I’ve previously mentioned how many of the CD singles sitting here in Villain Towers were picked up long after the time of their release via bargain bins or as cheap second-hand offerings. Today’s offering is another example.
My first exposure to Wilco was through the album Being There, released in 1996. The CD was given to me as a Christmas Present from Jacques the Kipper, presumably on the basis that it was an album he had enjoyed, and that he thought I’d like it too. Then again, it might have been something he picked up on a whim or had received as a gift from someone else that had proved not to be his liking and he fobbed it off on me (only kidding…..he’s never do anything like that – he’s about the most honest and straight-up bloke I know!!!). Looking back on the timeline, it might have been to give me an early heads-up on Mermaid Avenue, the upcoming project between Billy Bragg and Wilco in which previously unreleased songs by Woody Guthrie would be taken into the studio and recorded.
Either way, Being There didn’t really hold my attention for long, while the Wilco-led songs on Mermaid Avenue didn’t appeal as much as the ones on which Billy was at the forefront. It happens, doesn’t it? A critically acclaimed singer or band whom the optics suggest you will like just never measures up.
I did hand over 99p sometime in 1999 to buy Can’t Stand It, a single from Wilco that had been issued to support the release of the album Summerteeth. It didn’ttty change my opinion of them, but on the basis that there may be a few regular readers who are fond of the band (as evidenced by the enthusiastic response to this ICA written by Jonny the Friendly Lawyer back in February 2020) I thought I’d remind you of the single, which reached #67 in March 1999, along with the two songs that can be found on CD1 of what was a multi-formatted release.
mp3 : Wilco – Can’t Stand It
mp3 : Wilco – Student Loan Stereo
mp3 : Wilco – Tried And True
June 1984. The month I turned 21 years of age. I wish I had a photo or two to show you, but it was an era when nobody bothered too much with cameras. There was no huge celebration to mark the occasion, mainly as my birthday fell on a Monday, but much drink was consumed and I ended up playing Girl Afraid by The Smiths on constant rotation back in the flat, grateful to be indulged by my flatmates in such a manner.
Having been out all day, we missed seeing the TV news, which would have been full of one-sided reporting of a shameful day for Britain.
The soundtrack to this state-sanctioned police brutality?
3 – 9 June
One new entry in the Top 40, courtesy of Spandau Ballet, in at #5, with the utterly forgettable Only When You Leave. I mean that, I cannot recall this one at all, despite it seemingly spending nine weeks in the charts and peaking at #3.
The next highest new entry was at #43, and is one featured previously on TVV:-
The follow-up to Top 10 hit Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin) was released a couple of weeks before the band’s debut album for Virgin Records. Any initial disappointment at not cracking the Top 40 right away would have been dissipated quickly as Absolute spent ten weeks in the charts, peaking at #17 and getting Green & co another appearance on Top of The Pops where anyone who hadn’t been keeping up with things since the release of the scratchy Skank Bloc Bologna back in 1978 might have rubbed their eyes in astonishment:-
It is so 80s isn’t it? (and I don’t mean that as a bad thing!!!!)
The Damned were still doing there thing a full eight years after New Rose had lit us all up:-
They were never really a band for hit single. This was their 19th (by my reckoning) assault on the UK charts and only twice had they gone Top 40 (Love Song and Smash It Up, both in 1979). Thanks For The Night didn’t change things. In at #52 and peaking a week later at #43.
This week’s chart was responsible for the only time a single by Working Week ever made the Top 75:-
A jazz-dance band with something of a fluid membership, the single was a benefit record made to raise funds for the UK Chile Solidarity campaign, and had been inspired by the Pinochet junta’s brutal murder of political activisit Victor Jara (who had been namechecked by The Clash in Washington Bullets from the Sandinista! album). The vocalist are Claudia Figuerora, Robert Wyatt and Tracey Thorn. This came in at #66 with the 12″ version, which comes in at just over ten minutes in length, being the easier to find in the shops than the 7″:-
It’s worth recalling that there were some genuine fears that a nuclear war could erupt as the Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union intensified, and FGTH’s take on things, including the controversial and violent video featuring a wrestling match between President Ronald Reagan (USA) and General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko, captured the zeitgeist.
Two Tribes would spent nine weeks at #1 and wouldn’t drop out of the singles chart until late October.
