1 Nov – 38)
See? They were hits once! Good socialist collectives, both of them, but Boy Scout campfire singalongs? Oh, and of course the Scaffold bagsied the 1968 Christmas number one with “Lily The Pink,” their cheery ditty about a drug addict who kills herself by drinking paraffin; produced by Macca, so kind of a big sister to “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”

Peter SARSTEDT
Where Do You Go To, My Lovely? (5 Feb – 1)
Frozen Orange Juice (4 Jun – 10)
Did someone up there mention Eden Kane? Mr Kane was in reality Richard Sarstedt, elder brother of Peter and Robin Sarstedt. When I was young I laboured under the misapprehension that the Bonzo Dog Band’s “My Pink Half Of The Drainpipe” was a pisstake of “Where Do You Go To, My Lovely?” but actually the former predates the latter by a year. The song itself leaves a rather nasty taste in the mouth; an inelegant attempt to wed Brel and Dylan (in the case of the latter, specifically “Positively 4th Street”) with its unsavoury message of you’re a rich bitch now but don’t forget when you were poor and NO ONE WOULD FUCK YOU EXCEPT ME AND GOD I STILL WANT TO FUCK YOU (“For a laugh/Ha ha ha ha” – the most mirthless laugh in pop). Well in fact that’s why people get rich – so that they CAN forget about wandering the back streets of Naples, begging in rags, the implication being that Mr Sarstedt is still begging in rags, and boy is he bitter about it. The complete lack of love for his object is underlined by the fact that he gives her the name of a magazine – Marie Claire. It’s all a bloody postmodern laugh, isn’t it? Really, the best thing about this song is how the line “And you sip your Napoleon brandy” was subsequently sent up by Gilbert O’Sullivan in “Nothing Rhymes” – “While I’m drinking my Bonaparte shandy.”

Mind you, “I’ll buy you one more frozen orange juice on this fan-TAS-tic day” is a rather more palatable sentiment.

Sandie SHAW
Monsieur Dupont (12 Feb - 6)
The gulf between Cilla and Sandie is best exemplified by how they each tackle “Anyone Who Had A Heart.” Cilla’s cool enough to plead where needed, hot enough to demand when expected (and get that line, will you – “Anyone who had a heart would love me TOO!” Troilism? I’m up for it!). But, admittedly marooned in the least subtle arrangement of any song ever by the BEF on their 1982 Music Of Quality And Distinction Vol 1 album, all Shaw can do is whimper rather ineffectively. That in itself might have led her down some interesting aesthetic paths, but throughout the ‘60s the fact is that she was saddled with lousy material. Fair enough, no one, not even Naked Eyes, could mess up a song as great as “There’s Always Something There To Remind Me,” but thereafter we get an insufferable procession of perky coquettish pop, mostly penned by Chris Andrews (dig the intertextuality of the “It’s Not Unusual” brass line popping up in the final chorus of “Long Live Love”), through which Shaw could only giggle like a slightly renovated Alma Cogan. So while Scott was busy rebuilding and rebranding Jacques Brel, Sandie had to make do with appalling rubbish like “Monsieur Dupont” – Frenchness as perceived via The Benny Hill Show. Thereafter she had no further hits until 1984, and her performance of “Hand In Glove,” backed by the Smiths, on TOTP that year was frankly embarrassing. Still barefoot but also rolling around on the floor as if she were Patti Smith, in reality she was your embarrassing mum, one drink too many, at your birthday party trying to do the twist to Dizzee Rascal.

SIMON and GARFUNKEL
Mrs Robinson (E.P.) (8 Jan - 9)
The Boxer (30 Apr – 6)
With the possible exception of “Good Vibrations,” “The Boxer” is the first hit single to feature a synthesiser; it sneaks in halfway through as S&G sing about their nervous breakdown somewhere in the streets of New York. And Bridge Over Troubled Water, the album from which this was the first single, was pretty much their Abbey Road, in both good and bad ways.

