One of the things I enjoy most about curating this blog is the fact that so many folk come forward with guest contributions, and it is from one of those back in 2017 that today’s song had been plucked.
The post came from Jonder, and was the first of what proved to be a number of ICAs by The Fall that he would submit in due course. ICA#137, published in September 2017, had the title ‘Elena’s The Fall’, and focussed on the ten-year period between 2007 and 2017, and was pulled together to acknowledge the contribution to the band by Elena Poulou, who had married Mark E. Smith and joined the band prior to 2003’s “The Real New Fall LP”, and then departed when the marriage fell apart.
A 2010 World Cup song created by ex-Fall member Ed Blaney, Mark E. Smith and Jenny Shuttleworth. Blaney has remained on good terms with Smith, a feat unmatched among the scores of former Fall members. He and Mark made several records credited to “Smith And Blaney”, and Smith appears on Blaney’s 2016 album “Urban Nature”
Fancy a look at the low-budget video?
Great fun!
Oh, and I’ll just mention in passing that England got through the group stage but were then hammered 4-1 by Germany in the first knock-out round. At least they made it to South Africa…..Scotland fans were sitting at home and watching on television.
A guest series by Fraser Pettigrew (aka our New Zealand correspondent)
#4: New Amsterdam – Elvis Costello (1980)
New Amsterdam was technically the third single taken from Elvis Costello’s fourth album, Get Happy! (1980) but with the inclusion of three other non-album songs the EP feels as though it inhabits its own little space in the Costello canon, separate from what came before and after. Stylistically, none of the songs, including New Amsterdam, have much in common with the rest of Get Happy! and they don’t signal a shift towards either the expansive sophistication of Trust or the country and western detour of Almost Blue that appeared the following year.
At the time Get Happy! came out, the story went around (and was subsequently confirmed) that Costello had written most of the material in a compositional binge assisted by a crate of old Stax and Atlantic soul singles that he had bought in bulk from a couple of London record shops. Song after song was absorbed, analysed, deconstructed and reassembled into original material, distilling the hooks and hit factory tricks into new songs. As well as the obviously soul-styled songs like Love For Tender, High Fidelity, 5ive Gears in Reverse and Beaten to the Punch, there are two cover versions, I Stand Accused and the lead single I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down, all of which imbue the album with a 1960s r’n’b vibe. A further cover of Van McCoy’s Getting Mighty Crowded appears on the B-side of second album single High Fidelity to amplify the effect.
Get Happy! is much more than an edition of Soul Train, however. There are several songs that flaunt different roots, such as the ska-styled B-Movie and Human Touch, torch-song crooner Motel Matches and the closer Riot Act, which could have been written and arranged in the same session as Party Girl from Armed Forces. New Amsterdam is likewise of a different kind.
For a start it’s in 3/4 time. This wasn’t entirely new for Costello – Little Triggers from This Year’s Model and Sunday’s Best on Armed Forces both employ waltz rhythms. Sunday’s Best also fades out with a musical quotation from the 1950s Danny Kaye hit Wonderful Copenhagen, betraying Costello’s familiarity with old-time schmaltz, no doubt inherited from his band-leader father. To my mind, Costello employed the crate-of-singles deconstruction method for New Amsterdam, but rather than some old soul banger, the inspiration came from the unlikely source of Tulips From Amsterdam, a big hit in 1958 for Max Bygraves. A double A-side in fact, with You Need Hands. Maybe a copy got mixed up in a Sam and Dave sleeve by mistake.
Tulips From Amsterdam was originally a German song written in the ‘schlager’ or ‘hit song’ tradition, a particularly Germanic style of cheesey, simplistic, sentimental pop born out of folk tunes and operetta. The English lyrics were provided in 1957 by Marcel Stellman, a Belgian-Scottish producer and lyricist, and Max Bygraves never looked back. Listening to Costello’s New Amsterdam it’s not difficult to hear a slight tonal shift that would produce an altogether more naïve version, oom-pahed out to an audience of swaying grannies and children before the tubas and accordions segue slickly into The Birdie Song.
Costello’s lyrics wouldn’t work in that schlager version though. Apart from the wilful perversity of using Rotherhithe as a rhyme, and the difficulty of ever working out exactly what he’s talking about, the song finds its composer overwhelmed and disappointed by the city of New York (New Amsterdam prior to 1667) and closes with a withering judgement on the “transparent people who live on the other side / Living a life that is almost like suicide.” Not quite the stuff to get the grannies rocking in their seats.
Another thing that sets the New Amsterdam EP aside is that none of the tracks are credited to Costello and the Attractions. It was released under Costello’s name alone because he provides almost all the accompaniment himself, except for Pete Thomas adding drums to Dr Luther’s Assistant and Steve Nieve the keys on Just a Memory. New Amsterdam itself was played and recorded entirely by Costello some time in 1979 in a “fifteen-quid an hour demo studio” in London using the drums, fretless bass, vibes and “a very nasty synth” that he found there. Another version was attempted with The Attractions, but ultimately rejected in favour of the original demo. The group version eventually appeared on the 2003 reissue of Get Happy!
Dr Luther’s Assistant is a song left over from the writing of This Year’s Model in 1977-78 and it’s easy to see why it was left off that album. Not because it’s bad, but because it just doesn’t fit. It’s a sordid tale of an imaginary but all too believable sexual creep, voyeur and pornographer, set to a slightly plodding Paul McCartney-esque arrangement and a verse melody that somehow puts me in mind of The Beatles’ She’s Leaving Home.
Ghost Train is one of those Costello songs that sit almost entirely within quite traditional genres and could just about pass for an old standard were it not for the rather bleak portrayal of social and romantic relationships. Maureen and Stan are a couple of aspiring performers (“She plays the queen of the fleapit / He plays a Spanish guitar”) thwarted by their lack of good looks (“Step right up and show your face / We only want the pretty ones”). The failure of their careers is soon mirrored in their personal relationship: “While they make believe it’s just another holiday / They turn on each other when they hear that joker say… / Roll up for the ghost train …” The style is 50s/60s cocktail bar jazz-pop, a few years before The Style Council and Everything But The Girl got with it. Young Marble Giants were about the only other people in 1980 getting away with this kind of cool.
Finally, Just A Memory is a tender tragedy of love lost, a relationship falling victim to incompatibility, his inability to see what’s important to her. Brief and to the point in two verses, Costello pulling a poignant melody over Steve Nieve’s piano. It’s the kind of musical and lyrical material that Costello would frequently overwork in years to come, striving for that big Burt Bacharach complexity, but here he keeps it simple, and the result is a sparkling little teardrop of a song. As postpunkmonk has detailed (The Great B-Sides: Elvis Costello – Just A Memory | Post-Punk Monk ) the song was originally written for and eventually recorded by Dusty Springfield.
The whole package is housed in a beautiful laminated sleeve designed by Barney Bubbles to look a bit like a classic 50s or 60s jazz record with a very mid-century painting credited as “Jazz City Opus 1958 by Sal Forlenza” on the front, tying in with the New York theme of the title track. Sal Forlenza was a pseudonym used by Barney Bubbles, also to be found on the cover art for Imperial Bedroom.
Congratulations to those of you who tolerated the chart offerings from July 1984 via the post from a couple of weeks back. Surely those 45s issued via the indie labels and who distribution methods/lack of daytime airplay were the biggest factors in them not hitting the Top 75 would prove to be a bit more palatable. Surely……..