At the other end of the Top 40, a couple of TVV regulars show their faces:-
Worth mentioning that Locomotion by OMD was at #41 this week…..
Talking Loud & Clear is one that has grown on me a little bit over the years, albeit I wasn’t all that keen on it back in the day as mid-temp electro-pop wasn’t really my thing. It eventually reached #11, which illustrates I was out of touch with the record-buying public that summer.
Elvis’s record company went with a double-A sided single. I Wanna Be Loved was a cover version of an obscure 1973 b-side by Teacher’s Edition, a little-known US soul group, and seemed a strange choice at the time. A week or so later, the album Goodbye Cruel World hit the shops when it became clear that almost all of the Costello originals penned for the album were not exactly tailor-made singles. The flip side was a stand-alone song that had been written as the theme tune for Scully, a seven-part drama/comedy series broadcast on Channel 4 in May/June 1984, set in Liverpool and in which Elvis Costello had a minor but re-occurring part as the brother of the main character. It probably helped sales to some extent as the single, which is far from one of Costello’s best, peaked at #25.
Two long and difficult years had passed since the Associates had seemingly come to an end when Alan Rankine quit. Billy Mackenzie soldiered on under the band name, but to all intent and purposes, he was riding solo with a few session musician friends to help him out. The record label weren’t happy with what was being written and recorded, and Billy was utterly miserable. Those First Impressions got to #43. None of the subsequent singles ever got that close to the Top 40. The Top of the Pop era was well and truly over.
17-23 June
The height of summer. The single chart was a tad moribund. The highest new entry came from Pointer Sisters, in at #24 with Jump (For My Love). Urgh.
It’s a chart that saw the return of Gary Glitter after a number of years away as he and his band hit the university circuit , cashing-in on the fact that much of his original pre-pubescent audience were now propping up student unions up and down the country. I know this becuse he played Strathclyde a few times.. Urgh.
A couple of half-decent pop songs arrived further down the chart:-
Young At Heart was the second hit of the year for The Bluebells. It was radically different cover of a song that had originally been written and recorded by Bananarama for their 1983 debut album Deep Sea Skiving – Robert Hodgens of the Bluebells had helped with the writing having, at the time, been the boyfriend of Siobhan Fahey. The Bluebell take on things, which was credited soley to Hodgens and Fahey – went onto reach #8 in late July, at which point I don’t think anyone would have imagined that nine years later, having been used to soundtrack a car commercial, it would be re-released and reach #1.
Alison Moyet was embarking on a solo career after Vince Clarke had called it a day on Yazoo. It wasn’t anticipated that she would continue down the electro route, and it was no surprise that she was teamed up with songwriters whose main focus was the pop market, with a nod to AOR. I’m not actually that fond of much that she did, and indeed continues to do, in her solo career, but I’ve always had a chuckle that her debut single, which went Top 10, deals with erectile dysfunction.
24- 30 June
I mentioned last month how there had been a negative recation to the Human League‘s comeback single The Lebanon. The record label obviously felt that a rush-release of the follow-up might act as a bit of a distraction:-
A bit more akin to the sound with which they had shot to fame and made much fortune, but there was still something of a muted response among the critics and the fans. In time, this would reach #16, but this was a long way short of what everyone was expecting, given the enormous bills run uop in various studios over the years. To illustrate how big the dip was in popularity, Dare back in 1981/82 sold not far short of 1 million copies. Hysteria, which had now been in the shops for a month by the time Life On Your Own was released, would ship around just over 10% of that number.
After many years of critical acclaim but next to no commercial success in the UK, Prince had made a breakthrough with the album 1999, which spawned two huge hit singles via the title track and Little Red Corvette. Two years down the line, and the industry was buzzing with what was coming next in the shape of an album/soundtrack to a much-anticiapted film, Purple Rain, based on the life and times of the musician and in which he would star. When Doves Cry was the first single to be lifted from the new album, and by late July, it was sitting at #4 while the album was Top 20. The film was released at the end of July – it had cost $7.2 million to make and it grossed $70.3 world-wide at the box office. The album would go onto spend 63 weeks in the UK charts, sellling 600,000 copies. Across the world, the album would sell 25 million copies, over half being in the USA.