Nina SIMONE
I Put A Spell On You (15 Jan - 28)
To Love Somebody (15 Jan - 5)
Two hits in the same week? That’s because the great Nina had a #2 hit in late ’68 with yet another song from Hair – “Ain’t Got No…I Got Life,” thankfully thrashing and divesting the song of all its inbuilt preciousness, sharing a double-A side with an infinitely more profound and shattered reading of Webb’s “Do What You Gotta Do.” Consequently her old record company (Philips) reissued her old acetylene torch song from 1964 (Alan Price had the big UK hit with the song back in ’66, doing it in “House Of The Rising Sun” style) at the same time as her then current record company (RCA) issued the official follow-up, where Simone gives the Brothers Gibb a carnal seeing-to.

Frank SINATRA
My Way (2 Apr – 5)
Love’s Been Good To Me (4 Oct – 8)
Once he was a staunch Democrat, then JFK wouldn’t let him land his helicopter on his helipad, so he switched to being a stauncher Republican. Once he was skinny and neurotic, then he was fat and complacently arrogant. Although the chart position doesn’t in itself reflect it, let the records show that Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” still holds the record for the longest run of any single in the British singles chart. It debuted in April 1969 and did not bow out until January 1972, amassing along the way a total of 122 weeks on the chart. In terms of chart performance (if not in terms of actual sales) it’s the most successful British hit single ever.

Why was it so popular? Not just because Sinatra had announced his retirement (and notice how, when he reneged on that agreement in 1973 with “Let Me Try Again,” the latter pointedly wasn’t a hit) but because something of Paul Anka’s crass and facile lyric touched something in the grey belly of the mass public. You still see it everywhere; karaoke night at some godforsaken craphole of a pub in Croydon or Barnet; played at funerals, sung by and meant for people who have never had any control over any aspect of their lives from conception to demise. People to whom the option of “doing it their way” wasn’t available, whether they were belted in class for looking at the paranoid teacher the wrong way, or handed their slender redundancy package to expend down the bookie’s.

Thus we are left only with Sinatra’s monstrous, smug self-celebration of his ego (“I did it John Gotti’s way” would have been a more appropriate title), benevolently lording it over the proles (and don’t talk to me about “It Was A Very Good Year” either; that’s just as smug a performance). Rod McKuen’s “Love’s Been Good To Me” with its stomach-turning girl-in-every-port verse scenario continued the trend. “And may I say…not in a shy way.” Of course not, Frank, we wouldn’t expect you to hide under a bushel/Sam Giancana, would we? But, let me reiterate: this record was on the chart for nearly three years. We got fooled again.

Nancy SINATRA
Highway Song (29 Nov – 21)
Meanwhile, the daughter continued her extremely erratic chart career with this oddity (a trumpet riff sounding like a drunk Tijuana Brass) which doesn’t even appear on any of her compilations. “Some Velvet Morning” wasn’t even a single in the UK.

SLY and The FAMILY STONE
Everyday People (19 Mar – 36)
Surprising underperformance for this perennial classic; strangely, the more overtly neurotic Sly became, the bigger his hits in Britain (“Family Affair,” “Running Away”).

Joe SOUTH
Games People Play (5 Mar – 6)
From the album Introspect, recently reissued as a twofer with its successor Don’t It Make You Want To Go Home, both of which travel to bizarre psychedelic soul galaxies at which the sitar effects on this hit only suggest. But, gosh, “Mirror Of Your Mind,” “These Are Not My People” – this is pretty awesome stuff and I’m clearly going to have to write about it/Mr South in greater detail in the fullness of time.