In June 1983, Lawrence Hayward (aka Felt) had released Penelope Tree, a gloriously catchy piece of indie-pop which, if the world was a fair and just place, would have been a huge hit. The opening lines of Penelope Tree were:-
I didn’t want the world to know That sunlight bathed the golden glow
Just over a year later, the new single from Felt opened with these lines:-
You’re trying to fool somebody But you end up fooling yourself
Methinks Lawrence was, despite his claims of never really wanting to be a pop star, was getting a tad frustrated:-
mp3: Felt – Sunlight Bathed The Golden Glow
Moving along quickly to another song which takes me back to that particular summer
mp3: The Go-Betweens – Part Company
Having, the previous year, come to the attention of the UK indie cognoscenti via Rough Trade Records, our wizards from Oz were signed by Sire Records and thanks to the snippets of news via the music papers, we learned they had headed off to France to record what would be their third studio album, Spring Hill Fair, from which Part Company was the lead single. It’s one on which Robert Forster takes the lead vocal, and musically there is a hint of the slower numbers that Johnny Marr was writing for The Smiths. Another that should’ve been a hit, but like every other 45 released by the band, it failed to trouble the charts.
mp3: The Jazz Butcher – Roadrunner
I’ll confess not to knowing that this rather frantic and fabulous cover version had been released in July 1984….it was many many many years later (via a blog in the 21st century) did I learn that Pat Fish et al. had taken Jonathan Richman‘s signature tune and made into something that sounded like one of their own.
mp3: Shriekback – Hand On My Heart
The mid 80s was a time when white-boy funk was a bit of a ‘thing’ (and Glasgow had more than its fair share of would-be bands). Shriekback had formed in 1982, with Barry Andrews (ex XTC) and Dave Allen (ex Gang of Four) being joined on vocals by Carl Marsh. By 1984, they were signed to a major label – Arista Records – and given a bit of a makeover with the addition of female backing vocals in an attempt to create a really radio-friendly sound. Debut single for the label, Hand on My Heart flopped. As indeed would the subsequent singles and two albums, Mercy Dash (Sep 84) and Oil and Gold (June 85).
It wasn’t just white-boy funk, mind you:-
mp3: Sunset Gun – Be Thankful For What You’ve Got
As mentioned previously on the blog, Sunset Gun were a Glasgow trio, made of up sisters Dee and Louise Rutkowski, and Ross Campbell. The Rutkowski sisters were a huge part of the Glasgow music scene in the early 80s, having been part of Jazzateers, the group that would in due course evolve into Bourgie Bourgie.
The demos recorded by Sunset Gun created a bit of a buzz, with a number of labels looking to sign the group, and in the end it was CBS that won the bidding war. The trio went into a studio with Alan Rankine (ex Associates) in the producer’s chair, and the debut single was a cover of the 1974 hit written and recorded by William DeVaughn, a song later covered by Massive Attack and included on their subsequent debut album in 1991.
Continuing with the theme of debut singles…..
mp3: The Woodentops – Plenty
A band who would influence and delight many in subsequent years without ever getting the sort of commercial success that their fans in the media believed should have been theirs. I’ve always associated The Woodentops with Rough Trade Records, but this particular 45 was released on the then very new Food Records that had been set up by Dave Balfe, formerly of the Teardrop Explodes. What a glorious and enduring debut!!!!
# 102: Toy Dolls – ‘Olga … I Cannot!’ (Volume Records ’85)
Dear friends,
for those of you sitting there right now, scratching their heads and thinking: “so now he has gone completely bonkers”: just wait, will you?
As mentioned before, I am not a great fan of labelling bands into certain genres. That’s unless a band has invented (or at least co-invented a genre), something which Toy Dolls certainly have done: punk pathetique, or, for our (two) German readers: fun punk.
Now, you could argue that there were other bands around in 1980 who were not as dead serious as their ’77 punk colleagues, Splodgenessabounds come to mind, so do The Golinski Brothers and of course Peter & The Test Tube Babies. But apart from the latter, who became shite very soon, those were just one-hit-wonders. So at least to me, Toy Dolls were always way ahead of the game and, furthermore, they remained true to themselves.
They started in Sunderland in 1979, had a few member changes, but soon Michael ‘Olga’ Algar ended up on singing duties – and still does so, as freshly as ever! The thing is with this band, you see, they are always numbered down to just one song, which isn’t that good compared to very many of their other tunes: ‘Nellie The Elephant’. A classic children’s song which went to # 1 (Indie Charts) in ’82 and to # 4 (UK Singles Charts) in ’84 as a re-issue. It’s therefore somehow understandable that people remember nothing else by the band, but still it is a shame!
For example just listen to their debut single, ‘Tommy Kowey’s Car’ from April 1980, which is just fantastic, but due to the fact that there never was a repress of the initial 1000 copies, one of those go for a median of € 423,- on discogs currently. You see, I love you, I really do – but I’m afraid I’m having to give you something else today! There are many other Toy Dolls – songs which, if you only know ‘Nellie’, I urge you to listen to, ‘I’ve Got Asthma’, which is a must – and basically everything from the debut album from ’83, and, for that matter, the same is true for the follow-up-album from ’85: great stuff throughout!
But today it’s none of the above, we are back to B-Sides again – to the B-Side of ‘James Bond Lives Down Our Street’ from ’85, to be precise. Today’s song has everything I need basically: a great story of unfulfilled love & romance, combined with a most sensitive humour and a Pavarotti-like voice:
A masterpiece, I’m sure you agree! Then again that’s the way I was put together, sometimes things don’t need to be other than just simple. If you follow my advice above and listen to other Toy Dolls songs, you’ll find out that Olga is a class guitarist, once described as ‘a jaw-droppingly fast guitar picker’, perhaps that’s why Toy Dolls are the only punk band where guitar solos are a common thing.
I like Toy Dolls, mind you, ever did – hope I gained some new fan, who knows?
#22: Slow Life EP (2004, Placid Casual, BBN045CD2)
At a couple of points throughout this series, I’ve mentioned how some records and periods of Super Furry Animals’ career are considered by some people to be their absolute peak. The Ice Hockey Hair EP is one, the ‘Rings Around The World’ album is another. For some fans, though, it’s Slow Life. In fairness, it really does stand up as one of the finest moments of their existence, so it’s hard to argue against it.
MP3: Slow Life
The closing track on ‘Phantom Power’ is like nothing the band had done before, yet weirdly, it’s also the quintessential Super Furry Animals track. It brings together all the constituent parts of what made them great into one, single, seven-minute epic. I’m going to lift some bits from the song’s Wikipedia entry as it explains everything more than well enough:
Slow Life was written in two stages. According to bassist Guto Pryce the “electronic part” was composed by keyboard player Cian Ciaran“quite a few years” before its eventual release. The band had tried to fit this early, purely electronic version on previous albums but had “never got ’round to it”. By the time the group came to record ‘Phantom Power’ they were anxious to release the song, however Cian was reluctant to leave it in its original form and encouraged the rest of the band to jam over his original track. According to Gruff Rhys the instrumentation was recorded “pretty much live” after which lyrics were written and the band’s 10-minute jam session was “chopped up and made into a composed song” with the electronic section intact. Strings were later added by Sean O’Hagan.
Some promotional copies of ‘Phantom Power’ featured Slow Life as the first track, although it eventually appeared as the last track on the officially released version of the album. Gruff has stated that the song had to go at either the beginning or the end of the record as it is the “most sonically impressive” track on the album. He has described his lyrics as “regurgitating what we hear on the news, recycled, vomiting them all back”.
