CHAPTER 66

 

#35: RÖYKSOPP

“Happy Up Here”

from the album Junior

Released: March 2009

 

 

Imagine you’re coming home after a very long and potentially dangerous adventure. You’ve beaten all the odds, saw your enemies off, and now it’s time to return to what you know in your bones to be perfect. Back to home.

 

You take the motorway turnoff, view the familiar buildings and junctions as they approach you, speed off down the suburban A-road towards the eyes and heart of the city itself. The sun is shining and you are in guardedly jovial mood.

 

You get out of whatever vehicle you’ve taken to reach there and bow to the buildings, and perhaps to certain people if they’re there, as you reach them. Are you staying there?

 

There is this record shop on Fulham Broadway and three months after you’ve finally come together, one Friday teatime you walk into it and they are playing this record and you both love it immediately. You recognise the George Clinton sample being used at the beginning, and the fact that (!) this song, barely two-and-three-quarter minutes in length, makes you laugh at its capabilities for instant recognition of feelings and attachments, including to one’s favourite records, while its browning shades of autumn render you a shivering disciple to the song’s glacial but unavoidably spiritual iteration of non-manic pop thrills.

 

Yes, you’re happy up here, because up here is home, and this theme for a great city (because all cities are, by definition, great) articulates home’s naturalised magic.

CHAPTER 65

 

#36: WIRE

“Eardrum Buzz: 12” Version”

from the album It’s Beginning To And Back Again

Released: May 1988

 

 

“The Bee Song” by Arthur Askey was a gigantic hit in 1938 but is familiar to every British radio listener my age or older. Accompanied by just the piano of the song’s author Kenneth Blain, the Liverpudlian comic entertainer – at that point, one of Britain’s biggest stars – has great fun inhabiting the mindset of a bee as it goes about its average day of gathering honey and stinging and potentially killing unwary interlopers, including cows, Boy Scouts and butterflies. Actually it’s quite a brutal and sadistic song, bearing imagery that might subsequently have been worthy of Throbbing Gristle: “Flirting with the butterfly strong upon the wing/Whoopee! O' death/Where is thy sting?” The song concludes with a pitiless summary of the average bee’s ultimate fate, namely to be “pinned on a card in a mucky museum.”

 

Half a century later, that song’s reluctant sequel, “Eardrum Buzz,” appeared. The “buzz-buzz” leitmotif (with its twin, “Zee zee zee, zum zum”) is the only immediately visible factor which connects it to the Askey song, It isn’t really about a bee but more about that mucky impetus, hardwired into humanity’s DNA, that either cancels out good history or provokes bad history, because it renders the brain incapable of distinguishing reality from Debordian Spectacle.

 

“Eardrum Buzz” is a song warning us about how too much pop can kill us, owing to our stubborn tendency to grab the hooks, devoid of any workable meaning, and render us into artifices of perceived intelligence. Such as the inescapable hooks of the song itself and the ecstatic Cocteau Twins-ish guitar glides which punctuate each chorus, both of which deliberately serve to obscure half-lies, unfounded speculation and hearsay, all of which we are bound to accept because we cannot get off the merry-go-round to which we have unknowingly been chained. All human endeavour finally pinned on a card in that mucky museum. Who, or what, would dare pay humanity a visit?

CHAPTER 64

 

#37: PROCOL HARUM

“Homburg – 50^th Anniversary Full Length Stereo Mix”

from the E.P. Hits’n’Flips

Released: May 2019

 

 

Thursday, 30 September 1982 – I’ll shortly be starting my second year at university but have come down with a bit of a cold so am taking it easy and conserving my energies at home. It’s the fifteenth anniversary of the launch of Radio 1, and to commemorate this the station is devoting its entire daytime output to the hits of 1967. No non-hits, B-sides or album tracks – otherwise a 1967 schedule might still be in operation, over four decades later – just the music that got into the pop charts, and that encompassed anything, from distressed psychedelia through heavy rock, soul/R&B and teen bubblegum to housewife-friendly easy listening ballads.

