CHAPTER 7

 

 

 

 

#94: ANNE-MARIE DAVID

"Tu te reconnaîtras"

 

From the album Tu te reconnaîtras

 

Released: May 1973

 

 

The summer of 1973 was non-existent. Unlike the previous five summers, we didn't go anywhere on holiday, although I suspect that was for reasons beyond, or beneath, the weather. It was not a pleasant time to be alive in Britain, not for me personally or for anyone else as a whole. I dreamed as much as possible because it was preferable to Formica-ground reality. I read some comics and also two week-by-week encyclopaedia-type magazines, All About Science and (a bit later that year) The Story Of Pop. I even ordered binders to house those.

The future was as clearcut as ground glass. I would grow up to be a scientist, or an expert on pop music. Perhaps I could become a pop scientist (but Thomas Dolby beat me to that). It was better than the rubber violence I experienced at the time, from father and supposed school peers alike. The aura of the times was as grey as spent pork.

There were quasi-idyllic interludes, even if those involved rambling randomly around the backwoods of Blantyre and Uddingston, emerging on a sunny early evening of a Wednesday in July, looking in the window of the local electricity showroom and the washing machine we were shortly to buy. That's what springs to my mind whenever I hear "You Are The Sunshine Of My Life," anyway.

And there was also light entertainment, which in 1973 involved various then-well-known comedians, magicians and talent competitions, as well as the Eurovision Song Contest. That year Cliff Richard, someone I had never known not to exist, was back after five years with the slightly reluctant schlager-UK of "Power To All Our Friends." Representing Spain were Mocedades with "Eres Tu," a huge hit everywhere around the world except here.

But both songs were nudged out of first place by this elusive lament. Trumpets blow a fanfare, slithery saxophones recall Palais dance bands of an era long since evacuated, or perhaps were just keeping late fifties 6/8 jukebox ballads like "Born Too Late" in their minds. Then the singer tells us, in French (even though she was representing Luxembourg), of "childhood dreams, in the student whom the master punished, in the station where the first adventure of your life begins." The life mirror unnerved me.

She goes on to reassure us that "you" - that is, all of us - will recognise ourselves in every manifestation that life throws at us, in the artist whose glory is denied by the selfish world. "In those who fear, in those who are cold." Look beyond your self, and you will see yourself reflected in all of us. In Luxembourg City the red-dressed singer performed it in a somewhat distressed fashion. In a promotional film she is wearing a suit and tie and glances at the camera conspiratorially from time to time.

The song won, if only by four points, and was recorded in four other languages, including two entirely different Italian editions. In one of the latter, "The King's Bed," she angrily laments the childhood love she knew which has evaporated, abandoning her in a bed far too big for her. What is the point of that empty pillow? "It's not you, that king that once I dreamed of; the man that I wanted and in my fairytales. But you are the only truth, the one I'm going to accept - crying a little bit." Every now and then she falls apart.

The other Italian translation, however, is entitled "You Can't Live By Fear." In this setting, her lover is tormented by an unspecified terror. "I don't feel safe any more," she cries. "Why aren't you speaking? What's in your heart?" Later she indicates "You have a knot in your throat" - trying to avoid the noose? And yet, she will stand by him: "I would fight even if I knew that you were guilty...I'm here to help you, even knowing that I will always have fear and tears that tie me to you." Or is it the mother singing to the abused child?

In Britain the song was renamed "Wonderful Dream" and the singer's delivery is only very minutely uncomfortable, though a lot more discomfiting. The theme of youthful love gone to waste is reiterated, but in Mme David's closing cry of "Oh Lord, don't let it die," I think of the European dream signed into our laws in that very same years, and of how, hauntologically, the hellish present of the past six years* and counting are transposed back into 1973 and Anne-Marie David warning us not to fuck it up. The song - which says all it needs to say in less than two minutes and forty-five seconds - reminds us that an enclosed world will end up a suffocated one.

 

(*Reminder: this piece was written two years ago.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 8

 

 

 

 

 

#93: MARK RONSON & THE BUSINESS INTL.

