CHAPTER 74

 

#27: JANE WEAVER

“Stages Of Phases”

from the album Flock

Released: March 2021

 

 

Of course I imagined this came out a year before it did. Nobody apart from know-it-all bores can really pinpoint what music happened in 2020 or in 2021. It’s all melted into this bright blue nylon screen of a pudding. 2019 and early 2020 seem like a millennium ago and also about five minutes past. That era when the world was – not perfect, but “normal,” and normal human beings could still go about their unglamorous but vital normal lives doing their normal things.

 

Then we couldn’t. A world ended and nobody has yet worked out the paradigm of a new one. Hence we stumble in quarter-blindness, not really understanding that most of the things we thought we loved about the world were no longer there, had been eliminated or at minimum banished. We grasp at twigs of seeming benevolence, hopeful remnants of what we previously identified as “the world.”

 

So this record appeared in the early spring of 2021 although it is indented in my mind that it was released one year earlier, just before the world was imprisoned. The song is high in this list because I listened to it a lot, for the reason that I found it attractive, catchy and reassuring. It possesses elements of things the world has lost, including the Glitter beat – well, that was his fault anyway, but we cannot keep denying its immense influence – humanist leagues of dreaming clouds of pink resolution and slyly stalwart usage of Picardy thirds. I don’t really know what the words are about except this is a way to get somebody back, to retrieve them, perhaps from Dantean hell. The “long way round” twirls like sixties girl pop toffee and would confuse people today. Bugger people today and leave lyrical interpretation to Ph.D. theses. The song still clings to the glove of hope.

 

 

CHAPTER 73

 

 

#28: AUDIOBOOKS

“LaLaLa It’s The Good Life”

from the album Astro Tough

Released: October 2021

 

 

It’s a generation after Inner City and the baubles were about all that got spared. The neutron bomb virus had preserved all the trees and buildings but erased or hid the human beings. As we gingerly emerged from the iron pyrite-dotted wreckage, we gradually understood that we had to learn to act like human beings again. It is a difficult thing to have to relearn when the world would rather have scratched you out of its right pupil.

 

So yes, this is a jaunty, jittery art riot of concealed despair, despair about what happened to my iPhone (but don’t MOAN!) or that Uber XL or the margarita, knowing that it might still just be illegal, thus its quasi-epileptic chorus, designed to disguise the performers’ existence, and understanding the deep void which masks this attempt at ecstasy. It is barely two-and-a-quarter minutes long – a woman drawls, some guy hiccups the soundtrack – but it was a post-epidemic experiment under masked glass; does this way of existing still work, and why doesn’t it?

CHAPTER 72

 

 

#29: THE ALL SEEING I featuring TONY CHRISTIE

“Walk Like A Panther”

Single released: January 1999

 

 

You look at the world as it is and realise that it’s moved on without you and left you behind. As far as your life is concerned that could be its entire story. You always get left behind. At school they hung out and excluded you. At university they barely tolerated you and included you out. In your own homes everybody else in them moved on and left you feeling like the only one out of step. The Fridge in Brixton on 23 December 2001. A Christmas outing with old work colleagues. There were eight freebie tickets for staff and you were the ninth person there. No one was going to pay the nine pounds needed to admit you, least of all you. You solitarily crept home, slept for two hours then travelled to Scotland for a not very merry season. But in Oxford, nearly four months earlier, the family drove home by themselves on the night it happened and left you on your own. “Let us know when you’re moving out so we can take the coffee table.” You NEVER forgot that.

 

On the message board, both online and in life, they wanted you gone. You started a music blog and that was fine for about eighteen months then the moneyed scavengers swept in and ensured you were written out of all histories of music blogging. You tried to become a published music writer and realised fairly quickly that the shop was firmly closed. One book was written for purposes of vanity publishing, and then only as a substitute for somebody else who had turned them down. At work they just considered you weird, if peerlessly efficient. Visitors to the office acted like you were invisible.

 

The world moved on without you because it was built to do that and you weren’t. Any natural self-confidence you may once have possessed was physically knocked out of you at an early age. You closed up, shut your eyes and sealed your mouth because you didn’t wish to run the risk of being beaten up again. You have avoided almost all non-official photographs being taken of yourself since the age of fifteen because somebody made fun of your looks and you retreated into self-containment.

 

The world elected to do without you because of this ball and chain of a condition with which you were born and which has violently stopped you from achieving most of the things your peers managed. But were your peers really your peers? What part does arrogance, or what is perceived as arrogance (but is actually chronic shyness), portray in any of this?

