CHAPTER 55

 

#46: MUM & DAD

"Dawn Rider"

from the album Mum & Dad

Released: April 2002

 

The Mum & Dad album might be one of the great Manchester albums. I only discovered its existence thanks to the inclusion of “Dawn Rider” on Richard X’s Back To Mine compilation mix CD. This is a demon of a song – imagine Sigue Sigue Sputnik done (im)properly (“Be bop a lula I’m the dawn rider!”) – and on checking the album credits I note that it was co-written by the late Tony Ogden, former fucked-up genius of World of Twist.

Music usually finds its way to me sooner or later if it’s any good, and usually for a good reason. By the time the album reached me, though, it was too late, since the trio had already spliut. Nevertheless Mum & Dad is an excellent record, a good pointer to where GoldFrapp might have been heading at the time - observe the opening “The Electric Mistress” with its refrain of “Whip you into shape, don’t you dare disobey,” and the lilac stampedes of “Six Week Holiday” and “Kiss Of Death” (the sort of record I wish Suzi Quatro had gone on to make after her first five singles DON'T DARE FALL ASLEEP) – but also recognise the piteous poignancy of songs like "Marvin” with its introduction of playground schoolchildren and Boys’ Brigade drum tattoos and its lyric of sectioned-off alienation (“Don’t talk to me,” “my special friends,” “you all leave me cold”), the ambiguous, Syd Barrett-esque glee of “Easy Peasy” (“If everyone else was as simple as you/We’d all feel better…Laughing is easy when you’re breathing with me”) and the worrisome “Bird With A Broken Wing” and “Butterfingers” – listening to the former, with its refrain of “Tiny thing, won’t you sing for me once again?” and “I wish I could have saved you,” reminds me that it’s probably for the better that I didn’t hear this in 2001; it might have helped finish me off. But this is a brilliant record – singer Clair Pearson both more assured and more uncertain than Alison Goldfrapp - a difficult balance to maintain - while the invention of musicians Ian Rainford and Joe Robinson is endless. Did I really once, or even twice, write like this?