It’s fair to say that Prince was a big a global superstar as anyone in the mid-80s, but he never was as big a favourite in Villain Towers as the frontman of our next song:-
As mentioned earlier, Billy Mackenzie had gone through a misearble time with WEA Records in the mid 80s. So too, had Pete Wylie. He escaped to Beggars Banquet and wrote the sort of song those at WEA had been pleading for in vain. It was the proverbial two-fingered salute. This is another that Dirk has included in his 111 singles series, doing so last July. Click here for a reminder of what he had to say.
There was a ying to the yang that Wylie brought to this week’s chart.
Aga-fucking-doo came in this week at #66. It would hang around the Top 75 for 30 weeks, right through over Christmas and into early 1985, Maybe when people suggest that the 80s were among the worst decades for pop music, they are thinking of Black Lace. I know I have something of a mantra that there is no such thing as shit music, just a difference in tastes….but for Agadoo and ‘party/novelty’ songs of its ilk, I have to make an exception. It is music with any merits whatsoever.
My take on June 1984 is that I had a great time of it socially, and indeed I was gearing up to hit the railways of Europe over the summer months. Musically, the charts were a bit shit with the odd exception while politically, it was a shambles; astonishingly, on both fronts, we hadn’t reached rock-bottom.
Prior to the two-day of the Glas-Goes Pop festival in July 2023 I hadn’t heard anything by The Luxembourg Signal. I was aware of their existence, and their pedigree in the world of indie-pop, thanks to many of their seven members having previously been involved with bands that had been part of the Sarah Records rota and/or had played with Trembling Blue Stars, a band very much brought to my attention by Comrade Colin.
The live set at the Debating Chamber of Glasgow University proved to be a hugely enjoyable one, and led to a visit to the merch stall afterwards where I was able to pick up a vinyl copy of The Long Now, the band’s third album, released in late 2020, a purchase which has turned out to be one of the best I’ve made over the past couple of years.
It’s a superb listen from start to finish. I’d go as far as to call it an indie-pop classic, with ten quality tunes packed into 35 minutes which fly by all too quickly. It’s one of those records that having got to the end of Side 2, it is irresistible not to flip it over and enjoy things all over again.
mp3: The Luxembourg Signal – 2:22
mp3: The Luxembourg Signal – Cut The Bridle
These are among the most instant of the songs, both of which are worthy of filling the floor at any indie disco. But The Luxembourg Signal, certainly judging by this album, are far from one-dimensional. Indeed, album opener I Never Want To Leave is a bit of a curveball as the guitars are quite minimal and the keyboards at the heart of the song are very light, almost ethereal. The guitars, for the most part, dominate the songs thereafter with the exception of Elevator Silence which can best be described as a synth ballad. There’s also tunes that recall the cinematic style which characterised the afore-mentioned Trembling Blue Stars:-
mp3: The Luxembourg Signal – When All That We Hold Decays
That’s the album’s closing song – and as I mentioned inevitably leads to it being flipped over and listened to again. At which point, I find myself changing my mind about which of the ten tracks I’d pick out as being the real standouts. OK…let’s have another that will at some point find its way onto one of the TVV monthly mixes at some point:-
mp3: The Luxembourg Signal – Take It Back
I’m willing to bet that, if there’s any of you out there who are already familiar with the album, you’ll be willing to make the case that the songs I haven’t featured or mentioned above are actually the pick of the bunch.
Goodness me, we’re halfway through the series already. Not sure if we have any readers left, but we’re going to get through it regardless.
Some 7 months after the release of ‘Guerrilla’, and into the next year, a third single was finally lifted from the album. What took them so long? Well, the delay could be explained by problems at Creation. Following their US tour in 1999, Super Furry Animals returned home expecting preparations to have been made for their next choice of single – Wherever I Lay My Phone (That’s My Home). However, no such work had been done, and the band went out on tour again. On returning from Europe, they found Creation was being dissolved, and had completely changed tack with the proposed single. Firstly, Night Vision was lined up, but then it was decided it would be this:
mp3: Do Or Die
It was a bit of a strange choice. Firstly, it clocks in at just short of 2 minutes. Secondly, it’s not the most obvious of cuts for single release. Indeed, the band themselves were bemused by the decision. Nevertheless, it would be one of the final releases on the Creation label, coming out in January 2000. The traditional post-Christmas lull would propel Do Or Die to number 20 in the UK singles chart. The band performed it on Top Of The Pops, making it the shortest song to ever appear on the show, which is quite a surprising fact. It was also reviewed by the Wannadies in Melody Maker, who awarded it “all the points we can afford” and made it their Single Of The Week.