For me, that insight into the song’s formation makes it particularly great. Just a live, 10-minute jam over an electronic backing and voila! Those strings do finish things off wonderfully, mind. Slow Life really was – and still is – one of the best tracks of the century. And you can quote me on that.
It was the third and final single from ‘Phantom Power’, but its release, in April 2004, was far from conventional. It, along with its two b-sides, was initially available digitally only from the website of Placid Casual, the band’s own independent record label, which suggests that Epic may have been reluctant to release it themselves, possibly due to its length. They did, however, put out a single-sided 12” promo. It then featured as a CD single in the special limited edition of the ‘Phantom Phorce’ remix album in its own slipcase sleeve (as shown above). Needless to say, it didn’t chart due to the nature of its release.
The b-sides? Well, the ‘Phantom Power’ era is a bit of an odd one because up to this point, the vast majority of b-sides on Super Furry Animals singles were largely excellent, with some real lost gems to be found amongst them. I never found this for any of the ‘Phantom Power’ singles though, and these don’t really improve things that much.
MP3: Motherfokker
MP3: Lost Control
The former features Newport’s finest Goldie Lookin’ Chain larking around, pretending to be aliens. It was panned by reviewers, but to be fair I don’t think it’s nearly as bad as it’s made out to be. The London-based press were no doubt just exercising their well-versed snobbery, mainly because they just didn’t get it. Motherfokker may not make a Top 10 SFA b-sides compilation, but it’s better than 95% of anything in the charts in April 2004. Plus, Graham The Bear of GLC is a mate of mine, and he’s a bloody good bloke (he also runs a record shop in Monmouth, should you ever be passing through…) As for Lost Control, well it’s basically an instrumental remix of the album track Out Of Control.
Yer bonus tracks for this week – well my complete inability to make tough decisions means I failed to come up with just two tracks for you – so you’re getting twice that many! There was no demo made for Slow Life, but I’ve pulled together some things from various sources, some of which have not been commercially released. So here’s a CD2 of the Slow Life EP.
MP3: Slow Life [radio edit]
MP3: Slow Life [Bench remix]
MP3: Slow Life [rough mix]
MP3: Motherfokker [street edit]
As an added bonus, here’s some links to my aforementioned mate Graham The Bear talking about the Super Furry Animals and their legacy. Part three contains a little tale about when his side project supported the Furries in London, involving Slow Life, 50 Cent’s microphone and a very rude phrase. Don’t go playing this in front of your boss, young children or Daily Mail readers…
This is typical of the sort of conversations I have with Graham whenever I see him. It’s why I like the guy! (In another video on the same YouTube channel, he also talks about drinking with the Manics in a Newport pub while still underage, if you’re interested in that sort of thing…)
It’s back again to the Big Gold Dreams box set for a song from 1979. And for a tune that was recorded at the legendary Cargo Studios in Rochdale, a place which was important to the development of Joy Division.
‘The Fakes are no real’ was the conceptual gag promoted by this Stirling-sired quartet founded by bassist James ‘Jamzy’ McDonald, singer Johnny Maguire and drummer Brian Kemp.
Originally The Cunts, then SK70, named after a silicon lubricant used with condoms, The Fakes made just one EP and a self-released cassette, joined by guitarist Mairi Ross.
A-side ‘Production’ was a pounding comment on dead-end factory jobs, while Sylvia Clarke was more catchy:-
mp3: The Fakes – Sylvia Clarke
The band fell apart following the death of Kemp in a motorcycle accident. McDonald reinvented himself as Mr Egg, overseeing a one-man acid techno revolution as the Can-referencing Ege Bam Yasi. More recently, McDonald and McGuire reformed The Fakes, with guitar whizz William Baird and Tango Rhums drummer Lee McPhail on board. Recent live shows sound as authentic as they’ve ever been.
The tune on offer today is very much of its time, but I feel it has some merit, thanks to the angular and slightly (to my ears) off-key guitars……
In late 2006, The Strokes announced they were going to take a break from recording and touring. There had already been three studio albums – Is This It (2001), Room On Fire (2003) and First Impressions Of Earth (2005) – while 2006 itself had seen them play almost 150 live shows between January and October, many of which had been at festivals and arenas. The proposed break was probably in everyone’s best interests.
Somehow, in among all this activity, the band’s rhythm guitarist Albert Hammond Jr found time to go into a studio and record his debut solo album. Yours To Keep was released in the UK by Rough Trade on 9 October 2006. It was a strangely low-key release, with no single issued in advance, and indeed the release date coincided with The Strokes finishing off a tour in the USA, meaning that Albert wasn’t around to do anything in the way of promotion.
The reviews were fine, but not gushing with praise, which I thought were a bit harsh. I had bought the album having heard it being played in a record shop as I browsed, without me actually knowing who it was. I certainly felt it was a more consistent and tuneful effort than the recent output of his band. But if the hope had been that many fans of the Strokes would shell out for Yours To Keep, then it proved to be a bit misguided, as it barely made a dent in the charts, coming in on its week of release at #74 before dropping out of the Top 100 altogether.
A month or so later, Albert brought a band came over to Europe for a short tour to further promote the album, including a Glasgow show at the 300-capacity ABC2. I was there along with Rachel, and to be fair, it proved to be a lot more enjoyable a night that we probably anticipated, probably as much to do with the fact he was genuinely enjoying playing such a small venue.
One of the tracks most mentioned positively in the reviews was given a belated release to coincide with the tour
mp3: Albert Hammond Jr – 101
It failed to really do anything, selling only enough copies to be logged at #76 in its first week.
The b-side was a cover
mp3: Albert Hammond Jr. – Postal Blowfish
The original was written and recorded by Guided By Voices in the 1990s. One of Albert’s favourite bands who were incredibly prolific throughout that decade, but I’m sorry to say I know nothing about them….I’ve one track of theirs in the collection, courtesy of it being included on a compilation CD given away by one of the monthly magazines.
Those of you who can recall when I had a chronological look at all the James 45s might well be familiar with the following few paragraphs as they date from February 2014.
One of my favourite early James singles and the least favourite of the sleeves.
The latter half of 86, all of 87 and early 88 was a strange time to be a James fan. It was also a frustrating time to be in the band, and I’m assuming even more frustrating to be part of the label to which the band had signed.
James were uncompromising in how they wanted to sound, while Sire Records had made it clear that if they didn’t release material that was more commercial or radio-friendly then nothing would ever see the light of day. In early 1987, a new album was recorded, but the label demanded a ‘better’ mix which just wasn’t forthcoming. It really did look for a while as if we had seen the last of the band.
The boys eventually relented and in return the label agreed that they would back a new single which was released in March 1988, a full 18 months after the previous release. It turned out to be a stunning record. Joyous, anthemic and completely radio-friendly. It was surely destined for the Top 10. It even had whistling on it!!
Except……….the record label felt it was still too indie-sounding to be deserving of a promotional push and so again it was left to the late night DJs to try and champion it….but the problem being that the band had been away for too long and nobody was really all that interested.
A crime for which lots of folk should be put in the dock and found guilty.
A 12″ copy of this single sits in the cupboard, so here we go:-
mp3 : James – What For (Climax Mix)
mp3 : James – Island Swing
mp3 : James – Not There
Once again, the b-sides are well worth your attention. Island Swing perhaps suffers from having a wee bit too much in the way of harmonica and the second half of the song doesn’t match the opening minute or so which is quite tremendous, but there can’t be many bands that have done something this jaunty as a dig at the British Empire and other forms of colonialism – while Not There is an alternative and better version of a song that would later appear on the LP Strip-Mine.
