Simple Minds

THE 12″ LUCKY DIP (21): Simple Minds – I Travel

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Today’s 12″ offering is from 1983, and it features the re-release of a song that hadn’t charted as a single on two previous occasions, in 1980 and 1982.  It’s also kind of appropriate as I’m actually out and about just now, hitting Manchester for a couple of days, during which time I’ll have the privilege of hooking up with Swiss Adam for a long-overdue catch-up.

mp3: Simple Minds – I Travel

The 1980 release was on 7″ only, and was an edited version (about a minute or so shorter) of that which was on Empires and Dance, the album released In September 1980.  It was the band’s final album for the Arista label.  It was the failure of both the single and album that led to the end of the relationship with the label, and the move to Virgin Records for all releases of new music up until 1998.

The long-awaited chart success for Simple Minds after the move to Virgin led to the folk at Arista feeling they had a chance to cash-in, which is why the compilation album, Celebration, containing ten tracks from the first three albums, appeared in February 1982.  I Travel was also reissued as a single, this time on both 7″ and 12″, with the latter being a magnificently extended version.  The single didn’t bother the chart compilers, but the compilation album did reach #45 during a six-week stay.

This irked the folk at Virgin, and their response was to acquire the entire back catalogue and take control of all future releases.  It meant that the Arista pressings of Real to Real Cacophony, Life In A Day and Empires and Dance, as well as Celebration, were withdrawn and replaced in the shops in 1983 by pressings on Virgin Records.  And as part of the marketing campaign, I Travel was given a third release as a single, but this time on 12″ only.

The b-side to the 1983 re-release was this:-

mp3: Simple Minds – Film Theme

An instrumental that had originally been included on Real to Real Cacophony. It gives a great insight to how much the band’s sound had evolved in such a short period of time.

 

JC

Düsseldorf, Various

AN IMAGINARY COMPILATION ALBUM : #387: DUSSELDORF

A guest posting by Dirk

Dear friends,

Yes, I know – it’s a bit like one of those old jokes, you know: „three guys walk into a bar …“, but here it is, for once, not a priest, a Rabbi and an Imam – it’s a drummer and two guitarists, in fact.

The bar is the Ratinger Hof, Ratinger Strasse 10 in Düsseldorf. We are talking very early 70’s here when the Ratinger Hof still was a cosy pub, you see – with a starry sky painted onto the ceiling, little carpets on the desks, a jukebox – and mainly Hippie students and local wannabe artists went there. Not a place you’d like to be in today, I assume, but this venue’s importance cannot be highlighted enough. Why? Well, two of the guests, above drummer and above guitarist # 1 in fact, one fine day came to the conclusion to co-found a band: you might have heard from them perhaps, Kraftwerk. And this is where it all starts, at least the first part of of our journey does:

Kraftwerk – ‘Kometenmelodie 2’ (’74)

Of course all of you know Kraftwerk and their importance for modern music, there isn’t pretty much I can add to that. By all accounts the two ‘main’ members, Hütter and Schneider, were not the easiest chaps to work with, so after a short while Rother and Dinger left and formed Neu!. Now, like Kraftwerk, Neu! are regularly being cited when it comes to innovation within German music of the time, Krautrock, Kosmische – you name it. Dinger invented the ‘motorik’ beat, which quickly became a trademark for the music of the time:

Neu – ‘Für Immer’ (’73)

Neu! split in 1975 and Dinger formed La Düsseldorf – again this was a band which is always being mentioned as having been highly influential for many artists, even today.

Now, back to our cosy pub and fast forward a few years, to 1976. The ‘Hof’, as it’s by now being referred to, has new owners, Ingrid Kohlhöfer and Carmen Knoebel, wife of Imi Knoebel, a minimalistic painter and sculptor. Imi remodelled the cosy pub radically, all walls were white and there were neon lights all over – the change was too much for the old Rockers and the Hippies, so they stayed away – but the Hof quickly attracted other guests, their musical tastes were a bit different though. One thing led to another and fairly soon local punk bands were given the opportunity by Carmen Knoebel to rehearse in the Hof’s beer cellar at daytime, whereas in the evenings bands like 999, Wire, XTC, Pere Ubu and Dexys Midnight Runners would perform there, plus by and large all of the local punk bands.

You see, people always talk about the famous Sex Pistols gig in the Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976: basically everybody who was there formed a band, it’s always said. It’s questionable whether this is true or not, but as for the Ratinger Hof, 1971’s Dinger/Rother-history repeated itself in 1977 in the form of Franz Bielmeyer, aka Mary Lou Monroe – our second guitarist mentioned in the beginning. And this is where the second part of the journey begins:

Bielmeyer founded Charley’s Girls (and I always thought this was a clever take on Charles Manson‘s female killer gang, but in fact it’s just connected to a Lou Reed tune, I mean: how boring is this?). Anyway, as my little diagram above shows, it’s fair to say that hadn’t Franz Bielmeyer started Charley’s Girls, Düsseldorf’s – and Germany’s – music scene would have turned out to be much poorer indeed! Let’s prove this, shall we?

Probably Bielmeyer’s masterpiece was to recruit the mighty Peter Hein, aka Janie J. Jones, who quickly changed from bass to vocals. Two or three of Charley’s Girls’ recordings exist, but of poor sound quality, so let’s proceed with what became of Charley’s Girls one year later, Mittagspause:

Mittagspause – ‘Herrenreiter’ (’79)

Peter Hein is no Pavarotti, I think we can agree on this. But then again, nor is Billy Bragg. And even if you don’t understand a single word of Hein’s lyrics, believe me: he is one of the great German wordsmiths. So you better get used to his singing, because after Mittagspause he invented Fehlfarben, who issued their debut album in 1980, ‘Monarchie und Alltag’. You may believe I am exaggerating again, but this record changed everything over here! I don’t think there is anyone who would not regard it as t.h.e. influential German album. Eleven songs, and not a bad one on it, for sure. Consequently I could have chosen any of them, but I went for this:

Fehlfarben – ‘Ein Jahr (Es Geht Voran)’ (’80)

I’m willing to have small bet that both Walter and [sk] are right now shaking their heads in disbelief as on why I picked exactly this song. The thing is, you see, their record company took it and released it as a single in 1982, unbeknownst to the band, in order to jump onto the Neue Deutsche Welle-train, where almost everything sung in German apart from Schlager was labelled young, stylish and cool, regardless of the songs’ intentions. Also it became a hymn for German squatters, something Hein always strongly objected to, because what he wanted to express in the song was the mood in Germany in the late 70’s: terrorism, recession, cold war. Even today this song is constantly being played on daytime radio and therefore there is a chance that even some of you non-German readers may have heard it somewhere. If not, give it a go, if you want to do yourself a favour!

Let’s continue with Peter Hein, after Fehlfarben came, in ’81, Family 5, equally brilliant, surely because of the genius that was Xao Seffcheque on guitar. Their first proper album did not come before ’85 though, ‘Resistance’. Some described it as „the better ‘Monarchie und Alltag’“ at the time, I’m not quite sure about this though …

Family 5 – ‘Du Wärst So Gern Dabei’

So, finally enough of Peter Hein’s remarkable voice for you – although he returned to Fehlfarben in 1991 and they are still going strong: in fact they are playing a venue near my village next Saturday, but a) I’m already attending another gig in Aachen and b) nearly € 40,- is a bit steep, I thought.

Right, back to Mittagspause then. They wouldn’t have been complete without Thomas Schwebel on guitar, he left S.Y.P.H. for Mittagspause and, in fact, Fehlfarben, and for Kurt Dahlke, who left Mittagspause for S.Y.P.H.