The 7”, cassette and promo 12” all came backed by this:
mp3: Missunderstanding (sic)
Another OK tune with echoes of the band’s past. I like it, but it wasn’t really in keeping with the other stuff on ‘Guerrilla’, so little surprise it was a b-side. The same can be said of the CD bonus track:
mp3: Colorblind
This one bugs me just because of the American spelling…
And so to this week’s bonus track. No surprises here – it’s the demo of Do Or Die.
mp3: Do Or Die [demo]
Next week, if you’re still hanging around, we begin the second half of the series much as we started the first – with a SFA 7” in the Welsh language!
For a seventh time in this series, I’m grabbing something from David Cameron’s Eton Mess, a compilation album released in October 2015 on Song, By Toad Records.
As I’ve written before:-
“Almost all of the singers and bands were, at the time, unknown with very little more than a few tracks available online or via a limited physical release, most often cheaply done on a cassette. Label owner, Matthew Young, said at the time:-
“Most of the bands are friends and a lot of musicians feature on several of the album’s tracks, one of the reasons why we’ve put the compilation together. It feels like there’s this pool of really talented musicians bubbling away and all sorts of excellent music is starting to emerge from the mix. Bands are forming, breaking up, and starting again all the time. When you see a loose collection of bands connecting like this you never know what is going to happen. A few will disappear, some will do okay, some might pave the way for others, and a few of these bands could go on to do really well.”
The track from Dune Witch Trials was this:-
mp3: Dune Witch Trials – Motorcade
The band have four releases available over at this bandcamp page, all of which date from between 2014 and 2016.
Motorcade is an enjoyable rip-roaring effort lasting less than two minutes, and is one of the four tracks that can be found on Waving At Airports, released in July 2015. The four musicians who played on it were Kieran Thomas – Guitar/Vocals, Billy Gaughan – Guitar/Vocals, Kevin Snöw – Bass and Graham Sinclair – Drums.
In 1989, Nick Cave was living in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He was looking to turn his life around after a long period of drug addiction. The move had come after he had fallen in love with Brazilian journalist Viviane Carneiro. They would, in 1991, get married and have a son.
It all meant that his mind was in a completely different place than it had been during the writing, recording and touring of the first three Bad Seeds albums. Instead of heading back to Europe, and running the risk of falling back into bad habits, he summoned The Bad Seeds along with Victor Van Hugt, his producer of choice, to Sao Paulo to begin work on what would become The Good Son, released in April 1990.
Nick Cave would later say that the album was a reflection of how he was feeling at the time. He was happy in Brazil, and he was in love. The dark and often despairing nature of the previous albums was replaced by a sound that was more gentle in nature. History shows that this feeling of contentment didn’t last too long. The relationship was over by 1993 and the couple divorced in 1996. The music would take different turns again through the 90s….until the next time he fell madly in love. But let’s leave Polly Harvey out of today’s story.
The first of the new songs to emerge from the sessions on Brazil was greeted with a sense of disbelief among Cave devotees, particularly those whose fandom went all the way back to The Boys Next Door and The Birthday Party. A soppy ballad? What was the world coming to??
mp3 : Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – The Ship Song
These days, it is regarded, and rightly so, as one of his finest compositions. It is also testament to the skills of the Bad Seeds, who in this instance were Kid Congo Powers (guitars), Blixa Bargeld (guitars), Mick Harvey (bass) and Thomas Wydler (drums), that they could magnificently deliver a song, and indeed an entire album, which was so far removed from what they were used to.
The b-side to the single, which was issued on 7″, 12″ and CD, was perhaps an early indication that Nick Cave would, in the fullness of time, get involved in composing music for films:-
mp3 : Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – The Train Song
The Ship Song didn’t reach the Top 75 on its release. The Good Son spent one week in the album chart at #47. It would still take a few more years before Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds enjoyed the commercial success that many contemporary critics believed was their due.
# 096: Stockholm Monsters – ‘National Pastime’ (Factory Records ’84)
Hello friends,
another one on Factory Records today, always a sign of greatness of course. Like many Factory artists, Stockholm Monsters were clearly overshadowed by Joy Division/New Order, but to a degree this is understandable obviously. Factory’s legendary poor marketing didn’t help either, I suppose.