Dorothy SQUIRES
For Once In My Life (20 Sep – 24)
Ah Dot, the great survivor! She went through hell and drink and bankruptcy and hell again and is NOT AFRAID TO SHOUT OUT THAT SHE IS STILL ALIVE. Except I don’t think she is any more. As you might imagine, she doesn’t share the glee that Stevie Wonder has in singing the same song – she SHOUTS IT FROM THE MOUNTAIN TOP AS THOUGH SHE WERE JULIE ANDREWS OR SOMETHING. I HAVE SOMEONE WHOOOOOO-AH NEEEEEEEEEDS-AH MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAHHHHHHH-AH!!!! YOU TELL ‘EM GIRL!

Alternatively:

Calm down dear. It’s a commercial.

Edwin STARR
25 Miles (13 Sep – 36)
Great, classic song and all, but be honest: if this bloke had been walking non-stop for the best part of a week (I mean, why he is walking the 25 miles? Isn’t there a decent coach service or something?), his baby would not be eagerly standing at the front door waiting to launch into some immediate hott butt action, would she? She would gasp in horror at this smelly, straggly, Saddam Hussein-bearded apparition yelling at her from the other side of the road and alert the authorities. Or at least throw out some soap and towels, with perhaps a basin, and give him clear instructions not to set one lousy foot inside my lovely house wot I’ve just cleaned until you look presentable, you offal-scented wino!

B-b-but he says “666” three-quarters of the way through the song! Gaah! Edwin Starr was the Devil! Is why he needed to get Malcolm Roberts to write his late ‘70s disco hits?

STEPPENWOLF
Born To Be Wild (11 Jun – 30)
Yep, only #30. And doubly yep, I can’t think of a single thing to say about this song. Every schoolboy knows it. The film sucks when Jack Nicholson isn’t on screen. The song is the unwarranted excuse for every half-arsed pub rock barrel which has been rolled out in the intervening three-and-a-half decades. It is neither big nor clever.

The TEMPTATIONS
Get Ready (5 Mar – 10)
Cloud Nine (23 Aug – 15)
The old and the new. “Get Ready” was yet another Motown reissue from the mid-‘60s, while “Cloud Nine” showed Whitfield cracking the whip to help them get over David Ruffin. The vocals are chopped up into dissolute particles, syllables darting around the singers like a computer mouse. Dissolute because it’s unreal, because they’re high, because the vast array of musicians drown them out on several occasions. It went through the roof in the USA – look, Motown’s hip! Someone told them about Sly Stone! – and is perhaps more troubling a performance than “Grapevine” because there isn’t the uncertainty of Marvin Gaye’s one, indivisible voice to hang on to. Here you are plunged into the darkness of the other 1969; every man for himself, sink or swim, kill or be killed.

THUNDERCLAP NEWMAN
Something In The Air (11 Jun – 1)
The WHO
Pinball Wizard (19 Mar – 4)
Or simply talk about and propose a revolution. Sung by the proto-Sting strangled contralto of Speedy Keen, with the suspiciously Neville Dickie-lookey-likey Andy Newman at the barrelhouse piano (that piano break in the middle as though the Temperance Seven had inadvertently walked into a White Panther meeting!) and the suspiciously young-looking Jimmy McCullough on guitar, this call to arms was produced by Pete Townshend and remains the only single involving Townshend ever to make number one in the UK. The flop follow-up “Accidents” was even better.

In the meantime, Townshend had written Tommy and the lead single from the album gave the Who their biggest British hit in two years. The rock opera reinvention was an act of economic necessity; the group was on the verge of bankruptcy at the time (all those smashed guitars, night after night!), so they decided to magnify Townshend’s pain to the length of four album sides, and the Americans loved it (the album did OK but not brilliant business in Britain) and so the Who were saved. Nevertheless, “Pinball Wizard” is indisputably a great pill-popping single (I’ve always assumed that “pinball” was equated with pill-popping) with its adrenalin rush of Spanish guitar. Singing about nothing but meaning everything.