As complicated as all of this might possibly be, again we are talking about a band which was highly praised in and around Düsseldorf: S.Y.P.H. Their early 80s punk stuff made them well known in the region, but I always thought this from a few years later was their absolute highlight:

S.Y.P.H. – ‘Der Letzte Held’ (’85)

And with Dahlke (aka Pyrolator) we have the next important figure within the Düsseldorf scene, because before S.Y.P.H. he was a founding member of DAF, or, if you’d rather, Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft … the name might ring a bell … the grandfathers of Techno, anyone? ‘Der Mussolini’? Ah, just listen to them, you youngsters, but make sure to turn it up good and loud:

Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft – ‘Verschwende Deine Jugend’ (’81)

I’m sure you have already looked it up above, the road from DAF leads us to the next awesome Düsseldorf combo, and our driver is DAF’s keyboarder, Chrislo Haas. He and Beate Bartel (out of Mania D) became Liaisons Dangereuses, you’ll surely can sing along to their outstandingly brilliant ‘Los Ninos Del Parque’. And because you already know it by heart, I’ll have something else from them now, not too shabby either, I would have thought:

Liaisons Dangereuses – ‘Etre Assis Ou Danser’ (’81)

If you are still reading this nonsense, we might as well return to S.Y.P.H. briefly, because they had a guy on the synthezisers called Ralf Dörper – who found, after joining Die Krupps (with Xao Seffcheque) fame and fortune by founding Propaganda – you’ll remember Susanne Freytag and Claudia Brücken, if you remember nothing else:

Propaganda – ‘Jewel (Cut Rough)’ (’85)

If you haven’t fallen asleep by now, you may or may not remember that you learnt about Charley’s Girls an hour so ago. Charley’s Girls’ bassist was Peter Stiefermann and in 1978 he gave a party, among the guests were Thomas Peters (aka Tommi Stumpff) and Klaus-Peter ‘Trini’ Trimpop. The two of them founded KFC, another punk band of quite some importance. KFC carried on for quite some time, in 1979 they recruited the 16-year-old bassist Ferdinand Mackenthum (aka Käpt’n Nuss) – who later went to play for Family 5!

So, Käpt’n Nuss joined the band- and Trini Trimpop left it. What did become of him, you are asking? Well, he became the drummer for Die Toten Hosen, and later their manager – which a) probably made him a multi-millionaire and b) finally, you’ll be relieved to hear, closes a long and probably very boring circle!

I have on various occasions expressed my disinclination for Die Toten Hosen, or rather what became of them. But to be fair, their very first records were really good, especially this one, their second single:

Die Toten Hosen – ‘Reisefieber’ (’82)

Let’s return to where we came from, to the Ratinger Hof: in the spring of 1981 a big German magazine, the Stern, had an article about the venue in which it was advertised as ‘a secret spot for all things punk’, this happened at about the same time when the aforementioned Neue Deutsche Welle began to mutate into a huge Tsunami – which very quickly flushed everything away in an immense vortex: you could no longer tell which band was still good (as in: true to their roots) and which one was crap.

Now, I assume you can imagine what happened then: the Hof was soon flooded with tourists who wanted to see those oh so dangerous punks and listen to some of their strange music. Of course it all went downhill from then on and the Hof closed a few years later …

So, that’s Düsseldorf for you, friends – a city to listen to, for sure … but not necessarily one to visit, if you ask me: some say that the best thing in Düsseldorf is the motorway to Aachen.

Well, I cannot disagree …

Enjoy,

 

Dirk

selecter

ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN SINGLES : #089

aka The Vinyl Villain incorporating Sexy Loser

#089: The Selecter – ‘Too Much Pressure’ (Chrysalis Records ’79)

Dear friends,

yes, it’s Ska-time again, whether you like it or not. Then again: what’s not to like about Ska, right? I mean, how can anyone resist, I think it’s fair to ask.

Probably not only to me, three bands were really important when it comes to British Ska in 1979, The Beat, The Specials and …. not Madness. It may be a bit unfair, but poor Madness never really counted somehow, did they? They were quickly being put into the more funny corner of the genre, whether this was the right thing to do or not remains questionable. No, the third important band were of course The Selecter! Led by the wonderful Belinda Magnus, or, as you and I know her better, Pauline Black. It’s often the case that a frontman/frontwoman overshadows the band, and most of the time it’s unjustified, still it happens to be the case – and perhaps The Selecter were a prime example for this.

But I think it must have been very hard at a Selecter live show back then not to concentrate on Pauline, but on other members of the band. Quite obviously this lady delivered a presence that is hard to beat, even these days. I am too young to have witnessed The Selecter when they were still going, but I once attended a Ska-allnighter with Pauline Black on the bill in the late 80s: an awesome experience, I can tell you!

The Selecter fought hard to gain success, they played their hearts out in small clubs – at a time ABBA were the big thing, mind you. By and large there wasn’t any success before the release of the first single on the famous Two-Tone label, ‘On My Radio’, in 1979. The debut album followed a year later – and if you’re new to Ska or contemplate getting into it, this one is a must-have for you, for sure.

After said debut and its success the band signed with Chrysalis – but only one year later it was all over already, The Selecter disbanded. I think a major reason for this was that the music scene changed so damned quickly 45 years ago: what was big big big in 1979 (Punkrock, Ska, Disco, Funk) was already totally obsolete in 1981, fully being replaced by electronic stuff, Synthpop and New Wave … a tough surrounding for a band like The Selecter, too tough in fact, apparently.

So, what remains is, as I said, a fantastic debut album, which sounds as fresh as it did upon its release and a handful of wonderful singles. Today’s tune is the flipside of the very first one (although my copy is a French Chrysalis-pressing):

 

 

mp3: The Selecter – Too Much Pressure

Now, you might be wondering why I praised Pauline Black’s greatness all the time above … and then chose a song sung by Arthur ‘Gaps’ Hendrickson.

Well, first it’s bloody brilliant, that’s why – and secondly, as ace as ‘On My Radio’ is, I think you hear it everywhere, constantly. Nothing wrong with this, but I always thought ‘Too Much Pressure’ deserved more attention.

So enjoy,

Dirk

 

JC adds……..

A very important heads-up…..this is the first of two successive days on which the blog will be handed over to Dirk.

You may recall that a few weeks ago, there was a suggestion that he might want to offer up a Düsseldorf ICA for our collective enjoyment.

Well, I’m delighted to say that the fruits of his labour will be posted tomorrow, and I really hope everyone will have a read and offer up their thoughts as our great friend really has surpassed himself by combining a ten-song ICA with an informative and entertaining piece of writing offering up a short history of Düsseldorf music from 1973 to 1989.

I really do think it’s one of the best things ever written for this blog, going all the way back to 2006.

Super Furry Animals

SUPER FURRY SUNDAYS (aka The Singular Adventures of Super Furry Animals)

A guest series by The Robster

#6: If You Don’t Want Me To Destroy You (1996, Creation Records, CRE243)

As was the way back then, some months after an album was released, singles continued to be churned out from it. A fourth single from ‘Fuzzy Logic’ was put out in September 1996, and it’s fair to say it was probably the weakest of the lot. I’ve never been overly fussed about If You Don’t Want Me To Destroy You. I can’t say why for sure – it’s pleasant enough in many respects, a nice tune, a string section, it kind of ticked a lot of Britpop boxes. Maybe that was the reason – it was all a bit ordinary, and the one thing Super Furry Animals never were was ordinary.

mp3: If You Don’t Want Me To Destroy You

It also bugs me how, as the song reaches its natural conclusion, it actually starts to fade out. In fact, you can hear the actual ending before the fade finishes. I never saw the point of that.