 

In the early autumn of 1982 that era was only a decade and a half away – the same distance, at the time of writing, that “American Boy” and “That’s Not My Name” are from now – yet the music, on that greyly overcast Thursday sounded as though it were emanating from another millennium, another civilisation, another planet even.

 

This was on the background of a not really called-for sixties revival, as New Pop’s first wave was sputtering out. “Love Me Do” was about to get a twentieth-anniversary reboot into the top five, thus conveniently rewriting history. “House Of The Rising Sun” inexplicably reappeared in the chart and only narrowly missed the top ten. There were also plenty of sixties pop pastiches some more aesthetically successful – “Heartache Avenue” by the Maisonettes, “Parade” by White and Torch – than others – “Thank You” by the Pale Fountains, “Danger Games” by the Pinkees.

 

In this context – with New Pop progressively darkening (“House OF Fun” turns to “Our House”) – the hits of 1967 sounded…etiolated, as though dug up entrained in entrails of aspic. “Nothing is real,” Lennon sang on “Strawberry Fields”; well, neither did anything else, not “Seven Rooms Of Gloom” or “Burning Of The Midnight Lamp” or “We Love You” or “Randy Scouse Git” or even the Dave Clark Five’s weepie comeback smash “Everybody Knows” with the same unsettling, undulating Clavioline as “Theme From A Teenage Opera.” You listened anew to something ostensibly cheerful like “Flowers In The Rain” and realised it was actually about a drugged-up fuck-up whose existence was disintegrating into pieces (“with my commitments in a mess…in a world of fantasy, you’ll find me”).

 

I tried to regroup my memories from 1967; these were scattered and not conjoined. Visiting the High Speed Gas showroom with my mother one weekday morning to pay the gas bill. The showroom was situated in front of a giant (and now long-demolished) gasometer, on the border between Uddingston and Bothwell, which one could see from Glasgow and, we used to joke, sometimes from southern Italy. There was a queue of anxious housewives.

 

A visit with my parents to the greenhouse at Tollcross Park, me dressed in a navy blue sailor’s suit. Photographs were taken which I didn’t really enjoy.

 

A new kitchen dresser being installed in the hallway of our narrow flat in Uddingston Main Street and filled with items of food and cutlery. I kept having to move out of its way.

 

The small conical dome presiding over the grocery – for a spell in the 1970s it was a branch of the Centra chain – at the junction of Uddingston Main Street and the extremely steep Gardenside Street. If you climbed up the steps heading towards Spindlehowe Road, behind what was then a church, you could still see it.

 

Riding on the dodgems at the local fair – if it were local; I cannot precisely recall – with my mother, wearing a rather fetching raincoat.

 

Mrs Marley and her version of expatriate Italian culture. The huge Bush radiogram with its teak-redolent, dark blue-labelled Decca singles deep within (so to this day I cannot think of Sir Tom or Engelbert without visualising that charming chasm).

 

The visits from several newspapers because word had got out about my being something of a child prodigy. Reading and writing at two. A lengthy, detailed and finally apologetic letter from the National Association of Gifted Children was sent to our house. The photograph of me, reading that letter, made the front pages of the Scottish Daily Mail and Scottish Daily Express. The glum conclusion was that nothing special could be done for me in terms of formal education, which I almost certainly should not have come anywhere near. Not enough money, you see. We were living in a first-floor flat on Main Street in Uddingston, above what was then the Bay Horse Inn pub. Saturday nights were noisy. In my childhood that situation was deemed unique.

 

Music drifted unevenly throughout my head that year. The first record I remember hearing and remembering was “I Feel Free” by Cream right at year's beginning. My father liked Cream; they were really a jazz group masquerading as a pop one ("rock" didn't yet exist). I saw the promotional film for “Strawberry Fields Forever” on Top of the Pops, and indeed that broadcast was recorded, in audio, by sellotaping a microphone to the television speaker. All other elements were random; San Francisco, Grocer Jack (the Clavioline tag to the latter immediately conjured up the abovementioned conical dome for me; it twirled as balletically as the dome seemed to do), light entertainment in general.