The TREMELOES
Hello World (19 Mar – 14)
(Call Me) Number One (1 Nov – 2)
For those thankfully too young to recall such things, the Tremeloes came on like Benny Hill sending up TOTP, waving their great big meaty butcher’s hands around and shouting “Yippee!” every two seconds. I am yet to be convinced of the need to rehabilitate them. Nevertheless by 1969 they were obviously trying to get taken more seriously, thus these relatively straightforward pop-rock numbers which proved successful enough to convince them that they could be taken seriously, although they were only to have one further major hit, 1971’s “Me And My Life.” But remember – it’s “The One And Only” Chesney Hawkes’ dad on vocals!

Jackie TRENT
I’ll Be There (2 Apr – 38)
She never really had the success as a performer that she did as a co-writer, and this is pleasant enough but you really want Petula to be singing it.

Les TROUBADOURS du ROI BAUDOUIN
Sanctus (Missa Luba) (19 Mar – 28)
In case you’re wondering, it was used in the film “If…” Revolution and apocalypse, you see! I’m not going to say any more about it here ‘cos Sinker’s probably said enough about it in his book, ahem.

The TYMES
People (15 Jan - 16)
For a time, the Tymes (sorry, couldn’t resist it) also seemed to wander in and out of the charts as it took their fancy – there was “So In Love” in 1963, then this souled-up cover of the Streisand belter in ’69, then five years after the latter they came back yet again with “You Little Trustmaker” (with its Kevin Ayers-ish intro) and the 1975 number one “Ms Grace.” And then…who knows? They must have done a guest slot on The Love Boat.

The UPSETTERS
Return Of Django/Dollar In The Teeth (4 Oct – 5)
One of only two Lee Perry productions ever to make the UK singles chart, this was pretty raw stuff for the top five, including Tommy McCook’s momentary Ayler-ish freak out halfway through his tenor solo. Its use to soundtrack a Keep Britain Tidy TV advertising campaign probably helped as well. The other? “Complete Control” by the Clash.

VANITY FAIR
Early In The Morning (23 Jul – 8)
Hitchin’ A Ride (27 Dec – 16)
Bouncy Brit MoR bubblegum from the “I Live For The Sun” boys. That harpsichord again on “Early In The Morning.” Makes Daniel O’Donnell sound like Alan Tomlinson (and what WAS that business with Tomlinson improvising with a fish and chip van on Richard and Judy yesterday?).

Junior WALKER and The ALL STARS
(I’m A) Road Runner (2 Apr – 12)
What Does It Take (To Win Your Love) (18 Oct – 13)
Motown it might be, but “Road Runner” is essentially meat-and-potatoes R&B with Mr Walker’s typically anxious-sounding alto, whereas “What Does It Take” is essentially Philly soul, three years before the event, with luscious strings and backing vocals. Quickest career metamorphosis in pop, you might think, except that, yes you guessed it, “Road Runner” was another mid-‘60s flop given a second chance in the UK in ’69. Why weren’t all these records big hits in the first instance? Reason: the charts of 1964-6 were clogged up with the likes of Ken Dodd and Val Doonican. Bloody BBC.

Scott WALKER
Lights Of Cincinatti (11 Jun – 13)
You can understand Scott’s uncertainty. There he is, on one hand, conjuring up the unfettered brilliance of Scott 3 and the rather more erratic brilliance of Scott 4, while on the other hand he was simultaneously making records like Scott Sings Songs From His TV Series and having hits with lightweight ballads such as “Lights Of Cincinatti.” Wouldn’t you want to retreat?

Roger WHITTAKER
Durham Town (The Leavin’) (8 Nov – 12)
The first in a long line of enviably gloomy hits from the Kenyan-born whistler. All Whittaker’s songs seem to be about the impossibility of permanence, the need to move on to nothing in particular (he’s GOT to leave Durham because there’s nothing and no one to keep him there, but where’s he going?), the impracticability of dreaming about utopias (“New World In The Morning”), even retreating from life to embrace death (sailing back to an unspecified war in “The Last Farewell”). His masterpiece, however, remains 1970’s shattering “I Don’t Believe In If Anymore,” with an orchestral arrangement worthy of Walker and a pro-existentialist sentiment likewise – existentialism wrenched from the weariness provoked by the pain of too much experience.