Released in the usual three formats, it equalled their top chart position to date – number 18, the same as its predecessor. The picture on the sleeve tells a story. As Wikipedia puts it:

“The band spent their promotional budget for this single on a tank. [They] had the tank painted bright blue and used it to arrive at music festivals. A photograph of the tank is featured on the cover of this single, with the title painted on the tank gun barrel. The tank was later sold to Don Henley.”

Super Furry Animals selling a tank to an Eagle! That’s not a transaction you’ll come across on any wildlife documentary, I can tell you. Another quick tank fact – painted across the front of the gun turret was the phrase “A oes heddwch?” which means “Is there peace?” Anyway – the b-sides. All formats contained this raucous little number:

mp3: Guacamole

“I need a revolution because I can’t afford the price of cake” is one of the best lines ever written, don’t you agree? I love this one, it’s a lot of fun. Thing is, Guacamole nearly didn’t see the light of day – it wasn’t the original planned b-side. Early CD and cassette promos featured a different track that had to be replaced at the last minute. We pick that story up next week… The CD single also included a third track:

mp3: (Nid) Hon Yw’r Gân Sy’n Mynd I Achub Yr Iaith

This one was penned for a free single-sided 7” given away at a benefit gig in North Wales for the Welsh Language Society. The title translates as This Is (Not) The Song That Will Save The Language. Thing is, while they may be right about that, the Furries, along with some of their Welsh compatriots riding the crest of the Cool Cymru wave, probably did more for the advancement of the Welsh language than any political campaign achieved in decades. It took the language out of the province and into the consciousness of music fans across the UK, many of whom probably didn’t even realise Wales had its own language (like someone – a grown adult, no less – I once actually knew…)

For my money, both b-sides beat the a-side hands down. You are free to disagree, of course. If you do, then you’ll enjoy this week’s bonus track – it’s the demo of the title track, recorded in October 1995. Note the alternative (better?) lyrics in the chorus…

mp3: If You Don’t Want Me To Destroy To You [demo]

Next week, that discarded b-side I mentioned above finally makes its appearance.

The Robster

Dancer

SATURDAY’S SCOTTISH SONG : #446: DANCER

A short while back, myself and Aldo headed along to catch The Bug Club play a gig in Glasgow.  One of the support acts on the night was Dancer, a band that had been picking up a great deal of positive press round these parts, not least for being included in the list of Top 20 best albums of 2024 as chosen by highly influential and important record-shop, Monorail.

“For a short while, Dancer felt like our city’s own little secret. The group, made up of Glasgow DIY mainstays (from the likes of Current Affairs and Order of the Toad), released only a few singles but gigged often at Bloc and the Old Hairdressers before their debut full length 10 Songs I Hate About You. The 10 songs in question are a sonic mash-up of melodic warmth and perfectly crafted pop songs with crunch. There’s a similarity to Life Without Buildings in Gemma’s vocal delivery and Chris’ erratic-slash-melodic guitar work, but there’s also, at times, a more chaotic and experimental storm brewing under the surface. A record which takes left turns into new territory every so often when it’s least expected; Gemma cackles, Gavin’s hi-hat taps out a new rhythm, Dancer is no longer a secret. I couldn’t be more glad”

They proved to be an excellent watch and listen in the live setting, and I subsequently went out and bought the debut album, which was released back in March 2024.  It was preceded by a couple of EPs and has been followed by a couple of split releases, an EP with Portland-based Whisper Hiss and a 7″ single with R.Aggs, who is better known perhaps as being one half of Glasgow’s Sacred Paws, whose debut release Strike A Match, was given the accolade, and associated prize-money, for being named Scottish Album of the Year in 2017.

The band members are Gemma Fleet (vocals), Chris Taylor (guitar), Andrew Doig (bass) and Gavin Murdoch (drums)

mp3: Dancer – Bluetooth Hell

The opening track on 10 Songs I Hate About You.

 

JC

Revenge

THE 7″ LUCKY DIP (31) : Revenge – Slave

By the time New Order were celebrating the success of #1 single World In Motion in the summer of 1990, the various members were already working on or planning various side projects – Gillian and Stephen were The Other Two, Bernard had teamed up with a few superstars to form Electronic, while Hooky chose to form Revenge.

Initially, it was a trio with Hooky (vocals, bass, keyboards) being joined by Davyth Hicks (guitar and vocals) and Chris Jones (keyboards).  The debut single, 7 Reasons, was released, on Factory Records in 1989, and the following year saw an album One True Passion, from which the singles Pineapple Face and Slave were lifted.  I’ve copies of all three singles on either 7″ or 12″ vinyl, all bought many years after the event for not a great deal of money.  They might all be on a cult label, and feature a member of one of the most influential and important bands of the late 20th Century, but that doesn’t mean there’s ever been much demand across the second-hand market.

There’s a straightforward explanation as to why this is the case – Revenge aren’t all that good.  Here’s the third and final single lifted from the album:-

mp3: Revenge – Slave

It sounds like a minor hit for New Order as imagined on one of those cheap Top of The Pops albums where session musicians did their best to mimic the stars and hitmakers of the day.

The b-side was a cover.  A very obscure cover, with the original being found on John Cale‘s 1970 album, Vintage Violence.

mp3: Revenge – Amsterdam

Revenge did tour the debut album across Europe, America and Japan, and for the live shows, they were supplemented by David Potts (bass and guitar) and Ashley Taylor (drums).  Shortly after returning from Japan, Hicks quit, citing the perennial ‘musical differences’.  There would be one further EP in 1992, Gun World Porn, after which Hooky returned to New Order for the recording and promotion of Republic, released in 1993.

 

JC

April Showers

ANOTHER SLICE OF LOVELINESS

Inspired by yesterday’s remarkable ICA from strangeways, I thought it was time, again, to offer up what I think is one of the loveliest tracks of all time.

I’ve written about Abandon Ship a couple of times before.  It was the only single ever released by April Showers – and yes, the turning of the calendar into a new month got me thinking about things, too.  A Glaswegian pop duo comprising Jonathan Bernstein and Beatrice Colin who had met and formed the group while at Glasgow University. Jonathan has subsequently forged a career for himself in recent years over in his native America as an author and screenwriter. Beatrice, sadly, passed away from cancer in 2019 at the age of 55, having led a full life in the creative arts, working in radio production and then journalism, before becoming an award-winning author and playwright, as well as a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Strathclyde.

It’s a single I regret not buying back in the day, relying instead on listening to it from the collection belonging to a flatmate.  In due course, I was able to add the song to my own collection thanks to its inclusion on the compilation CD, 10 Years Of Marina Records, released in 2004.

Now, at long last, I have a copy on vinyl after Pete Paphides included it on the superlative Sensitive pop anthology recently released on his Needle Mythology label.  It’s not only a beautifully and lovingly compiled collection, but it comes with extensive sleeve notes courtesy of Pete, which alone are worth the cost of the double album.  Here’s some of what he has written about Abandon Sip:-

Prior to Beatrice’s arrival, Jonathan hadn’t been able to interest any labels in his demos. That changed when she sang ‘Abandon Ship’ and Chrysalis heard the result. Enter Anne Dudley. This being 1984 – the year in which she arranged strings for Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Lloyd Cole And The Commotions – it’s not as though Dudley could have sone with the extra work, but she clearly heard something here that left her powerless to refuse.

If you’re an arranger listening to a song for the first time, you’re also listening to the beginnings of your own arrangement for it. To hear those strings rush in to help launch that first chorus skywards is like experiencing an early version of augmented reality.  And while none of this was possible without an achingly pretty song at the centre of it. Imagine ‘Abandon Ship’ without those strings and what’s left is a bittersweet song of resignation, from a protagonist who can no longer pretend that life hasn’t overwhelmed them.  Those strings give Beatrice’s vocal an added shot of energy : ‘Why don’t you come on in?/The water’s lovely!

mp3 : April Showers – Abandon Ship

At long last, a vinyl rip.