 

Even in 1982, however, just how unlike anything else was Procol Harum?

 

 

 

A colourised Top Of The Pops performance of “Whiter Shade Of Pale,” from the spring of ’67, on YouTube; the band are introduced by Pete Murray, who always bore the air of a middle-aged golf club secretary amused but bored by the comings and goings of the young (indeed all four main presenters of TOTP, including the one we can’t mention any more, were born in the twenties, like concerned parents who come back home at eight-thirty to prevent anything naughty happening with their kids’ birthday party). He said something about, well it’s proper standards like “A Man And A Woman” and “Somewhere My Love” that make the real money and sell the most in the end, not the transitory in-and-out-the-top-20-in-seven-weeks-then-forgotten-forever attractions. However, he added, a few new songs did carry the potential to become automatic standards, and this was one of them, as he introduced “The Procol Harum.”

 

Unlike practically all beat groups, they looked like they were doing nothing. Three of them were sitting down. There was an earnest-looking guitarist but I could hear no guitar. They took their time. There were, uniquely for the period, two keyboard players. One was a shrouded phantom with the suggestion of the beginnings of a beard playing the organ. The other played the piano and sang while staring, slightly bemused, at the screen.

 

The song obeyed no rules of what a pop song should constitute. Even “Strawberry Fields Forever” would still have worked if smoothed over; I can imagine the Seekers doing a de-weirded cover (although their valedictory number fifty hit from later that year, “Emerald City,” was, if anything, weirder). But this? The “chorus” was an instrumental hook. The actual chorus sounded like part of the verse. And it seemed to be about…whatever anyone wanted it to be about.

 

But I can understand the slowly-gaping shock of how this must have come across to people at the time; this stately ship of pop abruptly sailing into view, having seemingly materialised from nowhere – and the analogy stands, for it was among the last spectres of glimpsed, vanishing art drawn into (ex)plain(ed) sight by the pirate radio stations.

 

There is a tremendously moving moment, after (or during?) the song’s first chorus, when the studio camera pans back and we see the besuited audience solemnly but happily dancing slowly with each other, cheek to cheek, like their parents had probably done in the thirties. I watched this clip repeatedly during the first lockdown and thought; how euphorically cathartic this would have been if it were happening now, the hope that one day, some way, we can dance again, be in close contact with another human being again.

 

And then, while reading various obituaries of Keith Reid, the band’s non-performing lyricist who died in March 2023, I discovered that he was the son of a Holocaust survivor and that his family’s direct experience of that horror accounted in great part for the near-apocalyptic nature of many of his lyrics. The notion of “Whiter Shade Of Pale” representing some final retreat from a near-unspeakable terror cemented itself in my mind.

 

The song itself, when it’s not freely nodding to Percy Sledge and Bach (but Bob Marley subsequently nodded to it – where do you think “No Woman, No Cry” came from?), doesn’t seem, on examination, to be about much more than some guy getting drunk at a party and unsuccessfully attempting to chat up a woman. It wasn’t even “some guy,” actually; it was THAT Guy – Guy Stevens, the man who gave Procol Harum their name, who would go on to direct London Calling for The Clash.

 

And yet, it is the song’s static patience which made it so radical, even in that peculiarly radical year. Almost alone it was saying, don’t rush, don’t try to be “now” or indeed anywhere else – as a subsequent generation experienced with Oasis, it doesn’t matter what, if anything, the song is saying, because those who listen to the song feel it. Many continue to feel “Whiter Shade Of Pale” to this day.

 

(A total of four verses were originally written for the song but producer Denny Cordell recommended keeping it down to two – otherwise it would be too long for a single, and also it will keep people guessing. The third verse was sung by accident on one TOTP performance, and made the occasional appearance in concert, but the fourth verse was never recorded or performed publicly. I’ve seen those verses – and the late Mr Cordell was right to want to keep the record relatively brief and mysterious.