# 101: Terry & Gerry – ‘Wait Until You’re Older’ (Vindaloo Records ’84)
Dear friends,
today it’s one of these days again when I sit here and think to myself, ‘Jesus Christ, why can’t I just listen to „normal“ music, like The Beatles, for example?!“. Probably you will have the very same thought every week when my nonsense appears here, but that’s a different story.
Without looking it up, I don’t think there is a single Beatles-tune where I would not find thousands of essays about on the internet within a minute: get some facts, some inspiration perhaps, write a little something down, send it to JC, et voilà – back to bed!
Not so with today’s single by the most wonderful Terry & Gerry, a skiffle duo from Birmingham! I have to admit their Wikipedia entry is bigger than I first thought, but apart from this there isn’t anything I can find about them, regardless their brilliance.
They (Terry Lilley and Gerry Colvin) formed in the early 80s and unusually for the time the band was based on a skiffle sound, making use of a washboard for percussion instead of a drum kit. Terry plays double bass, and Gerry sings lead vocals and plays acoustic guitar. Below track is one of five tunes on their wonderful debut EP, ‘Butter’s On The Bread’ (a reference to the miners’ strike apparently), the sleeve of which tells me that the two chaps are backed by The Day-Glo’s, Andy Downer (guitar, singing) and Doreen Devine (washboard, singing).
I wish I had seen them live back then, they took their style from 1950’s pop artists – so much so that they wore black evening suits and ribbon ties at their gigs: great stuff!
You see, I know very well that songs like these don’t gain great applause generally. Therefore, even if there was more I could tell you, I should not take it too far – most of you would not bother anyway, I’m afraid. But hey, that’s my life story when it comes to obscurities like these: Peel liked them, so did I – but no one else did (and consequently isn’t interested) – and I liked them so much that on occasion they ended up in my singles box … end of the story, and no, I’m not complaining.
Today’s offering was single of the week in March 2002 in the NME.
It was described as “scorched, ragged and super heavy, taking ‘Bleach’-era Nirvana as its starting point and then proceeds to compress the whole of Kurt Cobain’s career into a blistering minute and a half. It’s a totally brilliant record”
A bit-OTT perhaps, but I think it’s fair to say it is an exciting listen
mp3: The Vines – Highly Evolved
It reached #32 in the UK singles charts. One subsequent single, Outtathaway would go Top 20 which is an indication that this Australian indie-rock combo never quite got the sales the critics had predicted. But then again, the debut album, also called Highly Evolved, did reach #3 and sold the best part of a million copies worldwide.
George Best, the debut album from the Wedding Present, was released in November 1987. Among its twelve tracks were two songs that had previously been released as singles – My Favourite Dress (February ’87) and Anyone Can Make A Mistake (October ’87) – although it must be pointed out that the album version of My Favourite Dress was a different recording.
The album was a relative success, reaching #47 in the charts, which wasn’t too shabby given it was issued on Reception Records, the band’s own label and there wasn’t a huge amount of money set aside for marketing and promotion beyond basic adverts in the UK music papers. Bands on major record labels would probably have found themselves being in the situation of being asked to lift another single from the album, maybe a month or six weeks after its initial release, as a way of giving sales a further shot in the arm.
This would have been counterproductive for TWP in that most, if not all their fan base, would have already likely purchased the album, while there was also the risk of the music press turning against the band with the accusation of ripping off said fans – at the very least there would have been missives from disgruntled punters printed in the letters section, regardless of whether such letters were genuine or the figment of the imaginations of journalists seeking to start a row.
It meant that Nobody’s Twisting Your Arm, the band’s next single, released in January 1988, was a previously unreleased song.
Which also means the world was denied this bona fide classic ever being made available as a stand-alone 45:-
mp3: The Wedding Present – A Million Miles
It’s that rare TWP thing from that era – a storyline in which the male protagonist gets the girl. It kind of is like a fairytale, given that for most of us, the scenario which plays out in How Soon Is Now? by The Smiths (so you go and you stand on your own, and you leave on your own) was surely far more common than catching the eye of someone who not only returns a smile but is soon happy to chat with you and to agree to your suggestion that you walk her home given the absence of the friend she had come along with.
And the middle verse of the protagonist excitedly calling a friend all about it, possibly the next morning…..genius!
It is a delightful song in every possible sense of the word, lyrically and musically. Almost forty years on, it remains one of the most popular TWP songs of them all, and is still aired to great effect in the live shows. It would have been a great single, but it wouldn’t have made the mainstream charts.
Let’s start with a song this week, shall we? Have a listen to this.
MP3: By The Sea – Wendy & Bonnie
Isn’t that lovely? I’m sure many of you will recognise at least part of that track (from teenage sibling duo Wendy & Bonnie’s only album ‘Genesis’ from 1969) owing to its first 30-odd seconds being sampled by Super Furry Animals as the intro to Hello Sunshine, the opening track on ‘Phantom Power’. Four months after the album’s release, a version of Hello Sunshine, sadly shorn of that intro, was released as the album’s second single.
MP3: Hello Sunshine [radio edit]
It’s a hazy, lazy little summery number about emerging from a period of darkness in one’s life and finding some joy again. Odd, really, considering the single was released in November just as the long nights were drawing in… It’s not my favourite SFA single, to be honest, I find it a bit ordinary, but it does have some pedal steel in it, and it was nice to hear that on a chart single at the time.
It has become something of a favourite among fans and not-really-fans for its line “I’m a minger/You’re a minger too”. For our overseas friends, minger is a Scottish word and defined as thus:
minger /ˈmɪŋə/ noun : derogatory – informal an unattractive or unpleasant person or thing. “Why can’t anyone see that Spencer is a complete minger?”
It’s always bellowed very loudly by the audience at a SFA concert. The band has far better couplets in its arsenal (as I’ve pointed out a few times in this series) but for some reason, this one has stuck.
It’s also a song the band could have made a lot of money from when they were approached to use it in a Coca-Cola ad. However, thankfully, the band has far more morals and ethics than most musicians and turned them down flat. Gruff explained:
“We have never been a big selling band, but when it came to the crunch, we felt we couldn’t justify endorsing a product that may have had a part in violently suppressing some of its workers. For a moment, I thought that we could have done the advert and donated the money for their campaign for justice. Yet the thought of having to hear our song used to sell anything that exploits anyone for the worse turns my stomach.”
Despite the commercial potential of Hello Sunshine, it failed to set the charts alight. Perhaps if it had been put out during the summer months, it might have climbed higher than its actual chart peak of #31. It means a lot of people missed out on the b-sides. All formats – 7” picture disc, CD and DVD – had this:
MP3: Cowbird
The CD and DVD also included a third track:
MP3: Sanitizzzed
The former is an instrumental that belongs on some movie soundtrack or something. In the right context, it might be amazing, but I fail to get much out of it. The latter sounds like something the band would have done a few years earlier. It has that classic psyche-infused SFA-of-old sound, with a good melody and lots of la-la-las. And a dog. It’s clear why neither of these tracks appeared on the album, they just wouldn’t have fit anywhere.
The demo is wonderful and is my favourite version of the song. It’s even more laid-back than the final studio version, and features an extended bridge with extra lyrics that were eventually discarded. I also love what the band is doing in that part too. This really was a highlight of the 20th anniversary edition of ‘Phantom Power’.
