Category: Primitives

A GUEST POSTING from STRANGEWAYS

Ten Lovely Tracks : An Imaginary Compilation Album

Welcome to a lovely Imaginary Compilation Album. That’s not me bigging-up this mix, but rather offering a literal description, for this is an ICA of songs deemed to be ‘lovely’ in nature. Immediately this business of a song being lovely is subjective of course. But the closest I got to a criterion was including tracks that, when you hear them, kind of wrap their arms around you.

It should be stated that this list is very, very far from exhaustive; the mountain of should-have-rans continues growing.

Side 1

1. The Ronettes: Walking in the Rain (single A-side, 1964, Philles)

I won’t attempt to add too much to the weight of words that must have been written about this song since The Ronettes released it in October 1964. I’m really not qualified, so to do so would be like writing about lofty cultural fixtures like the Mona Lisa or Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway.

That said, a thunderclap kicks the track off and immediately we’re in a dreamland co-created of course by an ace Phil Spector production. With its references to shyness, its grown-up assertion that ‘sometimes we’ll fight’, its fondness for wishing on stars and of course its championing of rain over sun you could say that thematically Walking in the Rain gifted a bit of a blueprint to the indiepop genre that would emerge fifteen or so years later.

The track is just super, and so far as its inclusion here is concerned, its sheer loveliness fought off the likes of Past, Present and Future by the Shangri-Las, Thinkin’ ‘Bout You Baby by Sharon Marie and A Lover’s Concerto by The Toys.

Loveliest line: ‘Walking in the rain and wishing on the stars up above, and being so in love… ’

2. The Jam: Wasteland (Setting Sons LP track, 1979, Polydor)

I am really no Jam expert whatsoever. It’s daft, of course, that I haven’t explored beyond the singles and a couple of LPs. Moron. But the album I know best is Setting Sons. And the track I love most is Wasteland.

That Paul Weller was only, what, 21 max when he wrote the elegant words of Wasteland is astonishing to me. Listing the wasteland’s decorations – including punctured footballs, ragged dolls and rusting bicycles – he conjures up the grimy props of a world in which ‘to be caught smiling’s to acknowledge life’ as two lovers? Ex-lovers? Never-were lovers? Just friends? sit amid the trash and stoke over the past. Certainly if the theory that Setting Sons was intended – but not realised – as a concept album concerned with the lives of three childhood friends, the relationship could well be platonic. The reference to hand-holding though perhaps hints at something else.

Adding to the overall loveliness of this track are notes from a recorder – an instrument, in the UK at least, recalling tuneless school music classes. Here though, sounding not unlike the calls from a bird on high, it puffs out an innocent intro and pops up again at a key line.

Finally, that Weller gets so much detail of his wasteland – ‘meet me on the wastelands, the ones behind the old houses, the ones left standing pre-war, the ones overshadowed by the monolith monstrosities councils call homes’ – to even scan properly is remarkable.

Loveliest line: ‘Meet me later – but we’ll have to hold hands… ’

3. R.E.M.: At My Most Beautiful (Up LP track, 1998, Warner Bros.)

Of all the bands selected to populate this ICA, R.E.M. gave me the most trouble. In surveying the songs I know of them – and to be fair that although it’s not 100% knowledge it’s not by any stretch horrendous either – it rapidly became apparent that you could, before breakfast, create an ICA of ‘Lovely Songs Just by R.E.M.’.

So what to do?

That’s easy – choose a total slushfest, and from an unfancied LP, that will annoy the readers of this blog. So apologies to the exalted likes of Perfect Circle, Wendell Gee and The Flowers of Guatemala, plus Half A World Away, Nightswimming and Electrolite. Here instead is At My Most Beautiful, from 1998 album Up.

I seem to remember that at the time a common brickbat chucked at this song was that it was ‘R.E.M. trying to sound like The Beach Boys’. It is. And I further remember thinking ‘great’.

Sure, it’s kind of saccharine and soppy, but the overall result is lovely – which is of course what we’re after here. Added to this, the words of this big value track also provide…

The Grand Indie Boy or Girl’s Guide to Snagging a Partner

Three sure-fire ways to reverse the joy of solitude:

1. Read bad poetry into their machine (or, for the less ancient, their mobile phone)

2. Save their messages just to hear their voice – (perhaps keep this one to yourself)

3. Count their eyelashes, secretly (and for bonus points, with every one whisper ‘I love you’)

Loveliest line: ‘You always listen carefully to awkward rhymes, you always say your name like I wouldn’t know it’s you, at your most beautiful.. ’

4. The Pogues: Lullaby of London (If I Should Fall From Grace With God LP track, 1987, WEA)

The Pogues are probably at their best when they’re rocking the furious likes of Boys From The County Hell and Sally MacLenanne, or Turkish Song of the Damned and Bottle of Smoke. But grand as these are, you could hardly call any of these breathless beauties lovely. That’s a job instead for Lullaby of London, from the revered 1987 album If I Should Fall From Grace With God.