 

So “Whiter Shade Of Pale”? Great! Momentous!

 

What happens next?

 

For a few months, nothing happened. There was a degree of evanescence around the band. Was this their one statement, their single shot? Actually they were touring or promoting the song abroad or busy writing new songs for a follow-up as well as for an album.

 

When “Homburg” appeared that autumn, there was enough residual public expectation to send the song cascading into the top ten. But it didn’t stick around nearly as long as its predecessor had done, and there were mutterings about soundalike follow-ups. Yet I think it is the better and less readily explicable song.

 

There are tangible differences between “Homburg” and “Pale.” Here, the piano, rather than the organ, is the song’s main musical focus. Also, there was a bit more for Robin Trower’s guitar to do; he had been present on “Pale” mostly for textural thickening purposes, but if you hadn’t noticed his being on it, you certainly would have noticed it if he hadn’t. On “Homburg,” however, he audibly comes up with some astute little countermelodies.

 

On the Continent, however, “Homburg” was welcomed with unquestioning enthusiasm and in some territories actually outperformed “Pale.” An Italian-language cover version ("L'ora dell'amore" by I Camaleonti) was that year’s Christmas number one in Italy and stayed top for ten weeks. An Italian television appearance during that period intersperses onstage performance (or miming) and footage of the band standing around and larking about in a snowbound forest.

 

Nevertheless, despite occasional subsequent hit parade appearances, Procol Harum soon settled for being a cult, albums-based band and despite its many personnel changes seemed happy with that. “Homburg” didn’t and still doesn’t get revived much, if at all, on the radio. But to my teenaged ears it sounded far more alluring, and disturbing.

 

I didn’t know whose multilingual business friend Gary Brooker was talking about or why clocks would eat themselves and everyone else if their hands ever met. Perhaps it was the fact that the song was so underexposed compared to “Pale” – Annie Lennox could never have covered that one – that rendered it fresher to me.

 

But the song continued to disturb me, and I couldn’t figure out why – until the summer of 2018, when I was lying in hospital, sweaty and drugged, when I kept trying to fall asleep and woke up seemingly two hours later to see that the clock on the wall of the corridor in the ward had gone back by two hours. In truth I wanted it to stay midnight, or two a.m. – and any long-term hospital inpatient will know exactly what happens when six in the morning comes around – but what was happening with me was the same as what was happening to the subject of “Homburg” (I don’t think Reid had Tony Hancock in mind).

 

In other words, we were both out of our heads on drugs – the song’s subject voluntarily, me under medical compulsion – and the disorientation of time is EXACTLY as Reid and Brooker articulate it. The world we inhabit is, for the moment, not the same world that we recognise. My brain continues to struggle trying to coalesce both worlds.

 

One year after my hospital residency, an E.P. of Harum’s early work appeared, and included a seven minute plus mix of “Homburg” – everything that was actually recorded at the session. And the most disorientating factor of this extended mix is that, after the song is essentially done…nothing happens for three-and-a-quarter minutes. The song’s main motifs continue to cycle around, sometimes accompanied by an exhausted, wordless vocal yelp or the occasional pianistic arpeggio. Then it draws down to a natural close. But nothing actually happens; there are no extra lyrics, no studio effects, no freaking out, no unanticipated orchestral crescendos. The song just circles around, emphasising its point (if not its purpose, which is unavoidably subjective) – but it is up to us to fill in its blanks before the song refills the aspic.

CHAPTER 63

 

 #38: GIORGIO MORODER

"From Here To Eternity - Single Version"

Single released: September 1977

 

 

If you look at some of the photographs that regularly turn up on social media of various 1960s notables at home listening to records - John Lennon, Julie Christie, Steve McQueen - you'll note that their records are cheerfully scattered across the floor. In some cases, singles are piled atop each other without sleeves to cover them. Many distressed audiophiles of our time throw a minor fit at that spectacle. Didn't they, uh, take care of their records? How much value (now the capitalist crocodile sneaks its way through the mud of memory) got wiped off them? Don't they have any...respect for records?