But they also gained a little bit from Factory: Peter Hook became their producer (under his ‘Be Music’ – moniker) and apparently also Rob Gretton liked them a great deal, so he became a bit of a mentor after having seen the band supporting The Rezillos.
Factory’s ‘house producer’ Martin Hannett produced their first single throughout 1981, ‘Fairy Tales’. After this release, The Monsters became Factory regulars, touring with New Order. The second single came shortly after this but the music papers had divided opinions about the band: some said they were great, others judged them as being a total bore. In 1983 the third single was released, but still Factory thought they weren’t ready for an album – consequently this, ‘Alma Mater’ did not come out before 1984.
And – finally – it was those punchy new album songs that really impressed. Indeed ‘Terror’, ‘Life’s Two Faces’ and ‘Where I Belong’ might all have made strong singles, yet Factory released just one – and then left it off the album: today’s choice, the energetic, effervescent ‘All At Once’, released in June 1984 as Fac 107, and – quite typically – I did not choose it, but the tune it is backed by, this little gem
mp3: Stockholm Monsters – National Pastime
Now, as great as ‘All At Once’ might be, ‘National Pastime’ is even better, at least if you ask me. It has a certain spirit, hard to describe, which always fully gets me when listening to it. Obviously neither ‘National Pastime’ nor, for that matter, ‘All At Once’ are the songs one remembers when it comes to Stockholm Monsters, this would be ‘Partyline’, their final single from 1987. But whatever song may be your favourite by them, as someone wrote at the time about the Monsters: „the indulgences that the sales of ‘Blue Monday’ allowed Factory to make in tolerating their less successful acts are looking to have been worthwhile“.
A guest ICA by Fraser Pettigrew (aka our New Zealand correspondent)
If there was a dominating manifesto principle for British punk, then it is perhaps best summed up by the phrase ‘do it yourself’. Knocking up your own fashions from ripped t-shirts and bin-bags, decorated with marker pen and safety-pin jewellery, or writing and photocopying your own fanzines were two characteristics of the moment. Starting your own record label and ultimately your own band, regardless of whether you could actually play an instrument, also had a defining impact on the early history of the genre.
The creative emphasis was very much against appearing derivative in any way, either visually or musically, even though there was, of course, an immense amount of copy-cat styling in both clothing, hairstyles and sound. Influences could be flaunted, but the end product earned its cred from not leaning too heavily on the invention of someone else, least of all the old-wave musical establishment of the time.
Cover versions are therefore understandably rare in the canon of early punk and new wave releases from 1977 and 1978. Writing your own stuff was self-evidently more original than plundering the past you wanted to break with. The covers that did make it onto the official releases of new wave bands at this time come from an interestingly diverse list of artists and reveal a range of different approaches that kind of sum up all the main reasons why any band chooses a particular song to cover. All, that is, barring the most obvious reason, as we’ll see.
Homage is a good place to start. For the punk artist there was a fairly short list of formative influences that could be publicly praised, amongst whom were the kings of the Detroit garage scene, MC5 and The Stooges. The songs were suffused with nihilism, teenage boredom and drug abuse, and housed in rudimentary rock riffs that even the most musically incompetent guitarist could just about master. Not that Brian James of The Damned was musically incompetent, but I Feel Alright from The Stooges’ second album Fun House (titled 1970 in the original), was the perfect accompaniment to the nihilism, teenage boredom and punchy riffs of the other eleven self-penned tracks on Damned Damned Damned.
For The Clash, it was the rude boys of Jamaican music that deserved acknowledgement, and the choice of Junior Murvin’s Police and Thieves on their first album was a pointedly political one. Despite the contrast in style and tempo, the song sits proudly alongside the band’s own rugged compositions, drawing a seamless comparison between authoritarian policing in Kingston and the vindictive racism of the Met in Brixton and Notting Hill.
From the beginning Paul Weller wore his influences on his sleeve, quite literally in the form of The Jam’s three-button mohair suits. The Jam’s recorded catalogue, as well as Weller’s solo output, is peppered with homages to various heroes, and includes several of the r’n’b standards beloved by the original mid-60s Mods. Amongst these was Slow Down, a hit for Larry Williams in the late 50s, later described as a proto-punk adrenalin-fuelled raver and a perfect fit on side one of In The City.