Andy WILLIAMS
Happy Heart (21 May – 19)
At least our Andy seemed happy enough. One of the few hit singles this year to say yes to life unambiguously, Williams strolls effortlessly through the everybody-join-in, slow-it-down-wait-for-the-big-chorus ITTTTT’SSSS! MYYYYYYYYYY! HAAAAAPPYHEARTYOU’LLHEAR! as if he’s just been admitted to the blossoming garden of the afterlife, or at least won the pools.

Jackie WILSON
(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher (14 May – 11)
His first UK hit of any stature since “Reet Petite” a dozen years previously, this (another Northern Soul perennial) finds the great soulman in superbly gleeful form, fitting into the New Thing a good deal more easily than The Flamingos.

Stevie WONDER
I Don’t Know Why (I Love You) (19 Mar – 14)
My Cherie Amour (16 Jul – 4)
Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday (15 Nov – 2)
He started the year in the top three with his late 1968 hit “For Once In My Life,” and this trio of hits sees him cautiously moving forward until the day (in 1971) when he can turn 21 and call the shots. “I Don’t Know Why” and “My Cherie Amour” are actually two sides of the same single – it was flipped and climbed back into the charts, “Rivers Of Babylon/Brown Girl In The Ring”-style – and two sublime takes on the confusion of new love. “I Don’t Know Why” is frantic in its curious ecstasy, while “My Cherie Amour” expresses how he feels once he’s got used to the idea. However, by year’s end, not yet 20, he was already looking back at an idealised childhood (“Yester-Me…”) and unsurprisingly for 1969, it was his biggest hit of that year. Everyone was affected by it.

Karen YOUNG
Nobody’s Child (6 Sep – 6)
But who could be affected by this? In Scotland the big-selling version of this C&W weepie was by the Alexander Brothers (sort of the Proclaimers with accordions instead of guitars) but Irishwoman Young had the big national hit. And it is terrible. She’s passing by this orphanage, you see, and there’s this cute little kid who starts bawling to her: “I’m nobody’s child/Just like a flow-ER/I’m running wild/No mammy’s kisses/And no daddy’s smiles/No-BO-dy WANTS meee!/I’m-a noBODY’s child!”

Quiet at the back there re. Morrissey comparisons.

But if this affliction is not enough – guess what? When prospective foster parents come to have a look at her, they’re ready to take her home, but then – “When they see that I am BLIND!” God, no buttons missed here, eh? All they needed was to add cancer and they would have had a royal flush!

Incidentally, this Karen Young is not the same one who had the disco hit in the late ‘70s with “Hot Shot.” Just in case you were wondering.

ZAGER and EVANS
In The Year 2525 (Exordium And Terminus) (9 Aug – 1)
This seems a logical place to end the analysis of this nihilistic year. I don’t know what I would have thought about 1969 if I had been 19 then instead of five; somehow my youth protected me from all the subtexts. We end, then, with this glimpse into the future (a more extensive glimpse than “Year 3000” by Busted – they rattle through two millennia per verse until at the end they sing “Now it’s been 10,000 years”) but a bleak glimpse nonetheless; one where The Machines Gradually Take Over Everything and Humanity Makes Itself Redundant (“Now man’s reign is through”). And then the punchline – “Or was it only yesterday?” You see? This is a coded warning about how we’re destroying ourselves and our planet RIGHT NOW! In 1969! No wonder the moon looked so damned attractive then! Thank Zager and Evans I was too young then to know any better!