The short bilateral answer to that last question is: no and yes. No because when pop happens, respect is the last thing on the mind of its truest lovers. And also yes because these people are showing pop their fullest respect. You see, in the sixties, pop records weren't things to be "collected," not like classical, jazz, folk, blues or...you know, those things adults did, like telling young people to shut up. Nobody gave them a third thought; why would they? Pop was disposable by definition - this was the music popular in, at, of and for its time. Nobody at its presumed peak envisaged pop to have a history, to be archiveable. It seemed contrary to its intention. You loved a pile of music for five weeks, then moved on to another one. Names of performers recurred because you became attached to them - you fancied them, you trusted them, you relied on them - but in essence it was all about searching for the next thrilling thing, or things that made you feel thrilled (not quite the same thing).

Certainly no one before Jann Wenner and his Ivy chums decided to chalk divisive rules on their groovy blackboard conceived of pop (or rock) record collections, so that toffs could once again sniff their supremacist noses at what filthy pleb serfs liked. What do you think Artie West from Blackboard Jungle would have made of a concept like Classic Album Sundays - no talking, no going to the toilet - apart from a hall suddenly filled with matchwood?

Most pop lovers, however, whatever their generation, continue to do what John, Julie and Steve did; they appreciate and cherish (not in that order) what they come across and find themselves feeling at this, and no other, point in their lives. Growing up in seventies Lanarkshire, I had no real grasp, or even a mythical one, of collecting records (it turned out that I never did get a grasp. Here, where I live, music accumulates, like read magazines). Buying records was a diverting thing to contemplate every now and again, usually depending upon how much residual pocket money was available to me, but otherwise I tended either to use the local libraries or simply tape songs from the radio, crass disc jockey chatter included.

Listening over and over to pop songs taped from the radio was how I grew to understand how and why pop worked. There was no pattern, no underlying aesthetic stigmata; if it caught my ear and stayed in it, I liked it. In 1977 this involved things as apparently diverse as Rod Argent's synthesised revisit of Satie's "Gymnopédie no 1" and Lou Reed's "Walk On The Wild Side," the latter then a four-year-old oldie (in those days, oldies strictly meant the sixties and, if you occasionally stretched things, the fifties. There was less "history" to negotiate then).

Actually, "Walk On The Wild Side" became something of a totem for me because it just sounded...different from everything else that was going on, and perhaps also helped deliver me from the painful inconvenience of my daily life. When it hit the top ten in 1973 I was much more interested in The Goon Show and All About Science than I was about pop and the record didn't register with me at all. But it eventually found its way through to me.

I liked the record's hectares of space. So little seems to happen yet cumulatively quite a lot of things come to pass. I listened to the relationship between the close-up lead voice, the folk club guitar, the twinned double basses of artful smoke, the siren backing singers drifting into view then immediately slamming into your face, and, in the very far distance, a high string section. And, at the end, to the baritone saxophonist deciding whether he wants to be Gerry Mulligan or John Surman (it was actually stalwart Ronnie Ross) - the record fades before that dilemma can be resolved.

I didn't know what the hell Reed was singing about. I didn't at that time know anything about Warhol's Factory and perhaps I was happier not knowing. All I registered were these funny people with funny things to whom funny (or deeply unfunny) things happened. As a record, a thing in itself, it hooked me.

Late spring was always good because if it was warm and the sun was shining we'd be let out of P.E. class and brought towards the playing fields down behind the school for a game of football. I was in goal and hardly ever troubled by the need to dive and save a ball, hence had an enormous lot of time to crouch down and contemplate...the immense space, and peace, in that field. Everybody else was generally busy down the other end so I was left to myself. I would consider the relationship between the blue in the air and the green on the ground and think of that faint, high string section on "Walk On The Wild Side."