 

JC

Butcher Boy, Camera Obscura, Jam, Pipettes, Pogues, Primitives, R.E.M., Ride, Ronettes, Smiths

AN IMAGINARY COMPILATION ALBUM : #386: TEN LOVELY TRACKS

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

Various

ANOTHER VOLUME OF UNRECONSTRUCTURED RUBBISH

First midweek day in April.   What else could I do?*

mp3: Various – Another Volume of Unreconstructed Rubbish

The Jesus and Mary Chain – April Skies
Lloyd Cole – Fool You Are
Pet Shop Boys – I Started A Joke
Everything But The Girl – Laugh You Out The House
The Smiths – The Headmaster Ritual
The Bug Club – Pop Single
Felt – Penelope Tree
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – We Call Upon The Author
Siouxsie and The Banshees – Metal Postcard
Massive Attack – Blue Lines
The Prodigy – Firestarter
The Big Moon – Trouble
Soulwax – NY Excuse
Billy Reeves – Never Cross
The Frank and Walters – Fashion Crisis Hits New York
Say Sue Me – B Lover
The Clash – 1977

* I did think about re-posting this previous offering from the date of 1 April in which a bit of fun was had.  I try not to take things too seriously too often on the blog.

JC

 

Fall

ON THIS DAY : THE FALL’S PEEL SESSIONS #4

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 #4 was broadcast on this day, 31 March 1981, having been recorded on 24 March 1981.

Another truly great recording, (Mojo listed it as the greatest Fall session in the wake of Peel’s passing); packed full of light and shade, comedy and chat. The recording highlighted only one song from the soon to be released ‘Slates’: the anti-football hooliganism rant ‘Middlemass’, which had now been in the group’s repertoire for five months.  The abandonment of Grotesque’s ‘C’n’C’ for the spot-on parody of Coast To Coast’s ‘Do The Hucklebuck’ after Smith’s announcement that comic Arthur Askey had been shot demonstrates the acute sense of humour near the group’s surface. The session is notable for the debut of Smith’s signature tune ‘Hip Priest’, as well as a tentative run through of ‘Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul’.

DARYL EASLEA, 2005

mp3: The Fall – Middlemass (Peel Session)
mp3: The Fall – Lie Dream Of A Casino Soul (Peel Session)
mp3: The Fall – Hip Priest (Peel Session)
mp3: The Fall – C’n’C – Hassle Schmuck (Peel Session)

Produced by Dale Griffin, engineered by Martyn Parker

Mark E Smith – vocals; Marc Riley – guitar; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Paul Hanley – drums; Dave Tucker – clarinet

JC

Super Furry Animals

SUPER FURRY SUNDAYS (aka The Singular Adventures of Super Furry Animals)

A guest series by The Robster

#5: Something 4 The Weekend (1996, Creation Records, CRE235)

The third single from ‘Fuzzy Logic’ wasn’t a direct lift. Something For The Weekend was an album highlight, showcasing the Furries jauntier side. However, for whatever reason, a decision was made to release a different version for the single.

mp3: Something 4 The Weekend

Note, firstly, the slight difference in the title. Secondly, the change in tempo. It was slightly slower than the album version, which is interesting as it doesn’t have quite the same impact. It’s also unusual for a single in that it’s 20 seconds longer than the original. As ever, with Super Furry Animals, you should always expect the unexpected. Regardless of all that, Something 4 The Weekend powered its way to number 18 in the UK charts following its release on 1st July 1996. It was the band’s debut in the top 20.

The single’s sleeve art depicts notorious Welsh drug dealer Howard Marks, who the band befriended, wrote a song about and even collaborated with. His autobiography Mr Big is a brilliant and hilarious read.

The 7” and cassette formats contained a song considered for the album, but which was passed over.

mp3: Waiting To Happen

If you think this sounds like a cover, you’d be… wrong. It sounds like it should be though, it’s not very Furry-like, which may explain its exclusion from ‘Fuzzy Logic’. The other b-side on the CD single though was much more conventional. Well, conventional in a SFA sense.

mp3: Arnofio/Glô In The Dark

Essentially, two songs welded together. Arnofio (trans: Floating) is a slow, trippy, keyboard-led tune sung in Welsh. After 2 minutes 18 seconds, the altogether louder, noiser (and English) Glô In The Dark kicks in for a verse. Arnofio is reprised briefly before Glô returns to the conclusion. It’s a great track this, and one the band loved too. It was aired during their 2015 reunion gigs and completely bemused the hipsters who were only there for a social media post, while the actual fans went mad. Oh, and there’s a bit of word play here as well, as glô is the Welsh word for coal.

The CD single also contained the album version of the title track (though it’s worth noting, on the US release of ‘Fuzzy Logic’, the single version replaced the UK’s album version)

mp3: Something For The Weekend

Two versions not enough for ya? OK then, here’s a bonus track bonanza! The fabulous 1995 demo version, the BBC Radio 1 Evening Show take, and a live version recorded at the ill-fated Phoenix Festival in 1996.

mp3: Something For The Weekend [1995 demo]
mp3: Something For The Weekend [Evening Session]
mp3: Something 4 The Weekend [live at the Phoenix Festival]

Five versions of the same song in a single post? Blimey. I just keep repeating myself. I just keep repeating myself. I just keep repeating myself…..

The Robster

Cuban Heels

SATURDAY’S SCOTTISH SONG : #445: CUBAN HEELS

A bio from the Big Gold Dreams box set.

“When Johnny and The Self Abusers split, while Jim Kerr and Co. planned world domination with Simple Minds, vocalist John Milarkey formed The Cuban Heels whose mix of pop-funk stridency teetered just the right side of anthemic. They debuted with a breathlessly bratty cover of the Petula Clark classic, Downtown, while second single Walk On Water (November 1980) – the first offering on the Cuba Libre label through Virgin – felt like a speedier, less angular Talking Heads.  A sole album. Working Our Way To Heaven was released by Virgin in 1981, with their final single a re-recorded version of Walk On Water, coming with a free flexi disc of Cat Stevens‘ Matthew And Son.”

mp3: Cuban Heels – Walk On Water

The original version, as included on the BGD box set.  The Talking Heads comparison is frighteningly valid…certainly when listening to the lead vocal delivery.

 

JC

White Stripes

SONGS UNDER TWO MINUTES (12): FELL IN LOVE WITH A GIRL

From 2002.  And no, I can’t believe it is such an old song!

mp3: The White Stripes – Fell In Love With A Girl

I’ll just cut’n’paste from the ‘Critical Reception’ section of the song’s wiki page:-

“The song was met with widespread critical acclaim. Comparing it to that of the Ramones, Tom Maginnis from AllMusic called it “an attention-grabbing chunk of primal punk rock confection that flames out in a breathless one minute and 50 seconds. … Surrendering is the only option; to fight against the infectious brutal and relentless energy of “Fell in Love With a Girl” is an exercise in futility.”

The May 3, 2007, issue of Rolling Stone magazine listed the song as one of the forty songs that changed the world.

In 2011, NME placed it at number 6 on its list “150 Best Tracks of the Past 15 Years”.

The Times said that the track “mixes the blues with the Pixies.”

The Village Voice’s “Pazz & Jop critics’ poll named “Fell in Love with a Girl” the sixth-best song of 2002. Paste and Stereogum ranked the song number six and number two, respectively, on their lists of the greatest White Stripes songs.”

Some of the above might be a bit OTT, but it’s surely up there as one of the band’s finest songs.  It’s certainly my favourite.

