CHAPTER 44

 

 

 

 

#57: INNER CITY

"Good Life"

from the single "Good Life"

Released: November 1988

 

 

You came to London in the eighties because it wasn't where you grew up. You didn't have to pretend to be a stalwart son of the parish and have your every word, motion and thought suffocatingly monitored by nineteenth-century puritanism. London was everything and possibly everybody you couldn't find back at home, that they didn't even think of having at home. You'd get off the coach at Marble Arch and the WH Smiths at that end of Oxford Street would have albums by Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel in their racks. You'd drop into your local Our Price and downstairs they had Damaged by Black Flag and Einstein On The Beach. The promise of London was lushly realisable.

In the eighties, and to a lesser extent in the nineties, London was your playground. You could afford to do and buy anything and go anywhere. You could even manage to run two flats on a basic Administrative and Clerical Grade 4 salary. Every sanded stone in the city blinked promise at you. It was the city of which you had dreamed probably since about 1970, when six-year-old you fantasised about living in Buckingham Palace or Tower Bridge. In fact you'd already been through the city in 1969, in a taxi going from Euston to Victoria; you remember the Mall and the Palace looming at you like a televisual antique. It did not quite seem real. Luckily, very few things do at that age.

But you didn't get to London until the eighties and being there was like the first seventeen years of your life summed up and imperiously served back at you. The Evening Standard, 20p from outside the Tube station! Time Out and City Limits, all those jazz records drooled over by seventies music journalists there and yours for a couple of pounds, if that. Shakin' Stevens beaming in various strategic parts of the City of Westminster in his video for "What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?" summed up the astonished jouissance of the days.

Perhaps deep down we knew it was as yet uncalled-in bullshit, running on pretend money that never really existed but would still be foreclosed. I understand how people there felt, though; they considered Thatcherism the licence for a party, and anybody who didn't find the scenario gut-level attractive is lying. The expiring dregs of surplus funds in the sandcastle of capitalism were then still sufficient to permit the illusion that we could do things like this. You're young, enjoy yourself and live; don't waste your time and disposable income on boringly square mortgages. The fact that four decades later you would effectively be punished for not doing the latter occurred to you not once.

But the unimpeachable joy of boarding a number nine bus which would sidle up elegantly to Piccadilly Circus and there, immediately to your right, were the newspaper vendor selling you Melody Maker and NME on Tuesday teatime, and Tower Records, in which latter I could, and frequently did, spend entire days. The astonishment of seeing the dome of St Paul's arising like a Neptune from layers of oceanic myth on that small and important bend in Fleet Street, on the top deck of the number eleven. The unutterable happiness of vaulting up from Portobello Road with the newly-purchased Reverb Motherfuckers album in your Rough Trade carrier bag of an optimistically cloudy but airy Saturday mid-morning.

This record-buying bullshit (or was it bullshit; imagine going out for your lunch hour and coming back with a copy of Bongwater's The Power Of Pussy - you couldn't have done that in Lanarkshire) is just secondary to the overall amazement that you felt in your bones in regard to the thing which used to be called London. But it was never just about the excitement. As I've already intimated, this joy came with a price.

You could articulate that potential contradiction in various ways. In the video to Clive Griffin's forgotten 1988 single "Don't Make Me Wait" - it was A-listed on Capital and if you were there is as instantly redolent of those Sloane's Pizza/Knightsbridge underpass days as, say, "Follow The Leader" or, if you incorporate pirate radio into this schemata, "To The Rhythm" by Longsy D and Cut Master M.C. (the one which sampled "Return Of Django") - he lurks in and around Westminster Bridge, waiting for an idealised girl who never really shows up.

Or you could be Inner City, whose "Big Fun" was as inescapable in mid-1988 central London as "The Only Way Is Up" - every shop and car blared one or the other - and whose follow-up reflected the increasingly auburn times as that year approached its end (think Isn't Anything, Bummed, Winter Was Hard). In the video to the song you see Paris Grey cheerfully shopping in Regent Street - we've never had it better! - but this is balanced by footage of Kevin Saunderson impatiently waiting for her taxi at the Lister Hospital end of a rainy Chelsea Bridge, and scenes of both outside St Paul's Cathedral - later the site of an extended Occupy! protest sit-in, but in this setting lends us the indispensable spiritual(ist) backdrop to gleeful consumerism.

The song itself is in a rueful, processional minor key, as if the singer knows that this manner of existing isn't really good or life, and that there is bound to be a dismal payback. Viewing in retrospect from this purposely-wrecked shell of a city which constitutes the London of 2023, we can interpret "Good Life" as a warning, or, as Tony Bennett would understand it, a goodbye kiss to capitalism. How do we function when the baubles are exhausted?

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.