I felt...freed from the horrendous business of my own life, or the one which had been imposed on me. I felt...away from school, from parents, from obligations. That undisturbed ocean permitted me, however briefly, to be myself.

(Four decades later, I'd be painfully lying in a hospital bed, and catching a glimpse of the books and DVDs being sold by whoever was advertising ceaselessly on the above-bed television screen I couldn't afford to use, I recaptured that ineluctable seventies blueness and thought forever how wonderful life was then, before reminding myself with gentle abruptness that it was not.)

There were other songs, like "Roadrunner" by Jonathan Richman. It was supposed to be "punk" but I liked it because it pottered along like a primary school child learning to do a pop song. It sounded made up on the spot, rhythmically contradictory at times, too many words to fit into any rational metre; it sounded as if its singer was happily immersing himself in the processes of creating music, discovering its own dynamics. And it was about celebration, of driving, of walking, of shopping, of BEING ALIVE. Such unexamined joy (always the best sort).

All barriers were down with me because I didn't know that barriers existed. Hence the Stranglers, the Jam and the Sex Pistols (in that order) were of equal importance to my ears as Stomu Yamash'ta, Premiata Forneria Marconi and Kraftwerk (and that isn't even getting into soul, reggae, jazz or disco). Let's not try to rewrite history. In 1977 Trans-Europe Express was marketed and regarded as a progressive rock album. I taped the entire first side as it was broadcast on a Friday early evening specialist prog-rock show on Radio Clyde called Son Of Baroque N' Roll, hosted by a guy called Colin McDonald (although Brian Ford may have been sitting in that particular week). I immediately thought it was somewhere just beyond brilliant, but it was not at the time considered the godfather of electro or techno or hip hop or anything else because these things hadn't been invented or yet come to wider public attention. It was treated no differently to such contemporaries as The Mathematician's Air Display by Pekka Pohjola (which I also liked).

 

I remember October 1977 being, for whatever reason, a particularly concentrated month for this subtype of activity. "Holidays In The Sun" and "Complete Control" marked the beginning of my real interest in punk; "rock" songs which spend their second half meticulously, if despairing, unravelling their own structures and negating their motives. "Virginia Plain," back after five years to promote a Greatest Hits album, sounded absolutely of the moment in its cheerful disruption. "'Heroes'" needed its quotation marks because it was a passionately impassionate examination of the clinical notion of freedom; suppose you did get gifted sound and vision - what would you hear and see? Its performer imagines escape, love, danger, courage and freedom while being deadly scared of the notion translating into action. He actually needs that wall to stay up; otherwise, how could he justify his work?

(It is possible that the British espied this uncertain duality and stopped the single at #24, despite a personal appearance by Bowie on Top Of The Pops, although it is far more likely that its lack of progress was more attributable to RCA's pressing plants having completely given themselves over to pressing up Elvis' back catalogue - as I recall, the single was always out of stock.)

 

Then there was the single edit of "From Here To Eternity." I knew that Giorgio (no "Moroder" on the label) was behind the work of Donna Summer. That summer, "I Feel Love" had struck me as a thing of its own wonder, an isolated blossom rather than an alternative pathway towards an ill-defined future (I bought the 12-inch from Listen Records, Renfield Street, on the afternoon of Saturday 2 July, the same afternoon that "Pretty Vacant" came into the shop; I got the fourth single out of that box). As summer hurtled towards autumn, however, "Eternity" sounded perhaps even more radical.

Beyond the Vocoderised prelude, the rhythm and overlying instrumentation sounded more ominous, more autumnal, than "I Feel Love" had done. The singer was a "Mystery Voice" and sounded a bit like Jonathan King (it appears to have been Pete Bellotte). He sings a couple of verses and two choruses which could have swooned their way out of 1968.