 

JC

Crispy Ambulance, Danse Society, Felt, Jasmine Minks, Jazz Butcher, Lou Reed, Pale Fountains, Pastels, R.E.M., Wake

WHEN THE CLOCKS STRUCK THIRTEEN (March Pt 3)

This would normally be Part 2 from March 1984, but I did of course, a few weeks back, spread the chart hits across two days worth of posts.

This is the usual half of the series looking at singles which failed to find much popularity with the record-purchasing public, but have proven to be of enough cultural significance to be recalled here on the blog.

mp3 : Crispy Ambulance – Sexus

A Manchester band who signed to Factory Records, albeit the two of their three singles and one album recorded and released between 1981 and 1984 came out on Factory Benelux, the Belgian imprint of the label.  Sexus was issued only on 12″ vinyl and is atypical of the band’s sound…..which many at the time (myself included) thought was too much like a cut-price early Joy Division in the days before Martin Hannett added his box of tricks to the sound. Indeed, lead singer Alan Hempsall stood in for Ian Curtis when he wasn’t well enough to perform the opening numbers of the set at what is now a very infamous gig in Bury on 8 April 1980, which ended in a riot among the audience and the band.

mp3: Danse Society – 2000 Light Years From Home

I’ve mentioned in earlier editions of this series that 1984 was a year in which goth, or variations of the genre, seemed to be everywhere.  Danse Society were from Barnsley, a blue-collar town in the north of England who formed in 1980 and by 1983 had signed with the major label, Arista Records.  The album Heaven Is Waiting, released in December 1983, had gone Top 40, but the subsequent release of this Rolling Stones cover, one which came with a touch of dance, made no impact on the singles chart.

mp3: Felt – Mexican Bandits

Felt may well have been a band, but to all intent and purposes it was the name under which the Birmingham-born Lawrence Hayward recorded and performed (albeit he never used his surname).  Signed to Cherry Red in 1981, there had already been two albums and four singles, all of which were critically acclaimed prior to Mexican Bandits which, like its predecessor 45s, would reach the indie chart but not come close to the mainstream chart.  But this really suited Lawrence who didn’t seem to want fame and all the hassle that comes with it.

mp3: Jasmine Minks – Think!

Originally from Aberdeen in north-east Scotland, the four-piece band relocated to London and signed to Creation Records, becoming a key part of that label’s early output and live scene centred around venues in central London.  Think! was the debut single, with the catalogue number of CRE 004, and it’s a belter.  In a previous mention of this 45, I said that I was waiting on either Edwyn Collins or James Kirk to start singing after that initial 20-second burst of energy.

mp3: Jazz Butcher – Marnie

The late Pat Fish (he passed away in October 2021 at the age of 63) was the one constant factor in the ever-changing line-up of Jazz Butcher.   The first single and album had come out in the Autumn of 1983, and Marnie, issued through the London-based indie Glass Records, was the first of the new material. For more on the life and times of Pat Fish, I’d like to refer you to the Friend of Rachel Worth’s wonderfully written guest ICA from back in March 2108.

mp3: The Pastels – Something Going On

Formed in Glasgow in 1982.  This was the band’s fourth single, but their first for Creation (it had the catalogue number of CRE 005).  Still very much on the go today, and while they have never had any meaningful commercial success, they have long been one of the most important and influential band to emerge from my home city given how much advice and support they have given to others who have come along in the subsequent decades.

mp3: Lou Reed – I Love You Suzanne

Don’t think any background info is required. The sole single issued in support of his thirteenth studio album, New Sensations.

mp3: R.E.M. – So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry)

Don’t think any background info is required. The band’s third ever 45, and the advance single for their second album, Reckoning,   Still sounds immense 40 years on.

mp3: The Pale Fountains – (Don’t Let Your Love) Start A War

See the January edition (Part 2) of this series for the background on The Pale Fountains.   I hope you’ll agree, it’s turning out to be a great month for flop singles……

mp3: The Wake – Talk About The Past

A Glasgow-band who signed to Factory Records.  Probably best known for the fact that Bobby Gillespie was their bassist for a while, he had been involved in the debut album Harmony (1982) and the later single Something Outside (1983).  By the time Talk About The Past (FAC 88) was released, he’d been asked to leave.

Happy listening.

 

JC

Screaming Tribesmen

ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN SINGLES : #088

aka The Vinyl Villain incorporating Sexy Loser

#088: The Screaming Tribesmen – ‘Igloo’ (Citadel Records ’83)

Dear friends,

for today’s single we have to go back to Australia again – and don’t you just love it there?

The thing is with Australian underground: its origins are rather complicated, at least they are for me. I know this is a vast generalization, of course, but the scene has not been the biggest one some 40 years ago and by and large there were just three important cities anyway. Perhaps these were the reasons that many bands, excellent as they may have been then, had a rather short life, who knows?

Not so The Screaming Tribesmen! I’m willing to bet you have never heard of them (and if you have, I’m sure you’ll only know their fabulous ‘Date With A Vampyre’) – although they played together for several years, toured the USA and Europe with some of the ‘big’ names (Damned, Cult, Dictators, Pursuit Of Happiness, Jane’s Addiction).

Originally from Brisbane, the Tribesmen relocated to Sydney, because that’s where they finally found a label which would release their stuff: Citadel Records. And today we have the first single for the label, recorded in ’82 and released a year later – ‘Igloo’.

Its roots date back to 1979 when Tribesmen singer/guitarist Mick Medewand still played in the 60’s garage rock band The 31st. Some folk left (to join Died Pretty and The Hoodoo Gurus), others came, and in ’81, The Screaming Tribesmen were born.

What I always loved about ‘Igloo’ is that in my mind it never fails to create a chilling landscape, making me feel like I am there, sheltering from the storm, while an arctic wind whips outside. This and its message of isolation, loneliness and despair combined with the melodic guitar sound makes the song so wonderful.

But to me it always reaches its peak with the line „I felt so lonely when my Samoyed died/I felt my tears freeze when I finally cried”. Now, how many of you know what a Samoyed is? I surely didn’t. A Samoyed is a breed of dog that is suited for colder climbs, originating from North-West Siberia. Find a picture, and you’ll see one of the happiest looking dogs ever. If this dog died, I’d cry too!!

And while I’m in my smart alec-mode: towards the end of the song comes the refrain “listen to The Shoeshine Boys”: this in fact was a black 50s doo-wop band from Alabama.

 

mp3: The Screaming Tribesmen – Igloo

One of my all time favourites, this: I do hope it meets with your approval as well!!

Enjoy

Dirk

 

Various

LOST IN CRYSTAL CANYONS

A guest posting by Fraser Pettigrew (aka our New Zealand correspondent)

I know it’s hard to believe, but my musical life has not always been filled with ineffably cool and mould-breaking alternative rock and avant-garde sounds of impeccable obscurity, as it is now. I consider myself a child of punk rock, but I can’t say I was there at its birth, nor even that I embraced it in its infancy. There was a time before punk, and I was there, listening to other stuff. I warn you, some of what follows may shock you…

In the early 1970s I was a typical pre-teen pop fan, captivated by the glam stars on Top of the Pops, especially the rock-weighted hits of T-Rex, Slade, Sweet, Suzi Quatro, David Bowie and Gary Glitter. Particular singles lodge in my memory from that era: Gudbuy T’Jane, Wigwam Bam, Blockbuster, Solid Gold Easy Action, Children of the Revolution, Starman, The Jean Genie, Rebel Rebel, Can the Can, 48 Crash, Leader of the Gang, Rock’n’Roll part 1.

(JC interjects………anyone born in the UK in 1963 will have a similar story……I know I have!)