"Bang Bang Bang"

from the album Record Collection

Released: September 2010

 

One grey, overcast Wednesday afternoon in the very late summer of 2010, we made our way to Portobello Road, or at any rate just off it, because Mark Ronson was in attendance at Rough Trade West promoting his then-new album. I had the day off work and we were always keen to spend as much time away from our accommodation - as it then was - as possible. I can't remember whether we saw Kelly Hoppen directing the unloading of a van across the street from the bus stop - well, we did, but I cannot recall whether it was on that same afternoon or another time altogether.

 

 

 

In the shop, Ronson was seated, having dyed his hair silver, chatting enthusiastically to a couple of young ladies. He signed our copy of the CD without really looking at us. Others in attendance, namely Rose Elinor Dougall and I think Amanda Warner, a.k.a. MNDR, were more forthcoming and gave us nicer signatures. Other books are available.

 

 

 

"Bang Bang Bang" was the first single from an album intent on reconstituting the musical elements of its chief creator's childhood and rendering it meaningful in the 2010 present tense. In any setting it would be a daunting declaration of principles, even if, as guest rapper Q-Tip is at pains to point out, principles are everything a living society should fulminate and act against ("We're believin' in the proof, we're believin' in the truth/We're believin' in each other, not you, you, YOU!"). The music is Heaven 17/Leisure Process-level insistent (the harmonic fab four of F, C, G and B flat) with swirls of atonal improvisation darting around the verses' background and that key vibraphone button so central to pop qualitatives.

 

 

 

Warner's lead vocal, plucking heads in a cruel, CRUEL world, is remorsefully remorseless; she licks the ice of her assassing lips with valuable venom. She'll apologise for killing you as she does it. The song rotates in Clairol Travelcards of baffled blossom. The song quotes "Alouette," which in itself celebrates the lark, the first bird to sing of a morning, and also the worst gossip. Since that song was initially published in A Pocket Song Book for the Use of Students and Graduates of McGill College in 1879, i.e. in Montreal, it is technically French-Canadian. The staccato shoots and sudden ending of "Bang Bang Bang," if they are not to represent the end of the world, should indicate the building blocks for another, better one, and that's what the song would show anyone. I think we caught a 328 bus to go to West Hampstead, the penultimate time we've been there to date.

 

 

 

We've never had a record collection. Collections are dead things that you just sit and stare at and never actually like, let alone listen to. We have a record library. Everything gets used, listened to and loved and they're maybe not in mint condition but we don't run a museum or a mortuary. We're on the side of life, while that's still legal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 9

 

 

 

 

 

#92: BOYZ II MEN

"End Of The Road"

from the album Boomerang: Original Soundtrack Album

Released: June 1992

Although it was very far from being the last hit on the Motown label, “End Of The Road” was maybe the last recognisable “Motown hit” that most people would remember without looking the rest up, and listening to its full-length 5.48 version, and having grown up with Motown in my bones, it is difficult not to become emotional at the spectre of a long and crucial chapter in music being brought to a close. Everyone involved in its making, from writers/producers L.A. Reid and Babyface onwards, must have known the record’s real significance, since stylistically it reaches far, far back, towards the fifties street corner symphonies which gave Motown its original life. This may have been recognised by the record’s American buyers, who made it the most commercially successful of all Motown singles and kept it at number one for a then record thirteen weeks. Here in Britain, although the song only stayed on top for three weeks, it had climbed the chart slowly and patiently for over two months – a real slow burner – before peaking, just as in the old days.

The four members of Boyz II Men take turns to voice the one soul, the soul who knows that he can’t really stop his girl from leaving, but is not confident that he will survive her departure. Their voices cluster and dovetail together just as the teenage Temptations (when they still called themselves the Primes) would have done back in Detroit, but the pain steadily escalates. At first they try to laugh her words off – there is a somewhat forced giggle after the line “Girl, I know you really love me,” and the following lines of “You just don’t realise you’ve never been there before/It’s only your first time” suggest that he may give her the benefit of the doubt (“Maybe I’ll forgive you” – is this “Band Of Gold” narrated from the other perspective?). But then there’s the untrammelled agony of the screaming “Pain in my head/Oh, I’d rather be dead!”