I have to admit to quite liking the remix as well. It’s obviously very different, but it has its own charm and hazy warmth about it that makes it well worth a listen. It also retains the pedal steel, so a big tick for that! It featured on the remix album ‘Phantom Phorce’ along with another remix of Hello Sunshine which isn’t worth the effort as there are no recognisable parts of the original song in it, so I object to it being called a remix of anything and it won’t be posted here!
Anyway, next week, the third and final instalment of the Phantom Power singles, and it’s another special bumper post!
Here’s a duo that totally passed me by until earlier this year. F.O. Machete – previously known as Fuck Off Machete – and consisting of Natasha Noramly (bass, vocals) and Paul Mellon (guitar, vocals), formed in Glasgow back in 2003, and debut album My First Machete was released on Lost Dog Recordings the following year. There would be one further album and a couple of EPs before what is now described as a hiatus (not a break-up) from Natasha moving to the USA in 2011.
The onset of the COVID pandemic led to Natasha returning to Glasgow in 2020, and in the fullness of time she reconnected with Paul. A couple of years back, Last Night From Glasgow had made contact to seek out the possibility of releasing the back catalogue on vinyl (it had previously only been issued on CD). Those at the label were delighted to be told that Natasha and Paul had been working on new material, and so the plans for the reissue were put on the back burner and resources instead put towards recording and releasing the new songs.
The album Mother Of A Thousand came out back in February, and it is only down to the fact I knew they were due up in this long-running series that has stopped me mentioning it until now. There are a few reviews out there online, all of them fulsome in their praise for the album, and I make no apologies for quoting Neil Hodge (aka The Ginger Quiff), someone whose finger is always on the pulse of Scottish music, and who is one of our best writers:-
“That second album from the band with perhaps the most Glaswegian name ever is the triumphant Mother of a Thousand, featuring ten masterpieces of no wave alt-rock genius that scythe through the competition with their unique flair and preposterously addictive catchiness. The machete have taken the loud-quiet-loud blueprint that marked out the Pixies from their competition and have made it all their own, with songs that move from quiet almost whispered quirkiness all the way through a gamut of many textured sounds to some gargantuan fuck off riffs…..”
He has absolutely nailed it.
mp3: F.O.Machete – Confetti Clown
Hooks and riffs abound, and it is the sort of album which seems to throw up something fresh and different with each and every listen. I’m certain it’ll be one that will make a few end-of-the-year lists, and not just round these parts.
In which I admit to falling for the tricks of the marketing folk…..
It was hearing some of their songs at the much-missed Little League nights during the 2010s that I first fell for the charms of The Pains of Being Pure At Heart. My dancing partner-in-crime, Aldo, was way ahead of the curve, having cottoned onto them from the outset, being someone who loved getting out and about to various indie-festivals in the UK and further afield. His CD collection has always been packed with releases from all the legendary indie labels, with Slumberland Records being one of his favourites.
The self-titled debut was released in February 2009. I’m quite sure Aldo would have bought it at the time and raved about it to anyone who would listen. I was going through a period of enjoying what was a particularly fertile period for emerging Scottish-based bands, and so I wouldn’t have paid much attention to the idea that great music was coming out of Brooklyn. But as I said, it was hearing some songs while out at the middle-aged folks equivalent of the indie-disco that got my ears pricked.
Said album was eventually purchased on CD in maybe 2015 or 2016. My take on things from the outset that it was a very good but not wholly brilliant listen. The opening five songs – Contender, Come Saturday, Young Adult Friction, This Love Is Fucking Right! and The Tenure Itch – were particularly strong, but that’s no real surprise, as the catchy singles were all in there. What I was particularly liking was how they seemed to blend a range of indie-influences from both the US and the UK and somehow come up with something that sounded different. The melodies were great, the tunes were toe-tapping, and the whole thing bounced along at a fair pace.
But just as I was beginning to think it was a classic, things sagged in the middle. Don’t get me wrong, the tunes Stay Alive and Everything With You were decent enough, but where there had been killer choruses early on, these kind of felt indie-by-numbers. Would I have felt the same if I’d seen the band play live back in the day? Probably not, as there was a sense that they would have sounded bright and energetic when aired in the presence of an adoring and enthusiastic audience. And just as I was kind of being dragged back in by A Teenager In Love and Hey Paul, the album closer Gentle Sons left me shaking my head as dull and plodding – the very worst of their influences coming through as it sounded like a Mary Chain cast-off with an awful lead guitar part midway through.
And then, in early 2022, one of the monthly e-mails from the Monorail record shop excitedly announced that the album was being re-released on limited edition vinyl – white with pink and yellow splatter no less – and could be ordered via the website. The thing is, there’s plenty of albums (and indeed singles) I have on CD that I’d love to have on vinyl, but this wasn’t really one of them. But, just like the Four Tops (and Orange Juice), I can’t help myself. And the order was placed within seconds of the email arriving – I didn’t want to miss out!
So now, I have two copies of The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart. Consumerism at its worst. But I could justify things to myself by the fact that I would now be able to place the vinyl on the turntable and lift it off without guilt at the end of Side 1.
mp3: The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – Contender
mp3: The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – Young Adult Friction
And if I want any of the Side 2 tracks, there’s always the digital versions on the laptop (although I’m no so shallow as to not put the needle into the groove of Side 2, but I always make sure it gets lifted again before the final track, which means it always closes with this:-
mp3: The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – Hey Paul
Which I’ve just done as I listened again while typing out all of the above.
I pulled this one down off the shelf for inclusion in this series. First thing I did was look at the credits and was stunned/horrified to see that the track dates back to 2001. It’s another of those that make me wonder about where the time has gone……I could have sworn this was a good ten years later.
mp3: The Chemical Brothers – Star Guitar (edit)
This version is a couple of minutes shorter than the one included on the album Come With Us. Not being very good at describing what music sounds like, please permit me to quote a couple of professionals.
“a crisp post-disco work-out featuring bristling guitars and a Giorgio Moroder-style synth-bass.” – Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine
“a dreamy melody hatches from an array of Ritalin beats, is evidence of a band that is increasingly drawn to disorientingly lush tunes rather than to mere adrenaline anthems.”– Pat Blashall of Rolling Stone
Maybe Mr Blashall went to the same writing school as Graeme Thomson?
Fatboy Slim was asked if he fancied doing a remix of Star Guitar, but he declined on the basis that it couldn’t be improved.
I’m assuming that having received that particular rejection, Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands turned their attention to another music producer from Brighton, who was quite happy to get on board.
mp3: The Chemical Brothers – Star Guitar (Pete Heller Expanded Mix)
It’s quite epic in some ways, speeding up and slowing down as it meanders along, and certainly has a ‘hands to the ceiling’ feel to it.
The CD single came with one other piece of music.
mp3: The Chemical Brothers – Base 6
This one seems to pay homage to an awful lot of different types of dance/club music. The ‘123456 Bass’ sample has been lifted from a 1992 track by a Miami-based club DJ known as Beat Dominator, although I can’t help but think of ‘Bass’ being taken from White Lines by Grandmaster Melle Mel.
Star Guitar reached #8 in the singles chart in January 2002. They’ve only once reached the Top 10 since then, and that was with Galvanize in January 2005. But I think it’s fair to say that much of their music has proved to be timeless, remaining highly popular with young clubbers/festival goers all these years later.