So far, so cool. Most of that music was still loved by the kids that started sticking safety pins through their ears a few years later. But the glitter faded in the middle of the decade as pop fashions changed or inspiration wore thin, and I was changing too. By the end of 1976 I was 13 and had already begun listening to more mature sounds on account of my older brother’s developing taste. This is where it gets ugly.

My brother’s record collection was a roll-call of prog-rock’s finest: Genesis, Yes, Pink Floyd. Also, God help us, Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Obviously singles were no longer the thing, and my borrowed playlist was now a run-down of the early-70s album charts, strangely still contemporary with the glam era but stylistically a million miles away from it: Trespass, Foxtrot, Selling England by the Pound, Fragile, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here…

(JC again interjects…..at which point I’m delighted by the fact I was the oldest child in the family!!!)

There were brighter moments. Rolled Gold, Abbey Road and Let It Be got consistent exposure, and a smattering of Sensational Alex Harvey Band lightened the prog landscape, if lightened is quite the word for Harvey’s gritty and somewhat misanthropic world-view. The song Anthem from The Impossible Dream album is an enduring echo from that time, evoking strong recollections of the young adult science fantasy ‘Sword of the Spirits’ novels by John Christopher that I was reading at the time.

But I was deeply embedded in the prog albums. I played them often enough to fairly say that I knew them inside-out. Meticulously hand-drawn reproductions of artist Roger Dean’s stylised Yes logo were a favourite adornment for school jotters. Admiration for Genesis caught up with the current moment with Trick of the Tail and Wind and Wuthering. My brother bought Pink Floyd’s Animals. My own record collection started, not with prog, but with Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The White Album.

And then something happened. 1977 happened, to be precise. I was not, as you have probably sensed, keenly aware of what was going on in the music scene at that time. Despite the growing media panic, the first I heard of punk rock was on a school trip in May ’77. Although punk history goes back well into 1976 it wasn’t until the following year that it made a serious impact on the mainstream. If you were into punk in 1976 you must have been part of the Bromley Contingent, or you’re suffering from false memory syndrome.

A couple of punk bands appeared on Top of the Pops soon after I became aware that punk was a thing. The Boomtown Rats were Looking After No. 1 and Mary of the 4th Form brazenly appealed to our stirring hormones. I remember The Jam playing All Around The World and The Stranglers declared there were No More Heroes. The notorious Sex Pistols and the pure of principle Clash never appeared, of course, but I came to know who they were, and they all stood, or rather slouched in marked contrast to the saccharine disco pish that filled up the rest of the weekly show.

At school, one of our music teachers periodically offered us the chance to play some of our own favourite records in the class. My mate Drew brought in Rattus Norvegicus and invited the teacher to play the first track. “Some day I’m going to smack your face!” barked Hugh Cornwell. “Beeeeeeat you honey till you drop!” Miss Cavaye tried not to look disapproving and may have made some courteous observations on Dave Greenfield’s arpeggiated keyboard figures. Another girl in the class followed up with a track by Rush. We probably didn’t try to disguise our disapproval, and would have made disparaging remarks about arpeggiated guitar figures if we had the faintest idea what it meant.

The next time The Jam appeared on Top of the Pops I was fully invested, and deployed three pounds of accumulated pocket money to buy This Is The Modern World. It didn’t matter to me that it was neither then nor now considered to be a very good album; to me, it was the first step into a new world and the first manifestation of a personal metamorphosis.

I was still listening to The Beatles, but I was susceptible to the influence of my friends from whom it had become clear that music with long hair and flared trousers was no longer tolerable. I think the adrenalin energy of punk was gradually rendering the elongated indulgence of prog incompatible for me in any case, but I would have to be honest and admit that I didn’t reject my old favourites entirely of my own accord. I sought peer approval, as you tend to when you’re 13, but the explosive change of 1977 made it easy to switch.

It’s fair to say that all of us will have gone through changes in our musical taste as we moved from childhood into adulthood, growing out of the music that appealed to us in youth faster than our clothes got too small for us. The coincidence of that growth spurt with the revolutionary moment of punk was a momentous one for me. It’s a time in life when we crave independence, assert our individuality and search instinctively for our own personal identity. Punk laid an epochal transformation on a plate for me and I lapped it up.

My brother clung faithfully to the old guard. Not being the best-buddy kind of siblings, that probably only encouraged me to reject his record collection as I established mine along quite different lines. Yes logos were blotted out and by the end of the year I was artistically proficient in rendering The Jam’s spray-can design and even imitations of Jamie Reid’s ransom note lettering of the Sex Pistols, despite not actually owning anything by them at that point.

By the start of 1978 I was a mature and discerning fan of the new wave, ready to embrace the radical eclecticism spawned by the effective death (already!) of punk, symbolically marked by the final debacle in the brief career of the Sex Pistols that January. I had started listening to the John Peel Show and buying the NME and Sounds. From all of this a kind of philosophy emerged that has guided my cultural life ever since. Embrace the new, seek out the inventive and the innovative, the unconventional and the iconoclastic. Reject imitation and repetition, stasis and complacency, the status quo. Especially Status Quo.

In old wave parlance we might have said ‘Keep on runnin’ and ‘Don’t Look Back’. The music of Yes and Genesis and Pink Floyd was now most decidedly of the past and became dead to me. In the years since, I have discovered and come to love a great deal of music from that old, long-haired, flared-trousered past, from Neil Young and Joni Mitchell to Van Morrison and Bob Dylan. But I’ve never been able to go back to the prog. It now exists in my memory like a kind of dream, an unreal world of English whimsy, science fantasy landscapes and gigantic hallucinatory stage sets and light shows. It feels unconnected to any sense of reality or actual lived experience. I just can’t go back there.

Neil Young put it well on his 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps. In the song Thrasher he drew out an extended metaphor for restless artistic integrity. “I searched out my companions, they were lost in crystal canyons”: I pictured them floundering in a Roger Dean landscape, though other kinds of crystals were probably involved. “It was then that I knew I’d had enough, burned my credit cards for fuel/Headed out to where the pavement turns to sand…”

“It’s better to burn out than it is to rust,” he sang on the opening track, My My Hey Hey (Out of the Blue), referencing ‘Johnny Rotten’. He wasn’t about to go all punk rock, but the point was clear.

In writing this piece, however, I realise I have potentially put myself in a difficult spot, as JC might dredge up something dreadful from Nursery Cryme or Tales from Topographic Oceans and I’ll feel compelled to listen to it, at risk of precipitating some kind of psychological flashback crisis. I recommend therefore that any of you who might feel similar trepidation ensure that you have a paramusical crash-team on stand-by, ready to administer a life-saving dose of 1977 by The Clash, or Art School by The Jam. Anything that delivers a full-bore shot of life-giving energy from that pivotal moment in popular music history. Anything that screams ‘keep on runnin’, or ‘don’t look back’.

mp3: T-Rex – Solid Gold Easy Action
mp3: Slade – Gudbuy T’Jane
mp3: SAHB – Anthem
mp3: Yes – Roundabout
mp3: Genesis – I Know What I Like
mp3: Pink Floyd – Great Gig in the Sky
mp3: Neil Young – Thrasher
mp3: Stranglers – Sometimes
mp3: The Clash – 1977
mp3: The Jam – Art School
mp3: The Adverts – New Church

Fraser

Fall

ON THIS DAY : THE FALL’S PEEL SESSIONS #14 & #6

(This one is a day later than planned…..I don’t want to interrupt the flow of The Robster‘s series on Super Furry Animals)

The continuation of this 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 – and you’ll have by now spotted that March was traditionally a popular month for the band to record a session, and once again 23 March proved to be a date on which two were broadcast.