DAVID ESSEX: HE ALL INSANE

We think we know David Essex. We have him pinned down as a slightly less naff ‘70s equivalent of Robbie Williams, all self-deprecating cheeky chappie grins with an actorly luvvie overlay. But we need to think again, because the six albums he made for CBS between 1973-77 have now been reissued in three two-albums-per-CD editions – respectively paired as his first and fourth (Rock On and the for-hardcore-fans-only live On Tour album), second and fifth (David Essex and Out On The Street) and third and sixth (All The Fun Of The Fair and Gold & Ivory) albums, presumably for commercial reasons; one album with hits on it and another with no hits on it. However, we can safely say that on the basis of these five studio albums, David Essex’s music of the ‘70s really was fucking weird.

Take, for instance, his 1973 breakthrough smash “Rock On.” Rarely has such a nostalgic record sounded so futuristic, and yet somehow lost (“Where do we go from here?/Which is the way that’s clear?,” those “ups” and “downs” which bounce. muttering, between channels) And credit is sorely overdue to Essex’s visionary producer Jeff Wayne, who with his dub spaces and raised-eyebrow strings, is the missing link between Norman Whitfield and Lee Perry, taking the logistics of proto-dub to even more minimalist spaces than Mike Leander managed with Gary Glitter.

Rock On, the album, similarly journeyed to some very strange universes. Laden throughout with backward drums, absurd vocal phasing and guitar barrages, a song like “We All Insane” could pass as an outtake from Eno’s “Here Come The Warm Jets.” And Massive Attack fans may be startled to discover the origin of their “I was looking back to see if you were looking back at me” refrain in Essex’s extraordinarily vicious clenched teeth epic “Streetfight.” Initially straightforward ballads like “Ocean Girl” are diverted by weird orchestral manoeuvres – those Oriental strings again, anticipating both Chic and Soul II Soul. And that’s without even mentioning the stoned music-hall jaunt of “Lamplight,” the least likely of these tracks to be picked as a follow-up single, and yet, in the still relatively open atmosphere of 1973, still comfortably making the top ten.

1974’s self-titled second album was even more bizarre. True, there was the cheerful satire of “Gonna Make You A Star,” with its inadvertent nods to Don Everly’s “Warmin’ Up The Band,” but there was also “Stardust,” far more suicidal than Ziggy, from its opening Cat Power ghost piano chords and never-closer heartbeat to its climactic drowning gongs (fact: to mirror musically the closing “Rock and roll king is DOWN” refrain, percussionist Ray Cooper brought a small bath into the studio, filled it up with water, struck his gong and then lowered it into the bath to produce that “falling star” effect) and the mindbending proto-industrial urban nightmare of “Windows” which almost outdoes Nine Inch Nails in its brutality, culminating in a cacophony of police sirens and a child’s voice screaming “Mummy!” Meanwhile, “Good Ol’ Rock And Roll” pounds along like an outtake from the first Roxy album, guitarist Chris Spedding and saxophonist Alan Wakeman in a splendidly barbed, bad-tempered mood.

All The Fun Of The Fair (1975) has Essex on its cover standing at the fairground entrance, Romany shirtsleeves rolled up, looking vaguely like Too-Rye-Ay-era Kevin Rowland, grinning maniacally on the cover, as if he’s about to slit your throat. The album’s concept was to evoke the darker realities behind the fairground’s superficial brightness. Indeed, on the title track Essex snarls his welcome and the list of dubious attractions (it’s like “Let Me Entertain You” done by Nick Cave), and musically it builds up to the point of catharsis where the band, led by Spedding’s guitar and Mike Garson’s piano, sounding as if they thought they were on a John Cale session, explodes into an all-out atonal freeform pile-up as Essex screams, proto-Lydon, “Let’s take a rrrrrrIDE!”). The noise segues directly into the jolly grannies’ favourite “Hold Me Close,” and this segue remains one of the most startling in all of pop; it will certainly make you view the cheeky-chappie chart-topper in a radically different light, especially as it segues out again into the dark thrashing of “Circles.” The ballad “If I Could” (also a single) is a slightly more optimistic first cousin of Cale’s “I Keep A Close Watch” but as tremulous and uncertain as Bedingfield’s “If You’re Not The One.” The fanciful dream of domesticity and happiness (“When I come home from work/I’ll change me shirt”) is wiped out by the closing, massive synth chord which sounds like an icepick stabbing his hope to death. And then the clearly Whitfield-inspired “Rolling Stone” with Essex and backing singers The Real Thing both fighting to stay sane – “A long way from HOOOOOOOOMMMMMEEEE,” they howl in the chorus like mortally wounded coyotes, another strange mirror of the tottering, collapsing female backing vocals (“DIEEEEEEEEE!”) on Cale’s version of “Heartbreak Hotel.” And this, incredibly, was a top five single.