July 1984. I spent most of the month inter-railing, myself and two girls using youth hostels en route to go from Glasgow to Rome, via London, Paris, Marseilles, Monte Carlo, Genoa and Viareggio where we realised we were running low on funds and so headed back via Venice and then overnight trains through Switzerland and Belgium before the boat back across the channel. As such, I can say with all honesty that I had no idea who was enjoying chart hits back home.
Thinking back to that trip, it’s unthinkable really to realise it was done without any sort of mobile technology and that all our cash was in sterling which was later exchanged at different times to francs and lira. We were also totally dependent on old-fashioned guide books and hostel info that we had borrowed from public libraries. Sadly, I’ve no photos at all from the adventure – I was in a relationship with one of the girls that later turned nasty, after which she destroyed almost everything that we collectively owned.
Anyways, back to the music.
1-7 July
Frankie Goes To Hollywood occupied #1 and #2 with Two Tribes and Relax. Nick Kershaw and Cyndi Lauper, sitting at #3 and #4, may well have been a tad upset that the mania engulfing the UK record-buying public prevented them hitting the top.
I do recall throughout my teen and youth years that the summer months were often quite barren in terms of new music and the first chart of July 1984 does nothing to distil such memories. The Thompson Twins had the highest new entry at #28 with Sister Of Mercy, which I had to look up on YouTube to be reminded of. It’s an overwrought ballad whose subject-matter was domestic abuse, seemingly based on a real-life murder case in France. Worthy but dull would be my verdict.
Ultravox were the next highest new entry, in at #33 with Lament, while the only other song to breach the Top 40 was State of Shock, a collaboration between The Jacksons and Mick Jagger. I have no recollection of either of these hits. The only two new entries further down that I can recall were ballads:-
mp3: The Kane Gang – Closest Thing To Heaven (#56)
mp3: Joe Jackson – Be My Number Two (#72)
The former would spend a couple of months in the chart, eventually peaking at #12 and is, by far, the one song most people of a certain age will recall when thinking of the Kane Gang. The latter is not one that I’m particularly enamoured by, but it’s on the hard drive courtesy of a cheap ‘best of’ CD’ picked up in a charity shop quite a few years ago.
8-14 July
The top four were still the same, albeit Nik and Cyndi had switched positions. The highest new entry was a novelty comedy record; actor Nigel Planer had released an album in his guise as the character Neil from the sitcom The Young Ones. The joke being that Neil was a peace-loving hippy, and the album was a mix of spoken tracks and 60s cover versions. Hole In My Shoe, originally recorded by Traffic in 1967, came in at #5. It would then spend three weeks stuck at #2 and if nothing else, we should perhaps be grateful that Two Tribes sold so heavily each and every week and prevented yet another novelty #1 single.
In among the dross was this at #26:-
mp3: Echo and The Bunnymen – Seven Seas
The Bunnymen‘s sixth successive Top 40 hit single and the third and final one to be lifted from Ocean Rain. It’s decent enough albeit far from a classic, but it did lead to a stupidly amusing appearance on Top of The Pops which I saw on VHS tape, courtesy of a flatmate, on my return from Europe:-
Introduced by John Peel. And there’s Bill Drummond down the front of the audience, looking geeky and awkward but ready to play his part in making waves. The big question, though, is how did Les Pattinson manage to avoid being part of all this? Oh, and just to mention…..my hair at this time was very much modelled on Mac’s look.
Keeping up the fun was this new entry at #38:-
mp3 : Divine – You Think You’re A Man
Bronski Beat were the serious side of gay culture in the pop charts. Harris Glenn Milstead, aka Divine, was the fun, cartoon-side of things back in 1984, with his drag-queen persona having long made him a film star prior to his pop/disco career. Divine brought his/her/their stage show to student venues in the UK in 1985, and I was lucky enough to see a performance at Strathclyde student union. It proved to be an outstanding night – the first time I realised live gigs delivered solely by backing tapes were not the devil incarnate! You Think You’re A Man would eventually reach #16 and be the biggest hit for Divine, who sadly died in his sleep of a heart attack, aged just 42, in March 1988.
15-21 July
Just as it was looking as if the Top 40 this week was totally stagnant:-
mp3: Blancmange – The Day Before You Came (#39)
Neil Arthur and Stephen Luscombe‘s sixth Top 40 hit, but their first with a cover version, being a slightly unusual take on the Abba single released just two years previously. Kind of hard to believe given how successful Abba were, but the cover version charted the highest of the two. The Swedes peaked at #32, while Blancmange’s take climbed to #22, a chart position it held for three successive weeks.
Worth mentioning, perhaps, that two very old songs entered the singles chart this week, thanks to then being re-released. A Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles came in at #54 (peaking the following week at #52) while Brown Sugar by The Rolling Stones was a #59 entry, peaking the following week at #58. It was also the chart in which Ben and Tracy enjoyed a second success of the year:-
mp3: Everything But The Girl – Mine (#58)
Fair play to the duo, and the record label, for not lifting a second single from the Top 20 album Eden, but my recollection at the time when first hearing it was that it was a bit of a letdown, not having too much of a memorable tune. I’ve grown to appreciate it more over the years, but it really felt like an outlier back in 1984. #58 was as high as it charted.
22-28 July
Ridiculously slim pickings this week. It’s A Hard Life by Queen was the highest new entry at #23, with the next best newbies being Hazell Dean, Rod Stewart and Tracey Ullman at 25, 42 and 51 respectively. I know I’ve featured Tracey Ullman before in this series, but Sunglasses, the song with which she entered the chart this week is one I just do not recall and having just gone again to YouTube to see if my memory could be jogged. Turned out that it couldn’t, and I only managed to watch about thirty seconds of the video before hurriedly hitting the stop button.
And just as I was to completely give up and write-off this week’s chart:-
mp3: The Colour Field – Take (#70)
The only week in which the band’s second single breached the Top 75.
Looking back over all of this, it does seem that I picked a good month to be out of the country.
The second most influential band ever. A Velvet Underground ICA
As the long summer of 1991 faded to a rather limp end, the long lost Medway band, the Sexbirds clambered on to the small stage in the back room of Churchills Pub in Chatham. If they were disappointed by the small crowd they didn’t let it show, but as there was only three people there, they kind of had to have hoped for more. Still, they played a tight four song set full of post punk energy and displayed enough rock n roll attitude to impress the grumpy looking barman who literally served more pints than there were people. In that crowd, a devilishly good looking young chap stood alone from the other two people in the crowd, largely because he didn’t know them and standing with them in an empty room would have been weird.
But as the feedback influenced third song came to an end, the taller of the two other people wandered over to the devilishly good looking chap and said “Can you play guitar?” the good looking chap nodded even though he couldn’t play guitar, well not really. He’d had four lessons. “Good”, said the taller man, “let’s form a band, because if that lot can do it..” he hoisted a thumb at the stage, “anyone can…”.
Folks, only three people saw the Sexbirds live, but all three of them formed a band because of it and that in my eyes makes them most influential band in the history of rock music.
The distinct lack of available Sexbirds material makes an ICA on rocks most influential band impossible. So, here instead is an ICA on rocks second most influential band, The Velvet Underground (it will be debut album heavy, obviously)
The Velvet Underground are apparently one of those bands that you either get or you don’t. You either accept that they invented everything, literally everything, including the wheel, fire, glass, cigarettes and rock music, or you don’t. When I first heard the Velvet Underground, which was as a naïve seventeen-year-old in the bedroom of a much older woman* I didn’t get them. Then two years later as a student, I suddenly did.