And finally, the crucial break in the song’s smooth 6/8 journey, as the bass narrator – taking the tradition even further back, to the Mills Brothers and Inkspots – voices (possibly to himself) his true feelings: “When you just hurt me and just ran out with that other fella…baby – I knew about it…I just didn’t care…You just don’t understand how much I love you, do you?” he asks in rhetorical pity. As the song swells up towards its final climax behind him, his hurt becomes more palpable – “Yes baby, my heart is lonely…My heart HURTS, baby…Yes, I feel pain TOO!…Baby PLEASE…”

So the soul knows her untruth, yet the soul clings because it doesn’t know how not to; because “End Of The Road” stands as a metaphor for the imminent passing of Motown, and the extreme reluctance not to let go of those memories, that sometimes utterable magic…”Although we’ve come to the end of the road/Still I can’t let go/It’s unnatural!/You belong to me…I belong to you!” The music finally fades to leave the voices on their own, clapping their hands to the slow rhythm, back to doo-wop, back to reminding us all how it started; they wave their farewells, the book is closed…but for those of us who lived through even half of Motown as it happened, that book will always remain open.

 

THEY.

 

CAN'T.

 

LOSE.

 

THEIR.

 

SELVES.

 

AGAIN.

CHAPTER 10

 

 

 

#91: GIORGIO MORODER featuring KYLIE MINOGUE

 

"Right Here, Right Now"

 

from the album Déjà Vu

 

Released: June 2015

 

 

 

 

The beat is a little too forceful to be considered lithe. There appear to be trapped voices deep within the rhythmic sarcophagus. But a woman's voice emerges, slightly bruised by circumstance but still capable of mandated enthusiasm and only partially-stifled wonder. The flashing lights indicate that she is in the club - if the club is to be considered shorthand for the world, which it must - and dancing with someone she might not love but at this moment does not want to love. The sixties girl group "yeah?"s herald some doubt imposing on the singer's self-imposed ecstasy - she could look for love "to get over you," or "for a deeper kiss."

 

 

But the orchestral shimmers indicate that permanence is the last thing on the singer's mind. It illumines her what-other-world wonder and underlines the perceived fact that there is nothing, nowhere, no one, no time, but the singer and whoever is dancing with her and making out that they love her for, oh, another hour at least. It may all be a dreamed Holy Grail, but nothing in the singer's whole life has seemed so touchably real to her and this, and only this, is what she decides matters. In her partner's eyes, she sees the sunrise, but her song never climaxes; having made its point, it fades with gentle abruptness into nothingness, as all sunrises must, its guitar strokes casting the shadow of half a lifetime away.

 

 

It could be said that this singer feels love.

 

 

The song had nothing to do with Jesus Jones but may have been Giorgio Moroder's way of saying hey, I'm still here and haven't fallen asleep. The Daft Punk modules and Nile Rodgers chordalities underline a legacy perhaps a little too firmly, as though this union were convenient rather than symbiotic (as had already been demonstrated on "Get Lucky," which works so fully because not for one second does it sound as though it is trying to make a statement about something). Some wondered whether Moroder was now gamely following trends rather than creating them. Kylie Minogue sings as a Selfridges cosmetics assistant lost in consumable space might.

 

 

As a pop record it was slightly reticent. One radio disc-jockey commented that it sounded slightly dated. It didn't catch on. But its beacon beams an unreal, yet concretely palpable, aura of magic which only practised professionalism can blur into an adornment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 11

 

 

 

#90: QUANTUM JUMP

"The Lone Ranger"

From the remixed single: "The Lone Ranger"

 

Released: May 1979

 

 

Politely hyperactive jazz-funk to conceal the smoothest of lounges, with the guitarist and drummer in particular knowing what they're doing. That's coming from one direction. Feom the other comes a bass pulse which resembles the breathing of a miked-up salamander. Curiously rootless, it indicates another path for dance music in which the bass acts as the song's cynosure, rather than its foundation.

The vocal is authoratitively breathy, resigned yet committed. If it didn't remind you so much of Ian Anderson - who is a Scot - the way in which the voice here wraps its flexors around the Estuary English hard "a" leaping out of the word "masked" in the choruses, you'd think of it as irrefutably English, eveen though its subject matter is American, created and originally broadcast in Detroit (so it is one stop away from being Canadian, another in laying the path for May, Atkins and Saunderson to tread the following decade).

