CHAPTER 43

 

#58: McALMONT & BUTLER

"Yes"

from the single "Yes"

Released: May 1995

 

 

The first of three songs in this book about rebirth, the ability to glide through the splinters of an old, failed life and fly into the limpid radiance of a new and implacably better one. You wouldn't recognise me now, sings the singer, or maybe you do and you want to pretend you didn't treat me like shit and prod me through Hell. Such bright, tinny optimism, such relentless brightness, and perhaps the singer had Billy MacKenzie in mind, since they both used the same producer (Mike Hedges). Behind the voice is a guitar, or guitars, or a sitar guitar in remembrance of Thom Bell, a synthesiser of sorts and a tilted string section. Multiple vocal overdubs mean it wasn't recorded in one take, but the record would like you to think it was, with its studio applause and drum runout (see also "Hello It's Me"). It is the most exuberant of V-signs, cheerily chanting stick your fake welcomes up your fucken arse, you who was previously glad to wrong and minimise me.

David McAlmont and Bernard Butler came with their separate histories, briefly slammed together to dunk the British hit parade in cubes of mauve tea. The nice thing about the perceived boom in British pop music in the mid-nineties was that it liminally permitted curveballs like this to be sung in school playgrounds and supermarkets. It's hard not to think of "Yes" as an Associates tribute - just as, one year later, "A Design For Life" was a reluctant sequel to "Story Of The Blues" (again, Hedges produced both). It's perhaps harder still to think of it as not a Joycean squeal of arrival but as the sweetest up-yours ever recorded. Well, recorded three or so decades ago. Look, the song proclaims, I'm still living, while your smug selves merely exist. They didn't last long, then got together again for a brief while some years later, and again some years after that, and the circuitous potter's wheel will presumably keep throwing them together when the sand curves at the expected prompt.

 

CHAPTER 42

 

#59: EDWYN COLLINS

 

"A Girl Like You"

 

from the album Gorgeous George

 

Released: July 1994

 

 

This is a song of anger disguised as ecstasy. It is not remotely fluffy or bouncy, even if the rhythm section drags a clever millisecond behind the beat. If anything the record's soundscan is more incrementally ominous than "uplifting." The rhythm is hammered into the mould of a battering ram. We are suspended on the perpetual verge of a breakthrough and uprising. The singer, who gives the best recorded impersonation of Iggy Pop there is, and who sounds like he spent sixteen years preparing to give or offer us this performance, tells of how this glad irruption into his somnolent life has thrust him towards renewal of purpose. At times, when he's crawling and bleeding on raw knees, the words sound cut and paste from some godawful hair metal stalwart, and when he cites the Devil you're sent right back to Robert Johnson. He sings the adverbs "metaphorically" and "allegorically" as if he'd just invented the words - and how dare everyone for not coming up wih that idea before now - and cements them into lurid scripture with his never-more emphatic "KNOW."

The four descending, in both key and volume, "never"s indicate a shift from personal to political, and it is here where the singer underscores both metaphor and allegory by complaining about the decline of society and the complete inability of a pub crammed with "protest singers" to affect or change anything. But then the "YOU" has come along, and you realise that he's been singing about a revolution all the time. The backing singers enter a trance loop of "Yeah, it's alright" as the music, which has been increasing in intensity in preparation for a Sonic Youth-style aural overspill, is finally detonated by the guitar, which began the song as a Peter Frampton tribute and ends up in Lee Ranaldo noiseland, like an angry wasp blowing up the planet. The Ascension is complete.

Edwyn Collins came from Dundee to Glasgow in the late seventies and formed a band called Orange Juice which went with benign violence against every accepted rule of what a "pop group" should do or be. In the Glasgow of the late seventies and early eighties, which was still crawling from the wreckage heritage of Alex Harvey and No Mean City, this was provocative, and the band duly eluded endless forays of thrown beer bottles and glasses with accompanying homophobic commentary.

When the clouds cleared in the not-so-early eighties, Orange Juice were revealed as not so much of a way ahead, but a friendly if subtly savage alternate way to proceed. Their first album may have been praised, retrospectively, by the (at the time of writing) Leader of the Opposition but received terrible reviews at the time. Blandout production, not as good as the Peel session versions, what do they think they're doing messing with Al Green (I actually thought in late 1981, and was not alone in thinking, when I listened to their single of "L.O.V.E. (Love)," that Collins and the then almost-chart-topping Clare Grogan might be a post-punk Donny and Marie Osmond)? In addition Haircut One Hundred came along with similar ideas, a horn section and a bigger promotional budget, and walked into the middle of the band's room.