 

Sometimes the rejected person has to stand in the middle of Castle Market and argue the case for themselves. You idly heard the song on your radio Walkman while heading home on foot from Denmark Hill to Victoria, and thence onto a coach to Oxford, a few months before it came out. Before that other thing happened, and you didn’t really know what planet you were on but it sounded like a remix of something old and obscure. Hadn’t you heard that voice before somewhere? The voice sounded magisterially angry, tired of bullshit, sick of this sickening new world that he and seemingly only he recognised as fake, ready to fight back against morons half his age but twice his size, cities being ground into opulent dust, the stupidity of refracted tomorrows. Then you realised that this voice came from the world of your mother, and those Bush radiograms. He was telling you that actually you had been doing the right thing all along. I eventually made it. Bollocks to “the world.”

 

 

CHAPTER 71

 

#30: THE SILOS

“When The Telephone Rings”

from the album When The Telephone Rings

Released: August 2004

 

 

I was all out of pain, or had deposited any residual pain in reserve. Laura was buried on Thursday 6 September, four years to the day after Diana’s funeral. She had barely been gone more than just over two weeks when the world ended. I hadn’t anything left to feel or give. I had enough grief (if, not yet, enough of grief). You watched the live footage on the work PC screens – I don’t think anyone was doing any actual work that Tuesday afternoon. You travelled home through an auburn fog of stunned bafflement, listened to the radio speaking for confirmation that the world had ended. Your employer had warned you to take care travelling home; they had even thought of keeping staff in because of supposed or imagined threats.

 

You were too busy trying to pull your collapsed self back together and there would be further, neighbour-to-calamitous collapse before any pulling could be pulled off. You had no time to think of the city you had visited at six times in your life, the first two when nobody sane travelled there, particularly to the Lower East Side (but then, nothing put my father off, except, in the end, his heart). No, you were occupied by your own internal battles. You wouldn’t want anybody to see what you looked like, those final Saturdays in Oxford; a generation later you still frighten yourself thinking about it.

 

It is three years later, almost to the week, when you’re unknowingly approaching the final act of reassembling your self, that you hear this quiet, almost apologetic in its pleading, song at some unearthly morning hour. “Even in New York – how I long for New York.” The fucked-up forks of exiled tongues, and even pissed at four-fifteen in the morning you recognise an elegy when you feel its curtain skyscrapers and its perishing world. It is the exit song of the West.

 

It is four years later still, one breeze-bedazzled but still sunny Saturday, and you are having a day out – a day away from your unpromising surroundings – looking for music; you go far and further trying to find the thing. It’s barely gone ten o’clock in the morning when you go upstairs in the second-hand shop and see this 2-CD, 42-track, probably not entirely legal Steinski compilation but you buy it anyway. You will go as far as Southgate, where the hippie in the Oxfam shop speaks knowingly of Zappa while you pick up a copy of the Red Rat album.

 

 

 

The thing turns up at the end of that day, almost as an afterthought, in your back yard. But you listen many, many times to the last track on the first CD of that Steinski compilation and it is undanceable, opaque, demanding (that you care), and features voices dutifully telling us that something horrible has just happened, is still happening, and the duty then crumbles to barely-suppressed fear as some of these voices know they are about to die horribly. “Number Three On Flight Eleven.” Interspersed with that dialogue, along with extracts with whatever was on television at that point, is a solemn, Masterpiece Theatre voice, intoning a soliloquy – “Even in New York – how I long for New York – when the telephone rings.” The same words you heard on that song three years earlier, augmented by some amended Matsuo Bashō haikus from nine centuries before.

 

Years yet later you will learn that Steinski knew the main person in The Silos and that via a middleman (a bandmate) the song was given to him and he interpreted it as it stood, or sat. He made the song – one of the greatest songs of the last quarter-century, however much that estimation is worth – the memoriam it had always promised to intend. The voice of the receiver, at the end…”Yes…We’re still here…”

 

Where I found the thing was in my then-local Oxfam and it was a Mastercuts compilation of jazz-funk and its final track was Bobby Caldwell’s “What You Won’t Do For Love” with its Arcades Project corridor of a long and patient fade. That was a blue carpet towards my future. I love that song more than most songs but it isn’t in this particular one hundred because the music one loves the most isn’t necessarily – indeed, rarely is – the music one plays most often.