But it's the hook which gets you. Whatever the hell he's chanting, like a Kingsley Amis variant on the introduction to "Tutti Frutti," it evades proper meaning sufficiently to echo with mindful mindlessness across school playgrounds. You don't really listen to the words beyond the dim awareness that this is a shaggy dog story about Tonto and kemosabe, complete with deliberate corn ("back to front-o").

Because it's a hook you know from The Kenny Everett Video Show, which you watch every Monday early evening at 6:45 pm and which is infinitely hipper than the Opportunity Knocks which preceded it. Top Of The Pops was a craggy pastel tent compared with Everett, and apart from the humour (more Jack Jackson than Milligan) it quietly demonstrated an astute pop-reading mind. Cerrone's "Supernature" was the theme tune, and the "Lone Ranger" hook was one intermittent heck of a leitmotif. "Ride into tomorrow today" suggested forgetting The Seventies and hurtling ourselves away from them as fast and eagerly as possible.

I remembered the song from being played briefly on daytime radio, and less briefly on Luxembourg, back in 1976. Back then it sounded as futuristic as, or more obligingly and Englishly so than, whatever Moroder was doing. The songwriter, singer, keyboard player and producer was Rupert Hine from Wimbledon, future producer of The Fixx.

It wasn't on mainstream radio for long, though; most producers saw through what Tonto's peace pipe could make people do, and there was that derogatory slang word for gay that seemed cruel and pointless even then, even though Hine was clearly performing the song from the perspective of its chief narrator, who, twist in the tale approaching, realises the Ranger is gay and...doesn't mind.

The questions the song raises, and the fact that it was picked up and promoted by a fairly openly gay disc jockey, suggest a more complex beast than the one routinely excluded from today's oldies radio. I don't think anyone at my school disco picked up its lyric at all, and these were the same peers making messy fools of themselves attempting to reproduce the intrinsically naff yet deceptively complex dance routines of the band Racey. It was just a great, imaginative liminal pop dancer.

You could never get away with a song like that in the 21st century. But then it wasn't created in the 21st century, and I think we have to get away with the notion of the whole of history being an imperfect path leading us to an allegedly perfect present. Oldies shows on the radio based around the charts - or indeed our received reaction to anything we perceive as dwelling in and for the past - grant us only that version of the past considered most convenient or comfortable for us. I suspect that the reason somebody like Bowie gets such singeingly heavy ladles of hagiography methodically thrust upon him is that he doesn't really represent glam, but we cannot mention the central figure in UK glampop - for reasons that are entirely the fault of said central figure - hence burden the likes of Bowie and Roxy Music with laurels which exceed their actual reach in the period.

We only seem to want the kind of airbrushed history that is acceptable to us, that nods at us, licks our faces and agrees with us. But if you persist in doing that you end up with a sorely atrophied and smudged photocopy of actuality. Focus your eyes on the approved jewels and try to sweep away the dirt without really looking at it. If nothing else, you lose a lot of fun, and are left with a solemn, stuffed New England classroom lecture. It is as if your history, your life as you have known and lived it, your life as your gut recognises it, is rendered into affable nothingness.

It also makes life as a fan of pop music so awkward and complicated that it might drive you to exchange it for a less hassle-ridden pastime, such as birdwatching. You can't fully understand "American Pie" if you don't know, or aren't exposed to, "Rock And Roll (Part 2)" - as rock dies, it is born again, and in the same year. Given the documented fact, however, that both Messrs McLean and Gadd are convicted offenders against women, you keep whittling the essence of what admittedly may be an essentially rancid thing - I don't know, that argument is for another book - eventually leaves you with nothing except the unlovably worthy. Even then, where do you go? "Well, she was just seventeen, if you know what I mean" go the first and second lines of the first song on the first Beatles album; throw those fellows out as well?