By the time Orange Juice put out their second album, later in 1982, most had forgotten they existed and underplayed them. While the critics were napping, the title track of that album leapt into the top ten, right next to "Don't Talk To Me About Love" by a suddenly-resurrected Altered Images, and they received nods with accompanying grudges.

So it was that when "A Girl Like You" first appeared in the summer of 1994, few people took any real notice; oh here's Edwyn again, doing his cuddly/grouchy indie thing, thank you and which way to The Good Mixer? Even when the song was released as a single at the end of that year, it took six months and a lot of re-promotion to become a hit.

And yet the song became more than just "a hit." Rod Stewart recognised a soul song when he heard one and covered it on stage. Pete Waterman declared "A Girl Like You" the best pop single of the last ten years. Len Barry's people noticed the "1-2-3" drum loop a long time later and an agreement was reached.

As a record "A Girl Like You" is magnificently scummy. Once past the "1-2-3" loop, the drumming is patiently primitive, and it was no surprise to find that the drummer was Paul Cook, once of the Sex Pistols (this is SUCH a punk song, one of the greatest). Vic Godard (with Sean Read) formed the backing Greek chorus. The vibraphonic tinkles automatically reroute us to the Wigan Casino, but overall this is a markedly Scottish protest - or liberation - song. Iggy Pop was indeed suggested as a candidate to cover the song, but Collins got there, along with everywhere else, first. Here he exudes a bruised elegance he had not previously demonstrated. That "YOU"? He's asking - demanding - US to come along, smash the social contract and begin anew. Simply thrilling lingers.

 

CHAPTER 41

 

 

 

#60: CLIFF NOBLES AND COMPANY

"The Horse"

B-side of the Cliff Nobles single "Love Is All Right"

Released: May 1968

 

 

Remember those Philadelphia dance craze records from the very early sixties? They never really went away, just mutated, away from Dick Clark and Bandstand and towards the decade to come. “The Horse” must count as one of the most obscure of all number two hits, and more or less was a happy accident.

 

 

Soul singer Cliff Nobles, originally from Alabama – born in Grove Hill, raised in Mobile – moved to Philadelphia and cut a few records for Atlantic, without success. He then formed a group – the “& Co.” – and, after having met with songwriter and record producer Jesse James (real name), they signed to the local Phil-L.A. Of Soul record label. Their second single was "Love Is All Right," featuring a particularly boisterous lead vocal from Nobles. It did little business…but then something happened.

Specifically, as was general practice back then – essentially to save having to pay double session fees – the B-side of “Love Is All Right,” which was simply retitled “The Horse,” was just the instrumental backing track for the A-side; the music had basically evolved (or been sonically tweaked/edited) from a jam session by the studio players. The musicians resented the low session fee they were given – they certainly weren’t put on royalties – and vowed never to work with James again.

 

Nonetheless, “The Horse” then began to take on a life of its own. It started to receive regular radio play, usually as a two-minutes-before-the-news filler or to soundtrack a DJ’s patter, and it caught on to the extent that it became a million-seller in its own right, placing “Love Is All Right,” and indeed Cliff Nobles, firmly in the shade.

 

Its popularity presented Nobles, who had nothing to do with the final “hit,” with a dilemma – how to promote a record into which he had injected zero input? A television clip from the period provides us with an answer; introduced by an excitable presenter, Nobles and his sidekick “Little Tina” perform a dance called “the Horse” and Nobles improvises new lyrics over the top. It wasn’t The Big Hit, as such. but did place the record’s success in a firm context.

 

As a dance record, “The Horse” must count as one of the most minimalist of all number twos – turn up Bobby Martin's piano in the mix and you’d have Acid House. But its groove is fine and funky, with some particularly crisp and sterling drumming, and broken up by some aptly equestrian-sounding brass figures. In Britain, although the record never charted, it became a huge club hit, and on the radio I recall Emperor Rosko being particularly keen on it. As for the “and Company” players (and their arranger, the aforementioned Mr Martin), they opted to hook up with another young pair of Philadelphia songwriters and producers called Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, and eventually became the basis of the band M.F.S.B. – by 1974 they were back at number one with the majestic "T.S.O.P." A future had commenced.