Here, Shane MacGowan takes us on a kind of stroll located by a river and in the springtime. On this jaunt, in the main, his words are mystical and supernatural (ghosts and haunted graves and angels are present). But he ambles also in the urban: and despite noting the absence of a cry from a lonesome corncrake – any twitcher will tell you i) that’s a bird and ii) its binomial nomenclature is Crex crex – he seems satisfied enough with the sounds of cars and bars and laughter and fights.

This is a song that feels older than it is or, to put it more delicately, could be of another age. Were it not for that reference to motor cars, the whole expedition could be taking place a century-and-a-half ago. Remove the pubs and you spool back even further. Laughter and fights though have surely been with us since the first caveman cracked an off-colour joke and instigated a brawl.

Enough. All that’s left to say is that if the words to Lullaby of London are remarkable, the band is totally on point too, especially via the lilting mandolin that quietly matches the lyrics for sheer emotional punch.

It’s odd, but a speck of dust always lands in my eye whenever I hear this track.

Loveliest line: ‘May the wind that blows from haunted graves never bring you misery, may the angels bright watch you tonight and keep you while you sleep… ’

5. The Primitives: We Found a Way to the Sun (Really Stupid 7” single B-side, 1986, Lazy Recordings)

Somewhat inevitably the band with the LP titled Lovely was always going to make it onto this ICA. And, also somewhat inevitably, the song selected here does not in fact feature on that album. Instead, it’s We Found a Way to the Sun – curiously styled, on the subsequent Lazy 86-88 compilation, and other anthologies that followed, as (We’ve) Found a Way (to the Sun).

Bracketed or not, it is just one of several absolutely killer formative Primitives B-sides. Delivered inside yet another early Prims sleeve to die for,

this smasher popped up in 1986 on the Really Stupid 7” single and, on 12”, alongside Where the Wind Blows. That gem of a fellow B-side, set at the witching hour and chockful of associated imagery, is the one I’d actually started writing about for this post. But that was before the handbrake turn you’re now reading.

Why the switch?

The truth is that either track could have made it, but the distorted, beautiful intro and subsequent melody of We Found a Way to the Sun just pipped Where the Wind Blows to the post. Add to these Tracy Tracy’s wide-eyed and hurt-sounding vocal, and we really do achieve Primitives perfection. Also, there’s a curiosity to celebrate: no chorus is offered – just one bewitching verse followed by repetition of the song’s title.

Loveliest line: ‘But it’s all too good to be true, I don’t know just what I should do, I love everything about you… ’

Side 2

1. Camera Obscura: My Maudlin Career (My Maudlin Career LP track, 2009, 4AD)

This title track to Camera Obscura’s fourth LP is both eminently huggable and a real bruiser. Its opening twenty-five seconds could be mistaken for a Wall of Sound production as keys and strings and brass add layer after layer of sock-knocking assault. And as the late Carey Lander’s incessant, trebly keys heroically wrangle it all into a followable structure, Tracyanne Campbell’s words speak of a relationship – the maudlin career of the title – going wrong (perhaps best distilled in the lines ‘we were love at first sight, now this crush is crushing’).

Despite the tale of a partnership on the skids, this is yet another lovely song from a band that specialises in them.

Loveliest line: ‘I’ll brace myself for the loneliness, say hello to feelings that I despise… ’

2. The Pipettes: A Winter’s Sky (We Are the Pipettes LP track, 2006, Memphis Industries)

Oh crumbs, not again. Look, I know I included this track on the Pipettes ICA I scribbled several years ago, but it’s just too lovely a fit not to revisit it. And what I wrote then remains, so I won’t deviate from it. The harmonies. The shimmer. The warm pootle of brass before the little Smithsy sound effect that chills the closing line ‘the last we saw of her, it came too soon’.

This is only ever played in our – that’s me and the furniture – house during winter (official three/four-month winter, I mean, not the Scottish one).

Loveliest line: ‘Underneath a winter’s sky, her eyes were bright, tonight he finds her underneath a winter’s moon… ’

3. Butcher Boy: I Could Be in Love With Anyone (Profit in Your Poetry LP track, 2007, How Does It Feel To Be Loved?)

A bit like R.E.M., there are loads of Butcher Boy songs you could tag as lovely. ‘Poetic’ is kind of a lazy descriptor for John Blain Hunt’s lyrics, but that doesn’t stop it being any less accurate. He’s a master of fastidious and forensic observation, and an expert in uplifting and championing the ordinary: pebbledash and paper chains, chimes and chewing gum.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the sheer quality that threads through Butcher Boy’s three LPs so far, this is a band that adheres stoically to a less-is-more philosophy. Releases are sporadic – bookended by years that meanwhile continue their business of totting up births and marriages and deaths. Gigs, at best, the same. World Cups occur more regularly. Plus, in spite of heavyweight patronage from names including Stuart Murdoch and John Niven, Ian Rankin and Peter Paphides (whose Needle Mythology label released the 2021 BB compilation You Had a Kind Face), there remains a Sundays-like reticence to seek the limelight. As listeners, we’re the losers in these arrangements of course. But you kind of wouldn’t really have it any other way.