 

 

CHAPTER 70

 

#31: ASSOCIATES

“Club Country”

12-inch single

Released: April 1982

 

 

The Tuesday smiles were unnerving. It was the calmest, warmest and most disciplined of evenings out in a part of the village which wasn’t quite the village I recognised, resplendent chairs crammed with awkward ducks wise enough to realise that school wasn’t worth anybody’s bother, least of all theirs, who benignly bulldozed their own pattern through the timid etchings of life. Huge, whitening tuxedos, property developers who maybe promised me a future; I wouldn’t know, being voluntarily stranded on another mental planet at the time.

 

It was the annual Rotary Club meeting and I had agreed, via my school, to go up there and make a speech. I can’t remember what the hell, if anything, my speech was about, except it was most likely as fatally overcrammed with qualifying clauses as every other thing I have written. However, it went down uncomprehendingly well, and I was politely schmoozed from agents of promise from whom I never heard again.

 

Social life in my later school years consisted of my fumbling attempts to put myself about. None of them stuck, else I wouldn’t be writing this now. I wrote an essay about something or other which won a prize – can’t remember what it was, but I had to go to Bellshill Academy in order to collect it and be reassured by the middle-aged lady who awarded it to me that I had a future. I didn’t keep a copy and nor do I suspect did anybody else. Again, there was no consequence.

 

Hence, when this song materialised a couple of springs later I immediately understood its aura of suffocated compromise, its surface busyness scarcely concealing a gully of absence. I didn’t stick around at the Club but still managed to get looked down upon. Oh, everyone in Uddingston looked down on me, those nice middle-class types with detached homes or bungalows in Douglas Gardens or Kylepark, at this hapless, impenitent clot stuck in a flat above a pub and a launderette. It didn’t matter whether I was at an actual country club or in the classroom; I felt that every breath I did breathe belonged, de facto, to somebody else, a stolidly solid member of the parish who went to church every Sunday (we did not go to church any Sunday – oh, there’s the stain of irreparable sin).

 

The genius of the song “Club Country” is that it juggles and rearranges those violently discursive inner voices keeping the singer’s arteries available with impossible chord changes, bass parts and lyrics which remain just the right Simple Minds edge of coherent – the song is all about impressions, those we hope to make on others and how they are at eternal war with the impressions we wish to preserve of ourselves. Maintain this outer self which isn’t you but keeps you alive; it’s something the child learns at birth – act in ways which please the mother who is going to feed you. Then sustain it because it’s just so much easier for society. What the child secretly wants is unattainable because then there would be no civilisation. I’m not sure anybody managed to tell “Club Country”’s main singer and co-writer that.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 69

 

#32: UNDERWORLD

“Born Slippy .NUXX”

Single B-side

Released: May 1995

 

 

The initial thought was: is that Prefab Sprout? What part of Jordan: The Comeback sounds like that? Something noble and eternal about that circle of changes, akin to an untouchable monument. But then the Vorticist voice stumbles into the square by accident and presents us with semi-dissolute sound poetry – is this Bob Cobbing? – as if about to micturate upon the monument (but he can’t control himself!).

 

The tone is alcoholic and the words were written and performed by a then still recovering alcoholic. But you can magnify the confusion and hue of mental dislocation to encompass the portrait of somebody who has loved London not wisely but too well; everything blurs into a relentless, ceaseless crusade of transient relief – the record shops, the streets, the headaches, Tottenham Court Road vertigo, going back to Romford, never going back to Romford if I, if anybody can help it.

 

For me at a dangerous point in the second half of the nineties, Oxford was my “Romford”…

 

Karl Hyde has frequently mentioned the pain he feels when (largely drunk) audiences shout multiple “LAGER”S at him – it ISN’T a celebration, you conical clots, but a plea for help and deliverance. The repeat “LAGER”s only happened because Hyde lost his place with the words (the vocal was recorded in one primal take). If you can transpose London to Glasgow, think of the closing section of James Kelman’s A Disaffection, where schoolteacher Patrick Doyle has reduced himself to the level of a shambling sham of a drunk, running across the road in Cowcaddens and trying to get himself killed, to end the pain.

 

You see everything yet also nothing when you are experiencing a mental breakdown. Everything explodes but nobody notices except you. After the thud everybody recognises, the drunk boards the train and it takes off, sometimes throbbing as it pulses through tunnels, before coming to an uncertain yet unavoidably terminal halt. As beautifully streamlined and “modern” as anything the early eighties Simple Minds would have envisaged, is this, but Hyde is less interested in any notion of “great cities” and would much rather yell “DO YOU WANT ANYTHING OUT OF THE VAN?” (which was the original working title for “Theme For Great Cities”; the ice cream van would chime its way outside Mick MacNeil’s council house living room).