Session #14 was broadcast on 23 March 1991, having been recorded on 5 March 1991.

To promote arguably their best Phonogram album, ‘Shift-Work’, the ‘four plus one’ line up of the group convened to record an especially vibrant session. A lumpy version of ‘A Lot Of Wind’ aside, Kenny Brady’s fiddle on ‘The War Against Intelligence’ is of note, further ahead in the mix than on the album.  A generous swipe at Madchester, ‘Idiot Joy Showland’ is performed with requisite venom; the use of megaphone on ‘The Mixer’ is pronounced and the similarities between the song and New Order’s ‘Thieves Like Us’ seem heightened.  Smith is on fantastic, crooning form.

DARYL EASLEA, 2005

mp3: The Fall – The War Against Intelligence (Peel Session)
mp3: The Fall – Idiot Joy Showland (Peel Session)
mp3: The Fall – A Lot Of Wind (Peel Session)
mp3: The Fall – The Mixer (Peel Session)

Produced by Mike Robinson

Mark E Smith – vocals; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Simon Wolsencroft – drums; Kenny Brady – fiddle

Session #6 was broadcast on 23 March 1983, having been recorded on 21 March 1983.

The first session without Marc Riley (and also the quickest to air, fact fans – and also the longest time-wise) was as spiky as its soon-to-be parent album ‘Perverted By Language (the session material, for once, eas all to feature on the forthcoming album). ‘Smile’ is, as always knotty. ‘Garden’, the sluggish centrepiece of PBL, is rendered fascinating in its excessive repetition. Just when ‘Hexen Definitive – Strife Knot’ is running into its ninth minute, the exaggerated manner in which Smith intones “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fall” is one of this box set’s highlights. ‘Eat Y’Self Fitter’ genuinely stirred Peel, who stated on air that he fainted listening to it and John Walters had to resuscitate him. It’s a great, upbeat rendition of the track

DARYL EASLEA, 2005

mp3: The Fall – Smile (Peel Session)
mp3: The Fall – Garden (Peel Session)
mp3: The Fall – Hexen Definitive – Strife Knot (Peel Session)
mp3: The Fall – Eat Y’Self Fitter (Peel Session)

Produced by John Porter, engineered by Dave Dade

Mark E Smith – vocals; Craig Scanlon – guitar; Steve Hanley – bass; Paul Hanley – keyboards; Karl Burns – drums

JC

Super Furry Animals

SUPER FURRY SUNDAYS (aka The Singular Adventures of Super Furry Animals)

A guest series by The Robster

#4: God! Show Me Magic (1996, Creation Records, CRE231)

By the Spring of 1996, Super Furry Animals’ debut album was ready to go. A second preview of it came in the form of a track that had already been released, albeit in a different version, on the previous year’s Moog Droog EP.

mp3: God! Show Me Magic

This brand new recording wasn’t drastically different to the original in terms of its arrangement, but the bigger budget meant the production was much improved and gave the song a bit more of the welly it deserved. God! Show Me Magic has long been a fan favourite, but even at the time it was the single that thrust the band into the fore of the emerging Cool Cymru scene. Not that they cared about being part of any scene, SFA were too different to be part of anything but themselves. Even so, it made John Peel’s Festive 50 that year and became the band’s first top 40 hit.

It was released on 29th April 1996 on 7”, CD and cassette and invaded the charts at #33 before dropping out the following week. The b-sides had both been demoed and recorded for the album, but never made the final cut.

mp3: Death By Melody (CD only)
mp3: Dim Bendith

I’m not a big fan of Death By Melody. Even by the Furries standard, it was a little light and novelty-ish. Dim Bendith (trans. No Blessing) is the better of the two by far.

Three weeks after the single’s release, Super Furry Animals’ debut album ‘Fuzzy Logic’ was in the shops. It really was a refreshing change to hear something so new, yet so… old. The band chose to record it in their native land at the legendary Rockfield Studios near Monmouth. Their reasoning? “We heard they had jacuzzis and you got three meals a day, all the wrong reasons for going to a studio,” according to Gruff Rhys. Regardless, it was a triumph, with the media lauding it with gushing praise. It featured in all the relevant Best Of 1996 end-of-year lists, and even nowadays gets huge retrospective acclaim.

Being so out-of-step with the trends of the time, it’s somewhat surprising ‘Fuzzy Logic’ became such a success. But then, as I said earlier in the series, Super Furry Animals were proving to be the antidote to Britpop which was becoming stale and ugly. It was almost like the perfect protest record against that increasingly smug, self-congratulatory movement. While Blur sounded like The Kinks and Oasis wanted so desperately to be the Beatles, SFA bathed in Syd Barret and glam-era Bowie vibes, while occasionally hinting at a cheeky electronic undertone that would gradually come more to the fore and define their sound.

God! Show Me Magic was the hectic opener to the album. It wasn’t demoed for the record – I assume because they had already released a version at the time they were demoing these songs – but they did demo the track that followed it.

mp3: Fuzzy Birds [demo]

Fuzzy Birds is a song about a dream Gruff had about guitarist Bunf’s hamster Stavros. In the dream, Bunf wired Stavros’ wheel up to a dynamo to produce electricity for his house. The lyrics depict the conversation between owner and pet – the verses being Bunf, the chorus being Stavros’ reply.

Mad but brilliant! Or maybe it has a more serious message than you think:

[Gruff]: “Stavros came into Bunf’s life and it was a very beautiful moment for all of us, because we all loved Stavros: funky hamster! He had special tricks where he would slide up chairs. I had a dream that Bunf had wired up his wheel to make electricity for his house, so I wrote a song about it. But it dawned on me that it was also a song about the slave and the enslaver, and I think you can apply that to the worker and the employer, or the landlord and the tenant. It’s a pop song about a psychedelic dream I had, but basically Stavros was shouting for more worker’s rights.”

The first Super Furry Animals song about a super furry animal. There would be plenty more.

 

The Robster

Cowboy Mouth

SATURDAY’S SCOTTISH SONG : #444: THE COWBOY MOUTH

The Cowboy Mouth formed in the early 90s and consisted of Grahame Skinner (ex-Hipsway) on vocals and Douglas MacIntyre (far too many bands to rhyme off!!!) on guitars.  The duo wrote and recorded two albums, My Life As A Dog (1994) and Love Is Dead (1995), both of which were released by the Hamburg-based Marina Records.

In 2023, Past Night From Glasgow (the label connected to Last Night From Glasgow but with the purpose of focussing on ‘lost’ albums), gave a re-release to My Life As A Dog.   This led to Skinner and MacIntyre hatching plans to reform and perform, and for that purpose they recruited Laughlin ‘Lox’ Allan on bass and Dougie Hannah on drums.

This led to new material being written, and a new album, Faultlines is due for imminent release by LNFG.   The album was actually launched this time last week at a gig in Cottiers Theatre in Glasgow, on a night when the ninth birthday of LNFG was celebrated, and I can report that a very good time was had by all.

mp3: The Cowboy Mouth – The Swimmer

One of the songs you’ll find on the new album.  Click here for more info and purchase options.

 

JC

Jam

AN IMAGINARY COMPILATION ALBUM : #385 : THE JAM (3)

The relatively recent passing of Rick Buckler went unmentioned on the blog.  It wasn’t as much an oversight on my part as the fact that I really couldn’t find the right words to say at the time.  To be honest, I still really don’t think I can really add to the many hundreds of fine tributes that can be found out there across mainstream and social media outlets, other than to mention that I found it incredibly sad to realise that one of the first of my genuinely musical idols had died, at the all-too-young age of 69.