CHAPTER 40

 

#61: YEARS & YEARS

"King"

from the album Communion

Released: July 2015

 

 

The gradual demotion and ultimate cancellation of Top Of The Pops was almost as stupid as the idea of the show itself. From what we now know, it should probably never have been commissioned in the first place. Yet where else were you going to see your pop stars, in full view of your parents and classmates? Not in the school assembly hall of Later with Jools Holland, that's for certain (or, more accurately, for the grown-ups).

And we have, since 2006, missed so much of the visuals which accompany any meaningful (or meaningless) pop star by their not being exposed on prime-time mainstream television. As good as La Roux is (are?), how much more dynamic would it have been to see Elly's flaming red electro-gaucho totality belting out "In For The Kill"?

 

 

The increasingly amateurish and pointless annual Christmas editions of Top Of The Pops survived for a while after the main show was cancelled, and it was on the Christmas 2015 show that I finally got the point of Years & Years. I had nodded along semi-agreeably to the Bronski Bros mannerisms of "King" on the radio, but one really had to see Olly Alexander, dressed like an angel, dazed and ecstatic, flanked by the two second-year medical students on keyboards, for its pop to hit home. Lyrically the song is the oldest of pop stories - you're treating me bad(ly) but I can't let go - but Alexander with divine uncertainty transposes the song into the realm of the hymnal, as no one had done since Jim Diamond and Tony Hymas with "I Won't Let You Down." Sometimes in pop, you have to see before you can bring yourself to believe.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 39

 

 

 

#62: HAPPY MONDAYS

"24 Hour Party People"

from the twelve-inch single "24 Hour Party People"

Released: October 1987

 

Marcello Carlin is the author of tedious, pretentious articles about music. Had he accepted his father's offer of journalistic training at Glasgow's Outram Press in 1980, he would have gained the professional competencies necessary to hone, edit and craft his prose such that it would prove engaging and readable. He instead pursued an initially hiccup-ridden but overall adequate career at university, in the first instance studying subjects he hated, largely because his father had insisted that he do. He should have listened and not listened to his father. As things turned out his most valuable skill proved to be the professional ones which he was taught by a bored Head of Business Studies in his school's nominal Religious Education class, and through this he has been able to hold down a reasonably successful career in the National Health Service for several decades, and counting.

Abruptly bereaved in the late summer of 2001, he fell to bits, then relocated and on professional psychological advice began to write about music in public and what's the fucking point of repeating this story yet again you've heard it a thousand times. The point is that he failed as a music writer - the kind who gets reviews published in magazines, is commissioned to write essays for book anthologies, sleevenotes etc. and gets paid for it - because his drearily forensic nitpicking approach to music, as though it only existed to justify his existence and live up to his expectations, has made for pedantic, turgid prose. Unable to grasp the elementary art of editing, his writing is routinely dismissed as "sentimental hogwash" which tends to numb its readers, give them headaches and/or send them to sleep.

Carlin remains fatally deluded about his capacities as a music writer. He thinks he's James Joyce. Secretly he'd be fine being James Kelman. In reality he is Ed Reardon, as anyone unlucky enough to have to endure his company over the last five decades will attest; a grotesquely venal pipsqueak who never gets his round in, not that he would now anyway since he is on Warfarin hence has been forbidden alcohol for, at the time of writing, well over eleven years.

Carlin lacks the knack of writing in a way that is sufficiently confident yet can also attract, entertain and preserve the reader's confidences. People turn away from his writing, as they do from hin in real life. They are instantly intimidated, and not in a way that inspires them to do better or exceed themselves. He is known across the industry as a difficult character, and a somewhat laughable, clapped-out old curmudgeon forlornly clinging to the chimera of widespread recognition as a writer. Not even a hasbeen, but a never-was. His egotistically persistent tendency towards self-pity has not helped matters either.

All of this is of course rooted in a grievous misunderstanding of Carlin's personality, due to people's unawareness of the psychological ball and chain which he has been forced to drag around with him his entire life, and which has sealed off countless opportunites from him. Indeed Carlin himself was unaware of it until he received his diagnosis in 1995. Prior to then people, his parents included, had erroneously considered him to be a child prodigy, a genius. That wasn't at all what it was, and really he had all along sensed that something didn't quite fit. At diagnosis, it was as though a miraculous box-ticking exercise had been conducted. It explained, and explains, everything.