But then the song...disappears. There is a break for the synthesised rhythm alone, before the music bubbles up again and quite unexpectedly offers us a new melody and arrangement, with only a wordless female choir (one of whom sounds like Donna Summer herself). The urge to travel, to go forward (long before "going forwards" transmutated into the insufferable mantra soundtracking and undermining every workplace) is as palpable as Kraftwerk's train - but in October 1977 I was startled by the concept of "the song" being steadily dismantled. What was this "pop record"? It was frightening, it was ecstatic, it was avant-garde, it was so patiently elegant. It mimicked the sound of pop being consumed by itself.

There was an album, which came out before the single but with which I didn't catch up until later, and it transpired that the single was a series of edited highlights of a quarter-hour piece as episodic but determined as Trans-Europe Express. That first side of the album remains remarkable in itself but possibly devalues the shock impact of the single by dispersing its dynamics, explicating its imposing compactness. The single of "Eternity," constructed in precise reverse of "Sound And Vision," suggested with neonlit harshness that we probably were alone, if not unobserved. But it was so nice and polite in its fetid precision. I wouldn't have gleaned that if Paul Burnett hadn't spoken over the fadeout on my Certron (3 for £1 - they weren't brilliant, but they were cheap) blank C90. These inelegant things, you see, taught me about catching, listening to and retaining feelings for pop music, much more than any shelves would have managed.

CHAPTER 62

 

39: LF SYSTEM

“Afraid To Feel”

from the single “Afraid To Feel”

Released: May 2022

 

 

People my age seem to luxuriate in sneering at the way pop music is now – in some cases, has been for more than three decades. It all sounds the same! It’s bits of other records glued together! There’s no “song.” It makes no sense. It’s noisy. I don’t understand it. I don’t know how these same people, or their ancestors, would have coped in the fifties. This rock and roll! It’s the one beat! All the songs sound the same – if you can call them “songs”! It’s bits of rhythm and blues and country ingloriously glued together. The “words” are just nonsense, unjust gibberish. It makes no sense. It’s noisy enough to give me headaches. IT ISN’T LIKE THE POP MUSIC I KNEW AND LOVED WHEN I WAS THE RIGHT AGE TO CARE ABOUT IT.

 

Great dance records in particular, though, be they “Rock Around The Clock” (originally described on its label as constituting a “Novelty Foxtrot”) or “Da Funk,” depend on maintaining a very canny balance between tension and release. In the late spring of 2022 I was very struck by how unlike anything else in the chart “Afraid To Feel” sounded. It might ostensibly consist of nothing more than a long sample from an old soul song that bounces between end-of-the-night smoocher and right royal rave-up. But usually that’s most of what you need to make a great pop record. When Pete Ham wrote “No Matter What,” it was because he thought the song good enough for the Beatles. He didn’t sit down with thirty Atlantic and Stax LPs, minutely documenting all the shifts and turns in that music. Kids danced to it at school discos and I expect used the record as an excuse to get close to that classroom neighbour they’d mutually fancied the whole year through.

 

In that instinctive tradition (a contradiction, I know), I will not go into an exhausting breakdown of how two guys from somewhere around Edinburgh found some old record in a shop on Leith Walk and knew they could purposively play with it. It is not the intention of this book to be a sodden encyclopaedia or curdling catacomb of recycled Wikipedia entries. It’s all about – or SHOULD be all about - how it makes me, the author, feel. Most music writers proceed on the assumption that both they and their readers are “afraid to feel” because feeling things are somehow common. “Afraid To Feel,” on the threshold of the first summer we’d been allowed to enjoy in two years, made me feel better.