But Out On The Street (1976) is Essex’s stomach-clenching, gasp-inducing masterpiece; 47 minutes of nervous breakdown set to music – almost the Sister Lovers of glam – from the slow death of the ten-minute title track (“PIMPS and PONCES!”) via the terrifying faux-glee of “Just Wanna Dance” (listen to that extended fadeout, with Essex desperately trying to stay afloat – “I wanna dance! Like Barry White! Do the Hokey Cokey!” – and the curiously carnal, Steve Harley-ish non-hit single “Ooh Love” (“Pink gin? Cheers!”) through to the exacerbating seven-minute death disco of “City Lights,” with its bassline which, shall we say, anticipates “Guns Of Brixton,” and a sax riff which gives us a preview of Wayne’s “Eve Of The War.” Essex sounds hoarse and near-psychotic throughout. This is the album which Robbie Williams is yet to make.

After that, Essex tried his hand at self-production in 1977’s back to basics Gold & Ivory. Although musically far more conservative, the element of doubt is still present in songs like “Good Morning (Darling)” – perhaps the most chilling song Essex has ever written, depicting the troubled state of an unloved wife composing goodbye letters to her husband in her mind, but who on every occasion (that small “OK” at 3:48 which turns the entire premise of the song around) decides against escaping and sentences herself to living death. Richard Hewson’s subtle string arrangement echoes the dilemmas tearing her head apart. The album also includes the remarkable requiem “Britannia,” in its own way as punk as anything else in 1977 (“Complacency shat in your eye”).

Think you know David Essex? I would recommend that you explore this extraordinary body of work – rather than an East End Donny Osmond, he was pop’s answer to Peter Hammill and Kevin Coyne. Listen to Hammill’s The Silent Corner And The Empty Stage, then follow it up with, say, Out On The Street, and think again.

DJ WRONGSPEED – PIRATE FLAVAS

I suppose the best thing about not-entirely-legal CD(R)s is that they provide the listener with something which, as it hasn’t necessarily been packaged for the convenience of mass consumption, offers more life than might be found in conventional albums, no matter how good. Or at least they offer a broader snapshot of the narrowness of life.

In fact Pirate Flavas by DJ Wrongspeed is now obtainable from Resonance 104.4 FM at the cost of a “donation” of £12. Wrongspeed himself has of late disappeared from the schedules of Resonance following reported anxieties about the alleged misogyny and homophobia of some of his broadcasts, which on aural evidence is a bit like accusing Henry Mayhew of being a rapacious stormtrooper.

Like Mayhew, Wrongspeed offers a panoramic cut-up of the different voices which turn up across neglected parts of London; in this case, a kind of Pick of the Week-style digest of the most notable moments from London’s various pirate radio stations. And, as with all music/art that hasn’t yet been regulated and hammered into sellable shape, Wrongspeed’s digests are a thrilling and occasionally chilling listen.