Nevertheless, Carlin undoubtedly has no grasp of the common touch. He does not comprehend what draws people to music and how they are retained in its grip. He is unable to communicate his love for music in a way which ordinary people would find empathetic. For him it is all about ticking off facts, detouring into pseudo-wild goose chases, telling the reader nothing except the fallacy that he is somehow superior to the reader.

Certainly Carlin would never, ever have been able to conceive of a band like Happy Mondays - because, as an aesthetic near-loner, the notion of bands is anathema to him - nor of a song like "24 Hour Party People," which sounds like the Teardrop Explodes locked in Peter Kay's basement and whose intentional nonsense, like that of Spike Milligan, Exocets directly at the spectator's heart and mind instead of coming across like Lieutenant Hauk with his dismal polkas. The band and song connect with an idealised public - soon to be followed by a genuine public - in ways the hoity-toity waste product of failed academia could never begin or pretend to penetrate.

CHAPTER 38

 

 

#63: BILL WHELAN and ANÚNA featuring The RTÉ CONCERT ORCHESTRA:

"Riverdance"

from the album: Riverdance: Music From The Show

Released: March 1995

 

 

(N.B.: For those striving to compile a playlist of songs from this blog, this particular one has subsequently vanished from Spotify, to be replaced by the 25th Anniversary Edition of the same show; that's pleasant enough but it's the original that's the more potent.)

 

I listen to this piece of music relatively frequently - I mean, that's why it's here - but am never able to do so without visualising it. In terms of pop music to be found in the British charts of 1995 it's as important as anything more fashionable. I don't imagine anyone has ever sat through its five minutes and forty-three seconds and not had the visuals automatically pop up in their mind.

Perhaps, as a piece of venturing popular music, it would have been equally at home in the 1968 charts next to "Classical Gas" and "MacArthur Park." But this was a studio re-recording of something done live, at Dublin's Point Theatre, on 30 April 1994, as a Eurovision Song Contest interval filler. That year the competition was won by Ireland for the third straight year, with "Rock n' Roll Kids" by Paul Harrington and Charlie McGettigan, at that time the least typical victor. The British entry was a nice "Unfinished Sympathy" knock-off called "We Will Be Free (Lonely Symphony)" and sung by West End stage star Frances Ruffelle (who is also the mother of the singer Eliza Doolittle); it finished tenth.

No one outside of Eurovision fans and experts remembers anything else about the competition. Except for the interval filler, which had it been an entry (it couldn't have been; far too long) would have scored a thousand points. Eurovision fans and experts would most likely have experienced a flashback to the 1981 Contest, held at the RDS Simmonscourt Pavilion in Dublin, where the interval piece was performed by an augmented Planxty (featuring the greatest man alive, Christy Moore) and dancers from Dublin City Ballet, and was entitled "Timedance." That year the skirt-ripping Bucks Fizz won for Britain.

Those fully awake in the early eighties would also have recalled EastWind, an arousing 1982 fusion of traditional Irish music and folk dances from Bulgaria and Macedonia, by Andy Irvine and Davy Spillane. The album was produced by Bill Whelan, who in the mid-nineties I principally knew from appearing on Mary Margaret O'Hara's brilliant Miss America.

Some of that influence inevitably seeped into "Riverdance" itself, as well as,, I would argue, sources ranging from Ravel's "Boléro" - the patiently-increasing rhythmic dominance which could represent either consummation or endgame - to Olé Coltrane (Kenneth Edge's soprano saxophone introducing the thematic climax). Certainly the opening hymnal quietude of the Anúna choir suggests the promise of something beyond the suffocating proud-parishioner politesse that its society typically demanded from one might call Irish dancing.

Then comes the gradual build-up, the massed drums, and the final ascent to glory, and it is here that the listener realises that they must see and feel this music. At Eurovision, Anúna ethereally looked like they'd been beamed down from another planet. Then Butler, and then Flatley - and the recording misses the trading-fours between Flatley's taps and the drumming.