I might have been describing Mark Perry in my opening paragraph above, as the creator of the Sniffin’ Glue punk fanzine and then founder of the band Alternative TV. ATV chose to pay tribute to Frank Zappa with their cover of Why Don’t You Do Me Right? by The Mothers of Invention. Zappa was one of very few artists associated with the hippy era who could be safely revered in 1978, largely because he was perceived to be weird as f and didn’t give a shit about commercial success. In fact, this song is amongst the most accessible things he ever did and makes for a great anti-romantic rant on The Image Has Cracked.
I’m not entirely sure whether The Stranglers’ version of Walk On By is a homage or not. There’s nothing much else in the band’s early repertoire that suggests they were big Burt Bacharach fans, nor would Bacharach be high on the list of punk-friendly composers. But the recording that appeared on a free white vinyl single with the first 75,000 copies of their third album Black and White is about as respectful a rendition as you could imagine from such disreputable oafs.
At any rate, it certainly doesn’t come across as parody, a category that comfortably embraces The Lurkers’ attempt to take the piss out of The Beach Boys.
Then I Kicked Her is a typically boorish transmogrification of Then I Kissed Her, a clean-cut tale of Californian sun and snogging, reduced to a coarse and ugly encounter in a Fulham backstreet by the simple substitution of a single consonant. Nobody thought The Beach Boys were still admirable in 1978, so The Lurkers probably thought they could get away with it, but they didn’t take the judgement of posterity into account.
The notion of covering a Fleetwood Mac song in 1978 without similar corruption might seem inconceivable. Part of the British blues revival alongside the likes of The Yardbirds, Rolling Stones, Them and The Animals, Fleetwood Mac had recently reinvented themselves as a soft-rock supergroup and their adult-oriented album Rumours had become a massive hit, polluting (to our ears) the turntables of every household in the land. Edinburgh punk band The Rezillos didn’t let this stop them exhuming an obscure 1969 b-side on their debut album, but then Somebody’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonite had a certain ring to it, illustrating how a cover might have an unlikely source but carry the right sentiment for a punk band.
Another example of this is the Sex Pistols’ version of (I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone, best known as a b-side hit for those confected pseudo-Beatles, The Monkees. I’m breaking my own rules here because the Pistols’ version wasn’t released until 1980, long after the event, but it was a staple of their live sets and was recorded in October of 1976 during their first studio sessions for A&M. There’s no irony in their rendition – despite The Monkees’ squeaky-clean comedy personality, the song’s sneering put-down of a wannabe celebrity social climber might have been written for John Lydon.
For someone who is so evidently the sum of multitudinous influences, Elvis Costello didn’t actually release a cover version until My Funny Valentine on the b-side of Oliver’s Army in February 1979. That is, if you don’t count the live version of The Damned’s Neat Neat Neat issued on a free single with This Year’s Model in early 1978. Costello and the Damned were briefly label-mates and the recording comes from a Live Stiffs tour, though The Damned didn’t feature. The flip side of the free single was the Costello composition Stranger in the House, whose country and western arrangement was so alien and provocative to new wave fans that it seems like a cover of an entire genre. A curiosity disc indeed.
Another example of new wave playing it safe by covering one of their own is Penetration’s version of Nostalgia, a Pete Shelley tune that glowed on their Moving Targets debut (luminously!) almost in the same week that it appeared under the Buzzcocks name on their second album Love Bites.
The final category of cover version is what I’d call deconstruction. This is where a song is lifted from an ‘uncool’ artist and made appealing to new wave taste by a radical restyling. It’s neither parody nor homage, but might seem like either depending on your point of view. To be fair, Helter Skelter was an atypical Beatles song, heavy and discordant and so it wasn’t that much of a stretch for Siouxsie and the Banshees to refashion it on The Scream. The song’s infamous association with Charles Manson’s deranged killing spree also helps to distance it from Beatlemania and the cross-generational adoration of the Fab Four.
All Along The Watchtower by XTC is sort of a cover of a cover. As Mr Tambourine Man was for The Byrds, Dylan’s song is far better known in Jimi Hendrix’s version than his own. Either way, these were not favourable associations for a new wave artist in January 1978, and the only way to carry this off was to smash it to bits. XTC took a sacred cow and led it straight into the slaughterhouse, the lyrics unintelligible in Andy Partridge’s contorted staccato yelp and the melody almost imperceptible in the eerie dub-funk arrangement. My brother, a faithful devotee of the old school, found the sacrilege unbearable and was almost moved to violence by it. And yet the end effect captures the song’s bleak and unsettling sense of malaise perfectly, a faithful interpretation in shattered form.