The 70 or so minutes of the CD-R are divided into four sections; the first two are fairly straightforward cut-ups of London pirates. As documents they would be valuable enough, but as a listening experience (for who wants to dwell within a home filled with “documents”?) it thrusts along at 300 mph, daring the unwary outsider to keep up. Track one begins with some sporadic glitches of radio static, enough to make you wonder whether the CD is working properly, but soon these glitches multiply, unify and coalesce into an FM swoop across the dial – taking in a sample of the World’s Famous Supreme Team (from Duck Rock) to remind us where this all started – which is eerily reminiscent of the radio scan which begins Searching For The Young Soul Rebels. Back then the wall against which Kevin Rowland was protesting was one filled with “Smoke On The Water,” military brass band music, “Holiday In The Sun” and “Rat Race.” There are the briefest of snatches of things like Magic FM and Radio 1, enough to underline the glaring difference between the efficient, unengaging professional radio operators and the passionate, chancing amateurs (Westwood even makes a cameo appearance – if it is him – advertising something called Sean B’s Erection Selection Volume One. If this latter CD actually exists can anyone with a copy get in touch with me urgento at marcellocarlin@hotmail.com ?). There are also horoscopes (Cancer and Aquarius are not at all suited, apparently, which I suppose make sense as my dad was a Cancerian and I’m an Aquarian), what may or may not be the hijacking of a station by escaped cons (complete with a wistful rap about the woes of imprisonment), a measured rant against “the Great Devil” (America) and how there are “holes appearing all over the country,” and why 9/11 was therefore justified, and lots of fractured extracts from various grime and hip hop 12-inchers (and don’t they sound so much more exciting in this context than in the rather bland blankness of a 12-inch single?).

The second section is necessarily grimmer, as it focuses on phone-in programmes where various agonising issues are discussed. The major controversy within this CD-R comes, I guess, with the extract where a chap enthusiastically exclaims, vis-à-vis gays: “As soon as we find out which closet they’re in, we’re gonna set the closet alight!” and the discussions then divert into waters which wouldn’t be out of place on late-night, ultra-right wing TalkSport programmes, including some jeering at women in clubs who are only interested in chaps displaying the bling (whereas if an “ordinary brother” comes up to them, they will “run him down”) – kind of an unfortunate basic of human behaviour, unfortunately, and not limited to Thursday nights at the Brixton Fridge, either. Still it must have been this sequence which caused Resonance to get Arts Council-inspired cold feet (they won’t give us another grant!). A shame because it is simply being documented rather than agreed with, and to pretend that this sort of thinking doesn’t exist is, in the most literal sense of the word, whitewashing – contrast with the preposterous Eric Clapton in the new Uncut, sober but still agreeing with his beloved Enoch about those irritating immigrants (remember that quote from Presley: “The only things that coloured people are good for are writing my songs and shining my shoes”? If not, well, there it is).

However, it’s the third section which really pierced my heart; here we are presented with a vintage selection of cut-ups from the golden age of the early ‘90s, just as Acieed was about to evolve into Happy Hardcore. This really made me feel as melancholy as Alistair Cooke or even Ian MacDonald about What We’ve Lost; instead of the jagged, who-you-staring-at, vicious beats, here were speeded-up voices, ecstatic pianos, all treble or speaker-shattering bass; adverts for club night at 3rd Base, forgotten names like Richie Rich, Paul “Trouble” Anderson, Colin Faver and Steve Jervier, HAPPINESS…

…and then, as the beats start to fracture and stiffen up, a DJ cheerfully comments: “Is Hardcore FM turning punk rock? I think so!” and we hear the transition into what would eventually become drum n’ bass, and everything which would evolve from the latter. It’s a poignant memory of times which were good for both of us. I got very emotional listening to it.

The final section is a straightforward mash-up of “Work It” and various other semi-recognisables. As the radio static builds up towards the section’s climax, and the DJ/MC howls enthusiastically, it’s as if hope had been plucked from the jaws of nihilism. It’s as if to say, no matter how hard or how often you try to push us down, you can’t destroy our love. Get this record from Resonance FM before the vision changes, before the focus twists.

(Many thanks to the Woebot man for kindly burning a copy of this for me)