CHAPTER 61

 

 

#40: BASEMENT JAXX

“Romeo”

from the album Rooty

Released: June 2001

 

 

It was the last party, to which she couldn’t be invited. It opens a record described at the time as the soundtrack to its year’s London summer. Throbbing its pouch out of an epiphanous chorale with that unapologetic and isolated opening guitar chord, immediately making me think of the Specials, the song ejects you from your crinkling pale blue sofa. That right-angled relationship between drumline and bass tempting me back to a comforting darkness which never quite existed. Sunday, 1974, 4:40 p.m. in the dark, ATV, Norman Vaughan (even though Charlie Williams was actually, if fleetingly, presenting The Golden Shot at that time but FUCK FACTS). Determined like a fresh bag of Tudor Crisps. You danced in your head to it one year later to prevent yourself from going mad thinking what might have been, even though you knew in your gut that it could never have been. She just wasn’t that much INTO this.

 

I don’t think much about the music of 2001 because I had too many other things imposed upon me that year to think about. I still need to catch up with it, even if, as I have done, I arrived in the departure lounge a generation too late. The album came out on Monday 25 June, four days before she collapsed in our GP surgery and had to be taken to the Radcliffe Infirmary. “You used to be my Romeo.”

 

Let it go?

 

In 2023 I think about how the two members of Basement Jaxx came from Camberwell, met in Clapham, named their second album after a regular club night in Brixton, and hired two eleven-year-old kids from Streatham to contribute to the song on the B-side of the single of “Romeo,” and listen to the Cloud One/Margo Williams/Patrick Adams song at the cynosure of "Romeo," and even though it now all sounds thoroughly of its time, I realised that this music had actually, and patiently, waited for me to catch up, so that I could identify its real and proper context; in the gloriously happy Lambeth of here and now.

 

Let all of the past GO!!

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 60

 

#41: FOCUS

"Sylvia"

from the album Focus 3

Released: November 1972

 

 

It's a pretty sad sight, isn't it, a pile of old pop records. I don't just mean in the sense of stumbling across them in charity shops, wondering who brought them in and to whom they once belonged. The names of the shops - British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research, Age UK - suggest that unhappy things may have befallen their former owners. What do you leave behind you when you go, however, and if you didn't manage to draft a will, then where will the things you left behind end up?

It is of course also the possible case that donors of these records may simply have grown out of them, or away from them. But the cumulative poignancy is unavoidable and overwhelming. Look at all those brightly, tackily-illuminated NOW albums, offering the most popular songs of their moment, or those k-Tel albums from up to half a century ago which once looked so exciting and, well, now in Woolworths. It's as if the child in us has vacated themselves.

What is the purpose of holding onto all of that former music? With the uncalled-for recycling of a spent, defunct format for sound reproduction, the layout of most record shops now resembles a morgue; dead culture, born-dead clones, piled in unlovable piles of necrophiliac grey. Thank Christ I don't collect records. When people ask me about my record collection, I simply and politely respond that I haven't got one. I'm not a "collector." Record collections are like butterfly collections, carefully assembled and displayed, and entirely lifeless.

What we actually have is a record library - a living archive of ever-changing preferences and whims, all of which gets used, based on a benignly immovable foundation of music which demonstrates how we live, what our lives have involved and encompassed. A century down the line - if humanity manages to get that far - this record library, if preserved, will prove to the world that once we existed, that this was what marked us out as human beings. Look and marvel at what we were able to imagine, or even achieve.

From my perspective that would include rock instrumentals from when I was a young boy in the midst of primary school which remind me of many things other than its content, things and people which can never be recaptured or reproduced. Oddities which managed to penetrate this intermittently liminal journal of popular songs because somebody's gates had been uncannilly left open. The chilling, fallacious reassurance that those things you recognised and adored when the song's tense was present could never disappear. Reach my age and the final rallentando of apologetic organ and drums will have you counting down the moments which might still be allowed to you. And that, perhaps, is why people don't let go of their music unless they absolutely have to - this, impassive posthumous observer, was me.

(Envoi: I do like how the tune was originally written in the late sixties, with lyrics, under the title "I Thought I Could Do Everything On My Own, I Was Always Stripping The Town Alone." Sylvia Alberts, the singer for whom the song had been intended, understandably didn't like it. The point, though, is, in the end, you can't. I don't know who could.)