To the song though. Winning out for this compilation is I Could Be in Love With Anyone, the fourth track on the first Butcher Boy LP Profit in Your Poetry.

Lyrically there’s a little of the celestial in this tale of a character who visits in dreams and flies around the walls of a room. Amid some good intentions there seems to be selfishness too, characterised by a title that could be delivered with a shrug, and also by the delight taken in ‘breaking hearts for fun’. From hearing this treasure years ago I quickly, and surely wrongly, settled on the idea that the words are describing my own favourite antihero Peter Pan.

Loveliest line: I’m actually going to reproduce the song entire for this entry, and hope you agree that choosing just one lovely line would be something of a disservice.

Listen, please don’t close your eyes
I don’t know how I know what you’re thinking but I

I’ve never felt so far away
Blood is chiming bells through you

But listen, that’s OK ‘cos I’m frightened too

And tenderly I write today

That I could be in love with anyone

I’ve been breaking hearts for fun

Listen, tell me what’s gone wrong

And I will come in dreams and I’ll bleed into songs

So you can sing them back to me.
Sun suspends my days in dust

If my love made you lonely I’m sorry but

The feeling flowed so easily

But I could be in love with anyone

I’ve been breaking hearts for fun

Glass reflects my eyes and skin

But still my lips will crumble like ash when we kiss

So cynically I shift the blame
I could fall upon this house

Or fly across these walls with your heart in my mouth

But honey I would rather stay

Where I could be in love with anyone

I’ve been breaking hearts for fun

4. Ride: Vapour Trail (Nowhere LP track, 1990, Creation)

This is probably the song that inspired the whole ICA. I’ve always struggled to find a better word than ‘lovely’ to summarise the romantic Vapour Trail, the track that closes Ride’s debut LP Nowhere.

Vapour Trail is dreamy and delicate and from its wispy intro to its choppy string-laden exit lifts you into a whole other place. Best of all, the words – describing total adoration and beguilement – feel like they were scratched onto a jotter during double geography, a carefully crooked arm shielding them from the ridicule of the class bully.

Loveliest line: ‘You are a vapour trail in a deep blue sky… ‘

5. The Smiths: I Won’t Share You (Strangeways, Here We Come LP track, 1987, Rough Trade)

After – literally – decades of internal debate and agony I concluded some years ago that My Favourite Smiths Song is this: I Won’t Share You, the very last track on the very last LP.

I mention its placement on Strangeways, Here We Come deliberately as it is crucial to its victory. That’s thanks really to Simon Goddard’s 2002 book Songs That Saved Your Life (Reynolds & Hearn Ltd.) – a painstaking track-by-track analysis of the band’s discography (and so dippable it should be sold with a lollypop and inside a poke of sherbet). There, Goddard notes that I Won’t Share You melts out with the subtlest little breath of faded-out harmonica. It’s an addition so brief and gentle in fact that it’s essentially drowned at birth. But, and here’s the kicker, Goddard – who beautifully and correctly describes the song as ‘a deeply affecting lullaby’ – cleverly connects this sigh of a coda with the band’s first offering, the Hand in Glove single, which begins with, amazingly, a faded-in harmonica.

This, the writer states, returns The Smiths full circle, pinging them from 1987 back to 1983, and all without a DeLorean and flux capacitor in sight.

You can call this proposed loop a reach of course, and it’s an unashamedly romantic way to view the band’s birth and death (and perpetual rebirth-by-harmonica). Amid these gymnastics after all is the troubling and inconvenient fact that The Smiths’ actual last recordings occurred in May 1987, a month after Strangeways had wrapped. These were created at a B-side session whose content and atmosphere so browned-off the already irritated Johnny Marr that it’s not dramatic to state it contributed significantly to the band’s ending.

So for fans of Cluedo, you could say it was the Cilla Black cover, in the studio, with the microphone wot did it.

Even so, the harmonica yarn is a notion I utterly subscribe to and, throughout that years-long agitation across which any helpful criteria was welcome, it earned I Won’t Share You my top spot.

Prettifying the number even further there is of course the debate regarding its lyrics. Specifically, this is concerned with whether or not they constitute Morrissey’s farewell to Johnny Marr. The song would have been completed just a few months before the group dissolved, then released just weeks after the split. It’s widely thought the singer disliked the idea of the guitarist collaborating with others, or even getting close to essential associates like managers and producers. Against those assumptions it’s easy to make a case for the disputed possibility that I Won’t Share You is the sonic equivalent of a note left upon the kitchen table (or, for Smiths trainspotters, perhaps pinned beneath a windscreen wiper).

Whatever the truth, and whether or not you buy the Magic Harmonica Theory and/or the potential Dear Johnny nature of the lines, it’s a song that’s a worthy last word on both The Smiths – it was surely the only serious track ten candidate – and on this collection of lovely songs, which I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about and maybe visiting/revisiting.

Loveliest line: ‘I’ll see you somewhere, I’ll see you sometime, darling… ’

Thanks as ever to Jim for the space and opportunity, and to you for reading.

 

STRANGEWAYS