 

Perhaps, for me, 12:30 p.m. on Saturday 24 October 1998, at the junction of Trevor Place and Knightsbridge, was the outcome that had always been waiting, been invited, to happen.

CHAPTER 68

 

#33: TONY HATCH AND THE SATIN BRASS

“Sounds Of The ‘70s”

from the album Sounds Of The ‘70s

Released: 1970

 

 

The greater part of my record library was systematically dispersed, for whatever money I could get for it, after Laura died in August 2001. I didn’t leave myself with nothing – maybe next to nothing, but not quite nothing. The costs of closing everything down and relocating permanently from Oxford to London were actually quite considerable and the thought of restarting from scratch was unavoidable.

 

However, one would find unexpected things when browsing in the charity shop – this was an era when these places actually were for the benefit of poor people, before they were swamped by moneyed collectors and bounty hunters – and one of these things was a three-CD box set of work by Tony Hatch which was clearly a budget job but contained enough useful items to warrant buying it, for not very much money (since not very much money was the best I could afford at the time).

 

One of the tracks on the collection which attracted me most was an instrumental entitled “Sounds Of The ‘70s” which the sleevenote confirmed had recently been sampled by the Finnish electronic dance duo Pepe Deluxé. It has stuck with me these subsequent two decades with its air of robbed optimism. Sounds Of The Seventies! Such hope – a new decade, not like the previous one; wipe clean that slate and let Cape Canaveral count us down into something which might well turn out to be The Future.

 

The main theme is a lurching behemoth of ambiguity, mostly proclaimed by bright trumpets and occasionally cautious French horns. It resembles an update of George Martin’s “Theme One,” which may have been its purpose. There is the air of a shy circus tent being methodically set up. The pinging lead guitar appears to be playing nothing harmonically or rhythmically related to the piece, yet is in complete concordance with the piece’s intended mood (I have not been able to discover who exactly played on the piece, but to a substantial extent it doesn’t really matter – the post-Walton totality is the work’s motor). The more rationed brass voicings in the second half of the main melody suggests a more rational decade, perhaps of sporting television themes.

 

About halfway through the piece, however, there is a lull and the listener is escorted into a French horn-led fantasy world of gentleness and compassion. There is an ineffable sadness about what essentially becomes a minor key progression – coupled with the “Penny Lane” piccolo trumpet leading the ensemble, it is as though the sixties, and everything they stood for, are being sadly laid to rest.

 

But this is only a momentary interlude and the main theme, after a pause as meaningful as a Paddington Bear stare, resumes, more boisterous and optimistic than ever. There is a final rallentando before everything swells up towards a climactic fanfare, and behold this miraculous era which is about to come to us…if we want it.

 

It is now half a century ago. We know that the miraculous era never came to pass, precisely because too many of us didn’t want it. I subsequently came across the entire Sounds Of The ‘70s album, as an element of another competitively-priced box set entitled Hatchbox. It mainly consists of late sixties MoR cover versions and seems tailor-made for the Radio 2 of that period. The title track is its clear peak, and has strangely (or not) stayed with me because it stands, in my mind and perhaps only in my mind, for a bereaved life renewed. If humanity can’t make it, I can at least try.

CHAPTER 67

 

#34: TRUE STEPPERS FEATURING DANE BOWERS & VICTORIA BECKHAM

“Out Of Your Mind”

from the album True Stepping

Released: November 2000

 

 

Although the single of “Out Of Your Mind” actually came out in August of 2000, and was promptly beaten to number one by Spiller and Sophie Ellis-Bextor by a margin of 20,000 copies OH STOP THIS SODDING SUB-WIKIPEDIA SHORROCKS look, you had to know what the autumn of 2000 was like west of London; that unusually concentrated glow of golden blithely foreshadowing the end of things (which in one very important way it did). “Black Coffee” by All Saints and Kid A by Radiohead both indicated the same, hesitantly radiant shadows. They called it speed garage and this was its service station deluxe artistic manifestation, sounding agreeably rootless in its triple phantom keyboard stabs as the two singing astronauts found themselves floating in the listener’s space. Yes you did, one of them accuses, no I didn’t, you’re mad, retorts the other. The accuser was the group member you knew and recognised most but was given hardly any solo features. The two sides rotate around each other’s orbits like grumpy satellites and all involved are keen to follow Faust’s advice and not take roots. “Ice Cream, you’re out of your mind,” intones the country’s then most famous woman as if she’s just won the National Lottery. Poing, boing, this tune has punished you.

 

 

 

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.