Moreover, it also misses the massed feet, legs and boots of the dozens of supporting dancers. This is why you have to watch the original 1994 Eurovision performance - something which people, at the time, had not seen before - and gasp at some of the most coordinated action you have ever seen emanating from human beings. The mass, unified, united stomping is imposing, actively cathartic and, in the best possible sense, intimidating - in that it makes the spectator want to be more than themselves, to exceed themselves. This immense message to humanity was that we could all work together and not merely settle for happiness but dare to express the ecstatic. It was one of the highlights of civilisation and perhaps should have been performed only once. Which I why I still endeavour to listen to this as often as sanity allows, and watch it even more frequently. It reminds me that once we were here, and this, once upon a time, was what we were capable of achieving. As you are now, so once were we, as Joyce continues to remind us.

CHAPTER 37

 

 

#64: MICKEY NEWBURY

"An American Trilogy"

from the album Frisco Mabel Joy

Released: October 1971

 

 

I just saw something on Twitter. It was a group of policemen in Tennessee hustling a woman out of hospital. She had been discharged because she didn't have insurance. Too poor to live, you see. The police demanded that she vacate the premises, which was difficult because she was in the middle of suffering a stroke. They bundled her into the back of the van, and she died there. Coming to a country near you, soon.

I read a piece in The Nation yesterday about the history of "education" in Florida. What de Santis is doing is reinforcing old prejudices and removing anything that gets in their way. The tradition there has always been to teach its children the differentials between "Americanism" and Communism. As a subject it is considered second only to basic literacy. Most libraries in the state have stripped their bookshelves entirely, so as not to fall foul of moneyed reactionists.

 

 

I read the many books written by Percival Everett and am reminded that, no matter how avant-garde, intelligent, perceptive and handsome you may be, all count as nothing when set against the colour of what They call slave skin.

These are not the "They" of Kay Dick's eroding England - though that will presently come to pass - but seem set on reversing all human progress and retreating into an animal state. As a protest. Against what They cannot really delineate or define.

 

 

Of course it is coming here. Turnips for avocados. Black Lace for Daft Punk. David Walliams for Charles M Schulz.

 

 

But but but.

 

 

It is a folk club in west Los Angeles, late 1970, and a guy is up on stage with his guitar. He is going to sing a proscribed song, a song misused and abused by some of humanity's worst. A song of the South, written by a Northerner (Dan Emmett of Knox County, Ohio). He wants to reclaim that song, make it mean what it used to mean, what it ought to mean.

One idiot in the audience starts to clap in march time and is rapidly made to look an idiot by the fact that he is not performing the song in that tempo - his is far, far slower. Some of the audience are rapt, others baffled. One is Barbra Streisand, bored out of her tree and as yet unaware that she inspired this approach with her funereal "Happy Days Are Here Again." But her then-partner, Kris Krisofferson, a man whose work was primarily inspired by the performer on that stage, is adamant; they must stay.

He gets to the end of his "Dixie" and notices the face of Odetta, wet with tears. Overcome, he cannot stop, and segues straight into the song of the North, the "oppressor," which was written, or adapted anyway, by Julia Ward Howe of Rhode Island. Even then he cannot complete his argument until he reaches the third point of the triangle, a Southern gospel song predating the Civil War sometimes known as "Bahamian Lullaby" - hence why it is so fitting that Rihanna, of Barbados, should make the song "Umbrella" into the collectivist, anti-racist hymn nobody realised it was. It might be raining now, but the struggle will soon be over. If "we" want it.

When the performer finished, there was a silence which lasted for several seconds. Then everybody, led by Mama Cass, started cheering, standing up and cheering as though a song had been...saved.

Also in that audience at Bitter End West, 8409 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood, was Joan Baez. Some months later the performer, who was otherwise a very good friend of Baez', became extremely vexed by her hit version of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," which its originators The Band had performed as a deliberate tripartite threnody, making you feel for the least sympathetic people on Earth. Then along came Joan celebrating the destruction of the South like it was a Christmas party.

Provoked, the performer decided to record that medley he'd done, and it is very quiet and patient - there is no real build-up and quite a lot of pregnant silence. Perhaps its most frightening factor is its barely perceptible instrumental coda, with violins sounding like bagpipes blowing the long regret of the Apocalypse.

You had to think of Vietnam, of John, Martin and Bobby, even donate some thoughts in the direction of the dim bulbs who to this day believe that the Civil War has never ended. But what the melange offers is a simple message: all of this constitutes "America." Where you particularly stand in that world is up to you. As long as we do not let it die. In whatever way, from whichever angle. As long as we can evolve into a species which values life above money, revelation over dogma, empathy ahead of arrogance. The allowed time is now seeping into stoppage.