What none of these cover versions did was make money – the oldest and most obvious reason for singing someone else’s already successful song. It wasn’t until Sid Vicious staggered down a glittering staircase in an ill-fitting tuxedo, drunkenly slurring My Way, the cover of all covers, that punk, such as it was by then, finally sought to shift units by singing a song that everyone loved and everyone else had already sung. It was the capstone on Malcolm Maclaren’s edifice of the Great Rock and Roll Swindle. Leonard Cohen, that famous old punk, said he never liked the song except when Sid Vicious sang it. It made number 7 in the singles chart in July 1978.
The Damned – I Feel Alright (The Stooges)
The Clash – Police and Thieves (Junior Murvin)
The Jam – Slow Down (Larry Williams)
Alternative TV – Why Don’t You Do Me Right? (Frank Zappa)
The Stranglers – Walk On By (Burt Bacharach)
The Lurkers – Then I Kicked Her (The Beach Boys)
The Rezillos – Somebody’s Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonite (Fleetwood Mac)
The Sex Pistols – (I’m not your) Steppin’ Stone (The Monkees)
Elvis Costello – Neat Neat Neat (The Damned)
Penetration – Nostalgia (Buzzcocks)
Siouxsie and the Banshees – Helter Skelter (The Beatles)
XTC – All Along the Watchtower (Bob Dylan)
A series for 2025 in which this blog will dedicate a day to each of the twenty-four of the sessions The Fall recorded for the John Peel Show between 1978 and 2004.
Session #8 was broadcast on this day, 3 June 1985, having been recorded on 14 May 1985.
Apart from the seventh session broadcast on the third of January that year, 1984 was, remarkably, a Peel session-free year for the group. A lot had happened; the band was on the verge of becoming obscure-art darlings, with their Beggars Banquet singles tickling the chart’s bum-end and ‘The Wonderful and Frightening World’ sounding all dressed up and ready to play. Hence they performed sessions for the more pop-friendly Janice Long and David ‘Kid’ Jensen programmes on BBB Radio One. Expectations were running high for this next session in May 1985. Produced by Marc Radcliffe, it has tremendous vim, and features the next two singles ‘Couldn’t Get Ahead’ and ‘Cruiser’s Creek’, as well as scintillating run-throughs of the two standouts from their forthcoming album, ‘This Nation’s Saving Grace’: ‘Gut Of The Quantifier’ and ‘Spoilt Victorian Child.’
DARYL EASLEA, 2005
mp3: The Fall – Cruiser’s Creek (Peel Session)
mp3: The Fall – Couldn’t Get Ahead (Peel Session)
mp3: The Fall – Spoilt Victorian Child (Peel Session)
mp3: The Fall – Gut Of The Quantifier (Peel Session)
Produced by Mark Radcliffe, engineered by Mike Walters
Mark E Smith – vocals; Brix Smith – guitar; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Simon Rogers – guitar, keyboards; Karl Burns – drums;
Released in June 2013, Scared To Get Happy (A Story Of Indie Pop 1980-1989) claimed to be the first box set ever to document the explosion of Indie Pop in Britain across the 1980s. Compiled in loosely chronological fashion, the five CDs charted Indie Pop’s development from the post punk era and the dominance of Scottish bands through to its genre-defining C86 period and onto the end of the decade, with the arrival of Madchester and the shoegazing sound. Inspired by the Nuggets compilations, the box set boasts 134 tracks span the Eighties, drawn from all the key labels of the period – Creation, Factory, Cherry Red, Rough Trade, Sarah, Subway Organisation, Zoo, Kitchenware, Pink, Chapter 22, In Tape, Medium Cool, Lazy, Dreamworld, 53rd & 3rd, Ron Johnson, el, Vindaloo, Red Rhino, Food, etc.