What I'm awkwardly trying to state here is that you can't live history as though it were the cloisters of a monastery, with all the mess scrubbed out. Yes, most pop musicians have done and said impossibly horrible things; name me one who hasn't. So you decide to stick to jazz then remember the stories about Miles and Mingus. Awareness of the vaudevillian primitivism at the heart of "The Lone Ranger," including some deeply ill-advised reactions of other band members in the video, as well as David Toop's recent caution that "[in] so much antique comedy...particularly that which depended for its amusement on making sport with those who lack power or are simply different, the laughs have evaporated into a silence of bewilderment: how was this ever [considered] funny?" doesn't prevent me listening to and enjoying Pansy Division, or Phranc, or Shockheaded Peters, or you can list the rest. In my spare time I like to listen to pop records that were hits when I was still at school, to help recall what kind of boy I was and the sort of life I led or was compelled to lead. It isn't just pop records, either - I loved and still love records by the Louis Moholo-Moholo Octet, Anthony Braxton, Keith Tippett's Ark, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. They remind me of where I came from. It was my world and I revel in it, or at least wink at it, without an element of shame or hypocrisy. If our worlds are to contain multitudes, we must therefore recognise that they are, by definition, awash with ridiculous contradictions. History is not our butler.

CHAPTER 12

 

 

 

#89: JOHN CALE

"Bicycle"

from the album HoboSapiens

Released: October 2003

 

 

Oxford, obviously. Cycling up a very steep incline all the way to the Library at Brookes University. The intermittent pumps of organ (or possibly harmonium) remind us of the premature autumnal glory of light (and perhaps Ivor Cutler). The quietly frantic citizen, trying to find Sid so that he can tell him about those gas shares. Dart round the village (or The Village) speedily enough to encompass its body in discounted gold.

 

 

The beat is a dancing lurch, grinding as it glosses. A 1981 fantasy of what a dance record could be as set against the screwed-in 2003 template. As opaque a flotation as the jelly of lemons (all the ducks wish they could cycle in the water). A looped, deepened, worn-out male voice ("do-doo-do-doo," teetering on the brink of an asthma attack) which may be winking wearily at Lou Reed's wild side (therein would lie the payback), eventually and lusciously counterpointed by a breezy, non-worried female equivalent. The bell of the bike, the afternoon toll of blue ghosts in the air.

 

 

Sometimes the beat comes to an awkward halt, as though having just encountered the sandwich-craving sheep of Top Withens. "Ponce!" cackles a sampled female voice, before the hymnal reverts to physical and the main voice eventually runs out of fitness (an elongated and possibly gratified "phew" at song's end).

 

 

The Wales, of course, the Llaggerub, John the Drone with the help of Brian the Drumloop. The vanished, the vapourised velveteens. And those sheep. And the reminder of how Nico died. A song for Chelsea.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 13

 

#88: LANA DEL REY

"Video Games"

from the album Born To Die

Released: January 2012

 

 

 

It could be either the last or first song of Creation.

The bell tolls for the field, which may well be rendered to carbon or may not yet have formed.

The harp of an angel.

It may as well be a country song with its talk of pool, wild darts, big arms, bad girls and old bars. It could equally be a teenpop song about how technology makes us all fall in love or see love's true essence, hence should ideally be accompanied by a ghostly troupe line dancing to a silent limbo.

 

The singer sounds nervous, bewildered or awed. It is possible that she could be all three. Awed because this is love as she has come to recognise and understand it - here, in this least promising of human arenas, drunk guys clicking and scoring points, but outside the bar, in the big drunken moonlight, you realise this is all you ever wanted and it's here, right here and now ("It's better than I ever even knew").

Maybe she also sounds a little disappointed - the third and fourth "Ev" of the "Everything"s which commence the choruses, the slightly impatient and frustrated "I tell you all the time," the way her voice falters and gulps on the two syllables that she manufactures out of the first "video gay-haymes," the prematurely bereaved whimpers of her "Is that true?"s. As if this is all it is, all she's going to derive from this gaudy puzzle called life.

And as for "baby, now you do" - now you do what? They (who are "they" and is the ghost of Kay Dick aware of  "them"?) say that the world was built for two (life is like a bicycle), only worth living if somebody is loving you. That whole sequence makes no sense, is subtly delirious like the lucid dreams you might come into if the morphine quarrelled with the anaesthesia. But we know what she means; it is the same subtle discolation of reality you get in the fed-back undertow of Psychocandy.

Strings, bell, that piano which you might imagine is being played inside your head. The emptied or fruitful plain; it's hard to tell in the dark.

The mysteries of love; a possible solution.