Side One
Sunday Morning – The first Velvet Underground song I ever heard and it was this with its music box intro that confused me. In 1992, I thought this sounded dull but two years later that music box intro sounds beautiful and the way that Lou Reed’s guitar sounds all countrified (thanks to him loosening the strings) gives it a rather luminous glow of strangeness and uniqueness.
Pale Blue Eyes – ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ is rather confusingly a love song about a girl that Lou Reed used to date who had hazel coloured eyes. It is one of the most tender song that the band ever recorded and its rather wonderful because of it. It is taken from the third Velvet Underground record, which of all the Velvet Underground records it’s the one I play the least, but ‘Pale Blue Eyes’ is the stand-out track from it.
Venus In Furs – ‘Venus In Furs’ isn’t just a blend of hypnotic drone rock, sound textures and atmospheric brilliance. It’s a blend of hypnotic drone rock, sound textures and atmospheric brilliance that is also about sado masochism that was written in about 1965. That, folks, is why the Velvet Underground matter.
Rock N Roll (Full Length Version) – By the time the band reached album four, John Cale had of course departed to make some introrespective and abstract noises with his electric viola. Mo Tucker had also momentarily left as well so that she could have a baby. This left Lou Reed to stretch out and pretty much do what he wanted, and Lou Reed wanted to make a pop record. Albeit a pop record laced with the odd voyage into proto punk rock.
Run, Run, Run – According to legend, Lou Reed wrote this song on the back of an envelope whilst he and the rest of the band were on their way to a gig. If true, ‘Run, Run, Run’ is the greatest thing ever to be written on the back of an envelope and until -someone comes up with the secret of immortality and pops it down on the back of a gas bill – it always will be.
Side Two
What Goes On – ‘What Goes On’ was the only track to be released as a single from the band’s third album. Twelve years or so later, Talking Heads would borrow the organ riff and use it as the backdrop for ‘Once In A Lifetime’. That, folks, is another reason why the Velvet Underground matter, their influence and sound and organ riffs shaped so much of the music that we all loved as we grew up.
Sweet Jane (Full Length Version) – There are two tracks on ‘Loaded’ that sound like they could have featured on the debut Velvet Underground record. ‘Rock N Roll’ was one, ‘Sweet Jane’ is the other, and it fizzes with pure energy.
The Black Angel’s Death Song – ‘The Black Angel’s Death Song’ is extraordinarily good. The way that John Cale’s electric viola squeaks and scraps like someone dragging their fingernails over a chalkboard, the way Lou Reed’s vocals are kind of all over the place, its unsettling and ace at the same time.
White Light/White Heat – Just realised that I’ve almost reached the end and not once mentioned drugs. Well, let’s sort that now shall we. ‘White Light/White Heat’ is the greatest song ever written about the sensation that you get by injecting methamphetamine, and I’ll add for good measure it has the greatest ending to a track ever as John Cale’s distorted single chord bass goes batshit crazy.
Heroin – I’ll end with my favourite Velvets song. It needs little introduction but it’s insanely good. It’s insanely good because of the way that it all speeds up, and because of the way that Mo Tucker is drumming so fast that she has to stop drumming because she can’t keep up the rhythm that she started and it’s insanely good because literally no one notices, and she just joins back in amongst the squall of guitars and the screech of, well everything. Incredible.
* There were seven other people in that room at the time, and we’d just finished playing Monopoly, but it doesn’t sound as cool if I tell you that.
A guest series by Fraser Pettigrew (aka our New Zealand correspondent)
#3: Datapanik in the Year Zero – Pere Ubu (1978)
As a genre label, ‘post-punk’ implies some sort of influence and progression from punk, when in fact it was more like the way that natural selection operates in the biological world. Evolution is often misrepresented as an active, conscious process when it is really the accidental combination of random mutation and environment. Pere Ubu was one of many musical mutations taking place in the mid-70s and punk was the environment that enabled them to flourish.
Whatever the definition or consciousness of ‘punk rock’ was in Cleveland, Ohio in 1975, Pere Ubu were unquestionably distant from any mainstream music scene. Formed by two ex-members of recently disintegrated Cleveland band Rocket From The Tombs, singer David Thomas and guitarist Peter Laughner, Pere Ubu tagged themselves as ‘avant-garage’, a neat and clever coinage that indicated a different direction from their erstwhile bandmates Cheetah Chrome and Johnny Blitz who went on to form the very definitely punk Dead Boys.
Ubu’s music was an unsettling hybrid of mid-70s rock and weirdo gothic psycho-horror, and frontman Thomas wasn’t likely to soften the appeal. Always a big lad, usually dressed in an ill-fitting suit, there was no mistaking him for David Cassidy in the visual charisma stakes and his vocal style ranged from depressive mumble to disgruntled adenoidal bleat. Keyboard player Alan Ravenstine rarely played a chord, preferring to smother the music with harsh electronic noise that evoked the declining industrial landscape of rust-belt Cleveland. Altogether, you can see how the eclectic experimental non-conformism of post-punk drew Pere Ubu into the fold.
Datapanik in the Year Zero is a bit of an outlier in this EP series since it is a compilation drawn from three of the band’s first four singles rather than an original release of new material. As a compilation it’s a bit odd too because it contains only one a-side from those three, all three b-sides and a different unreleased version of one of the other a-sides.
The 12” EP was released in the UK early in 1978 in a one-off deal with Radar Records, to coincide with Mercury’s UK release of first album The Modern Dance. The singles had never been released outside America, having appeared only in limited numbers on Pere Ubu’s own Hearthan label. The name Hearthan became ‘Hearpen’ because it comes from the Anglo-Saxon for ‘harp’ and uses the ‘thorn’ character Þ which looks like a ‘p’ but sounds like ‘th’. As Thomas explained on his Crocus Behemoth website, “Confusion was the foundation on which the business grew”. So, not a slick marketing campaign and world-leading brand strategy, then?
Datapanik covers a two-year period from 1975 to 1977. The first side is a grim affair, containing both sides of the debut single, but opening with b-side Heart of Darkness. Not Joseph Conrad’s story but a similar nightmare of emotional dysfunction. A-side 30 Seconds Over Tokyo is about the 1941 Dolittle Raid on Japan, America’s first retaliation after Pearl Harbour, imagined from the perspective of one of the pilots, “never coming back from a suicide ride”. All six minutes and 20 seconds of it.
Dark stuff, and clearly not a serious bid for global rock stardom. But if you’re going to name yourself after an absurdist literary character, you might at least confound expectations. 30 Seconds was a reworking of a Rocket From The Tombs number, co-credited to Gene O’Connor (Cheetah Chrome), while Heart of Darkness was a Pere Ubu composition, but stylistically very much from the same crypt.
Second single Final Solution is another Rocket song, comparably morbid in title and sound, based on a heavy guitar lick that might have been plucked from The Stooges or MC5, with bleak lyrics of romantic rejection and existential despair. However, Final Solution is not included on Datapanik. The modern perspective assumes the reason is good taste, but the song is not about the Nazi final solution any more than Heart of Darkness is about colonialism in the Congo, and people weren’t so nervous about that sort of ambivalence in 1978 when this EP was released.
Whatever, the b-side Cloud 149 is the first track on side two of the EP, and it’s a distinct contrast to side one. It’s like the sun has come out and big Dave has suddenly, unexpectedly found love with the simple flip of a 7” slice of vinyl. The song bounces into life on overlapping layers of rhythm, settling into a briskly chugging syncopation with the kind of musical ingenuity that leaves you wondering where exactly the first beat in the bar is until the vocals nail it down. “Here she comes/She’s ok/I can tell/She’s ok…” From the lyrics it could be The Undertones or The Beach Boys, and it really doesn’t feel ironic. No idea what Cloud 149 means, unless it’s simply 140 clouds higher than cloud nine.