Here’s 60 minutes of highlights.
mp3: Various – 60 mins from Scared To Get Happy
The Loft – Up The Hill and Down The Slope
Art Objects – Showing Off To Impress The Girls
The June Brides – Every Conversation
The Shop Assistants – All Day Long
Girls At Our Best – Getting Nowhere Fast
The Dentists – She Dazzled Me With Basil
The Jazz Butcher – Southern Mark Smith
The Corn Dollies – Be Small Again
Marine Girls – Don’t Come Back
The Brilliant Corners – Delilah Sands
Prefab Sprout – Lions In My Own Garden (Exit Someone)
Friends Again – Honey At The Core
Josef K – The Missionary
The Servants – Loggerheads
The Charlottes – Are You Happy Now?
The Wild Swans – Revolutionary Spirit
The Siddeleys – My Favourite Wet Wednesday Afternoon
The Chesterf!elds – Completely and Utterly
The Monochrome Set – The Jet Set Junta (remix)
The House of Love – Shine On
James – Hymn From A Village
There may be a second volume of this sort of nonsense later in the year
#14: Fire In My Heart (1999, Creation Records, CRE323)
You’d think, given their nature of twisted psychedelia, the one thing Super Furry Animals wouldn’t have in their armoury was a big, lighters-out, arms-in-the-air torch song. But as ever, this band confounded expectation, and the second single to be released from ‘Guerrilla’ was exactly that.
mp3: Fire In My Heart
Remember when I said the thing that disappointed me about If You Don’t Want Me To Destroy You was how it just sounded so ordinary? I suppose you could make a similar argument about Fire In My Heart. It’s one of the most straightforward songs in the band’s catalogue, even using what Gruff Rhys himself described as “clichéd lyrics”. Yet Fire In My Heart is a delight.
Originally titled Heartburn, it is, according to Gruff, a country song delivering “soul advice”about “all kinds of people in your life”. But despite its “normalness”, it has its quirks. The lyrics in the bridge, for instance, include: “The monkey puzzle tree has some questions for the watchdogs of the profane”, which by anyone’s standards isn’t what you’d expect from a clichéd country song. Then there’s the big key change at the end, the biggest cliché of the lot, but totally unexpected here. It is a SFA song, after all.
As was becoming common, the critics fawned over it, but the record-buying public were ambivalent. Fire In My Heart reached its chart peak of #25 the week after its release in August 1999. Shocking. If anyone ever wondered where I lost my faith in human nature, you don’t have to look much further.
So what of the other songs on the single? The 7” and cassette had this one:
mp3: Mrs Spector
An interesting one, I can’t say whether or not it’s about Ronnie, though I doubt it. But that chorus – shades of (1990s) Cardiacs perhaps?
This next one was the b-side of the 12” promo, and the extra track on the CD single:
mp3: The Matter Of Time
Apparently, this was initially going to be on ‘Guerrilla’, but the band felt it would make the album “too self-indulgent”. They replaced it with The Teacher in the final cut, a track they refer to as the “silly song”. Not sure that I’m entirely on board with that logic, but it’s not the strongest track in their canon, as pleasant as it is.
This week’s bonus track is the demo version of Fire In My Heart, an interesting take if far from polished.
mp3: Fire In My Heart [demo]
But wait! There’s more. You see, this isn’t just about those officially-released singles. I’m a bit of a nerdy completist, you know. Shortly after this release, Creation slipped out a one-sided 12” promo containing one of the album’s more peculiar, experimental songs. Wherever I Lay My Phone (That’s My Home) was written around a phone ringtone, with the rhythm track being based on a sample of bassist Guto Pryce tripping over a lead while Huw Bunford played a note on his guitar.
I’m not totally sure of the reasons behind the promo being sent out, but as next week’s article explains, there was a plan to release this track as the next single. The album version (and the one on the promo) was a trimmed-down edit lasting 5½ minutes. However, today, I’m going to create my own 12” promo, using the full uncut version and the demo.
I spoil you lot, I really do.*
mp3: Wherever I Lay My Phone (That’s My Home) [unedited]
mp3: Wherever I Lay My Phone (That’s My Home) [demo]
Oh, and this article is dedicated to MrsRobster. Today is our 21st Wedding Anniversary. I still very much have a Fire In My Heart for her.
The Robster
*JC adds…….apart from jumping in to wish the Mr and Mrs Robster the happiest of wedding anniversaries, I did want to echo the sentiment that we are being very spoiled right across this series with the b-sides, demos and mixes, topped off today with a cleverly crafted and creative offering.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 