Third single Street Waves is completely absent along with its b-side My Dark Ages. The obvious rationale is that the same version of the a-side can be found on The Modern Dance album where it is one of the highlights of side one, a great little chunk of 70s rock’n’roll, though it has always sounded structurally weird to me, like the second half of a song rather than the whole thing. The explanation for the b-side’s omission may simply be that it’s not that great, certainly the least appealing of these early single tracks.
Fourth single The Modern Dance is sort of here, but in a different version from either the original a-side or the album version. Those two versions are exactly the same cut except that on the album the instrumental backing is accentuated by a metallic percussive clink, but on the single this rhythmic highlight is provided by that common musical instrument, a squeaky toy. The ‘Untitled’ version on Datapanik has neither clink nor eek, nor the call-and-response backing vocal that I used to think said ‘mantra mantra’ but I have since discovered is actually ‘merdre merdre’. All you Alfred Jarry fans will of course be keenly aware that ‘Merdre!’ is the opening line of the play Ubu Roi, a technical provocation to the French censor of 1896, usually translated into English as the definitely not sweary-word ‘Shrit!’
Final track Heaven was the b-side of The Modern Dance and is another little ray of melodic and lyrical sunshine: “A mid-summer’s night on a magic beach/The dreams that come to me, they don’t look out of reach… C’mon, darlin! It feels like heaven”.
The singles sampled on Datapanik, and the first two albums The Modern Dance and Dub Housing are, for me, the essential moments of Pere Ubu’s career. Focus and inspiration began to drift on New Picnic Time and The Art of Walking and weren’t recaptured after their subsequent split and reformation, nor were they evident to me on what I heard of David Thomas’s solo work. Too much formless electronic noise collage and weird yelping, not enough of the delicious punchy rock knocked slightly off kilter by the unique vocals and synth terror.
They were still impressive when I saw them supporting Gang of Four in 1981, when there was little indulgence of the shuffling sounds of the sands, but on record the appeal had faded. The self-defined avant-garage was something more accessible than avant garde and less ragged and more taut than garage, but rather too soon it became too much of one and not enough of the other.
For album #6, Super Furry Animals went back to basics. After the ambitious lushness of ‘Rings Around The World’ and the huge number of songs they wrote for it (which resulted in four months of discussions and arguments over which songs would be included and which ones wouldn’t), the band made a decision not to over-complicate things for the next record. Initially, the plan was to write songs all based around the same unconventional guitar tuning: D-A-D-D-A-D. And while a batch of songs were written to that concept, it was felt to be too limiting over all, so that plan was abandoned. However, the other plan to not write as many songs and not tinker too much with them was adhered to.
Recording took place through the second half of 2002 in a Cardiff office block. The band worked through the nights so as not to disturb the other occupants of the building during the day. The resulting record, ‘Phantom Power’ was unleashed in the summer of 2003. The contrast to its immediate predecessor was stark – it had a much more stripped back sound and a more cohesive style. The one thing it did retain was a stack of great songs.
The public’s first taste of the new album was Golden Retriever, released just one week beforehand.
MP3: Golden Retriever
It was one of those songs written by Gruff on his acoustic guitar in the D-A-D-D-A-D tuning and has real echoes of the blues about it, not just in the musical structure, but in Gruff’s lyrics referencing the devil and the crossroads. It certainly has a more basic, raw feel to it than the songs on ‘Rings Around The World’, but those amazing backing vocals at the end of the chorus, that escalating “dryyyyyyyyyy” really sets the whole thing off for me. It’s that tinge of brilliance that runs through nearly everything the Furries ever did.
As for those lyrics – they’re about Gruff’s girlfriend’s two golden retrievers. Yes, even the lyrics were shorn of their obtuse, complex nature. Well, for the most part.
Golden Retriever remains one of the band’s highest charting singles, reaching number 13 in the UK. It was released on three formats – 7” picture disc, CD and DVD – all of which contained these two b-sides:
MP3: Summer Snow
MP3: Blue Fruit
Summer Snow is a country song which includes the eventual album’s title, suggesting it only missed out on the final cut somewhat narrowly. Blue Fruit, meanwhile sounds like a classic SFA psychedelic odyssey. It also sounds like a b-side, and not one of the quality we’d come to expect of the band over the years. Both these b-sides were issued in the US on a 7” single via Stop Smiling, “the magazine for high-minded lowlifes” according to itself, in 2004.
Now, the bonus tracks for the ‘Phantom Power’ singles will be drawn from both the 2002 demos issued with the 20th anniversary edition of the album, and the 2004 companion album ‘Phantom Phorce’ which contained remixes of each track alongside some cynical mock commentary by the fictional producer “Kurt Stern”.
MP3: Golden Retriever [demo]
MP3: Golden Retriever [Killa Kela remix]
The demo features Gruff solo with his voice double-tracked, one track being one line behind the other. The rest of the band contributes noisily towards the end. The remix comes courtesy of pioneering UK beatboxer Killa Kela, who strips away most of the instrumentation and replaces it with his own vocal-based beats. Kurt Stern can be heard at the end expressing his disappointment at the song’s subject matter.
As far as first singles go, Golden Retriever was a very decent introduction to Phantom Power. Sadly, it has been somewhat forgotten about due to the band’s next two singles becoming among their best loved.
Incidentally, that guitar tuning D-A-D-D-A-D was also used to compose the two short instrumental tracks on ‘Phantom Power’. Their titles? The clue is in there…..
Unashamedly copied and pasted from the website of the Manchester-based shop Piccadilly Records, which seems very apt as it was Manchester-based blogger Swiss Adam who first brought Eyes of Others to my attention:-
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“Eyes of Others is the studio alias of Edinburgh based John Bryden, a self-christened ‘post-pub couldn’t get in the club’producer.
Having announced their signing to Heavenly Recordings last November (2022) with the release of a 10” vinyl-only 6-track EP, Bewitched By The Flames, which sold out immediately through independent shops and mail order, Eyes Of Others is now set to present their debut, self-titled album.
Marrying the anything-goes, freestyle magpie tendencies of Beck and The Beta Band to the electronic stylings of primetime 80s New Order by way of the spacious moods conjured by King Tubby, Eyes of Others debut’s whimsical demeanour is the perfect sonic balm to the utter confusion of the outside world. As is its sense of almost Balearic musical freedom. Such a mindset is fundamental to the music according to Bryden.
“I was thinking where’s my spot?”Bryden reflects about the pick & mix quality of the album. “The music is later than a gig but it’s not full-on early morning club fare. It’s the in-between space where I was imagining where my music works.”
But his beguiling tunes are perfect for the music soundtracking the afters too. As the dawn breaks and the sun begins to rise. “Maybe there aren’t enough venues opening at 7am!”he laughs, before quickly adding: “I don’t think it will catch on unfortunately.”
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I bought the self-titled debut album in due course, and used the blog in October 2023 to declare it as one of my most enjoyable purchases of the year. A few months later, I caught a live performance in Glasgow in front of what was something of a meagre audience on a cold January evening, and came away quite annoyed that so few folk were picking up on things.
There’s not been any new music over the past 18 months, so I’m not sure if things have come to a crashing halt and that the legacy will be just the one rather excellent album.
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 