I was sure that I had written a review of That’s Entertainment : My Life In The Jam, the booked penned by Rick and published in 2017, but I can’t find it in the archives.  Maybe there was no review, and it was only it was mentioned in passing perhaps as a recommendation for adding to your Xmas lists.  Either way, I’m going to dig it out an re-read it, and this time pen something for the blog.

The Jam, as I’ve mentioned on so many occasions, were the first band I fell for in a very big way, and although it is now more than 40 years since they last made music together, I still find myself going back and playing the singles and albums on a frequent basis, never tiring of anything…well, almost anything as much of The Modern World album hasn’t aged well.

There’s been two previous ICA’s, the first being #52 back in December 2015 and the second being #152 in January 2018.

They were both a bit unusual in that neither featured any singles or b-sides.  The logic behind that was ICA 52 came almost immediately on the back of a long-running series on the band’s singles, while I self-imposed a rule for #152 that nothing on the previous ICA or any singles could be used.  But as my delayed tribute to Rick, I thought I’d try and come up with a definitive ICA.  I think it’s a more than decent selection, but there’s so many incredible tunes that I’ve had to leave off.  Many of the words in the description of each song have been lifted from previous postings.

SIDE A

1. Funeral Pyre (single, 1981)

One of the great things about The Jam is just how instantly recognisable so many of their tunes are, even after all these years.  The post-punk riff of In The City, the bass and organ which kick off A Town Called Malice, the acoustic strum of That’s Entertainment, the rat-a-tat first three notes of Going Underground….the list is endless.  Right up there among the best must be Funeral Pyre, which opens with a tour de force from the rhythm section before the lead/guitar and vocals come in.

There can be no better way to to acknowledge and appreciate Rick Buckler than to open the ICA with the one song on which his drumming prowess really stands out across the Jam’s entire output, and indeed the one song on which he was given a writing co-credit.  When I heard about Rick’s death, my mind went back to those amazing live shows at the Glasgow Apollo and how the lights shone directly on him as he smashed his way through the song’s final few seconds, inevitably and rightly leading to a huge roar from a very appreciative audience.

2. Strange Town (single, 1979)
3. The Butterfly Collector (b-side 1979)

All Mod Cons, released in November 1978, will, I suspect, be my all-time favourite album until my own dying day.  But just as I thought there was no way  The Jam could top its magnificence, they released an incredible new single and arguably an even better b-side in March 1979.

There surely can be no disputing that this remains an incredible record. The A-side is powerful and fast while the B-side is slow and haunting….but both contain really sad and moving lyrics. The A-side being the tale of someone lost, lonely and alienated having been lured to the capital by the bright lights and promises of streets paved with gold, while the B-side is a sorry and lurid tale of a groupie whose best days are behind her, but not that she has cottoned on. It’s worth remembering that back then, Paul Weller was a young musician very much in love with a long-term girlfriend, and this was his response to the sorts of offers which come the way of rock musicians while they are out on tour.

4. Saturday’s Kids (from the album Setting Sons, 1979)

As a 16-year-old who was becoming increasingly aware of politics and the difference between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, the sentiments of this lyric really hit home.  The fact it came accompanied by a killer, albeit atypical post-punk new wave tune, gave me a sense at the time that it was one of the greatest songs anyone had ever written and had recorded.  I’m old enough to know better, but I will never forget the euphoric feeling throughout my brain and body every time the needle hit the groove on this one.  The fact that Weller, Foxton and Buckler didn’t want the studio albums to be full of singles is the only reason this one never became a huge and memorable chart hit.

5. Town Called Malice (single, 1982)

One of the things I most loved about Town Called Malice was that it felt such a return to form after what, to me, had been the disappointing Absolute Beginners 45.   Looking back, I probably wasn’t alone in having such sentiments, given it came straight in at #1.

OK, there was the fact that, kind ahead of its time, Polydor Records indulged in a form of multi-formatting by releasing the studio version on 7″ and a live version on 12″ thereby just about guaranteeing it would go in at #1 given just how many fans that band had at the time.  The thing is, if Malice had been a bit of a duff number, then there’s every chance the 12″ version would have gathered loads of dust in record shops; after all, who would shell out for a live version of a song that was brand-new if it hadn’t been an instant classic? It could very well be argued that it has become the band’s best-known song, given it is very much a staple of the golden oldies slots on UK radio. And it still remains a belter to sway your hips to on the dance floor.

SIDE B

1. When You’re Young (single, 1979)

The anthem of my late(ish) teens.  The one which said it all, with a few, what felt like prophetic lines from the man who could do no wrong.

Life is timeless, days are long when you’re young
You used to fall in love with everyone

Life is new and there’s things to be done
You can’t wait to be grown up

but then there’s the words of warning, which really didn’t make sense at the time, but certainly did just a few years later after the halycon days of university were disappearing in the rearview mirror

And you find out life isn’t like that
It’s so hard to understand
Why the world is your oyster but your future’s a clam
It’s got you in its grip before you’re born
It’s done with the use of a dice and a board
And let you think you’re king but you’re really a pawn

I look back and there’s an increasing astonishment that Paul Weller, born in May 1958, wasn’t barely out his teens when he wrote so many of his greatest lyrics.

2. Going Underground (single, 1980)

In 1980, singles didn’t enter the charts at the #1 position. Instead, they came in somewhere in the 20s and that got you onto Top of the Pops. The single would sell well on the back of this TV appearance, would climb a few places and then again the following week into the Top 10. The second TOTP appearance would follow, and if it was different enough from the first one and Radio 1 was still playing it, then the Top 5 and a chance at #1 would follow. It was always a 3-4 week cycle to hit the top slot.

Going Underground broke all the rules of the game. It flew in at #1 and stayed there for three weeks, and in doing so, confirmed that my favourite band was also the biggest and best band of the time.

3. All Mod Cons
4. To Be Someone (Didn’t We Have A Nice Time)

OK….this means the ICA goes beyond the normal ten tunes, but I do find it hard to ever separate the opening two tracks which open up All Mod Cons…and besides with them having a combined running time of under four minutes, then it’s not as if I’m going to be accused of overcrowding this side of the vinyl.

It didn’t make too much sense to me at the time that there could actually be any downside to being famous and rich from being a footballer or a rock singer.  But then again, I never actually appreciated back in the day that, along with perhaps being a professional boxer, there were very few avenues open to working-class boys to really make it big.  Things might have been bad back in the late 70s when Weller offered up his cautionary words, but it surely was nothing in comparison to the horrific media frenzies which have become ubiquitous with celebrity life in subsequent decades, accelerated by the horrors of social media.

5. Thick As Thieves (from Settings Sons)

This is one of the key tracks from the band’s fourth and most ambitious album. There’s no doubt that in Weller was intending to go against the grain of the post-punk/new wave era by attempting to come up with a concept album telling the story of three childhood friends whose lives don’t go the way of their youngdreams with everything changing after them fighting, but surviving, a war.

The concept wasn’t fully realised, but then again to have taken on and complete such a task would probably have meant having to get off the treadmill when the band was at the height of its fame and popularity, and besides, the dangers of the fickle music media turning against Weller if he had realised such an audacious ambition were all too real.

6. Down In The Tube Station At Midnight (from All Mod Cons and also a single, 1978)

There are days when I think this may well be the greatest record of all time, especially with each passing year.  I almost always instantly offer up Temptation by New Order if asked the specific question, but depending on my mood, especially if I’m a bit more reflective than normal, then I could easily change my mind.

An incredible tune with an incredible lyric which, to a 15-year old who hadn’t yet set foot in London, was genuinely terrifying.  Not only did I never want to bump into the muggers but please don’t ever let me cross the path of the atheist nutter who sprays ‘Jesus Saves’ onto walls.  My first trip on the London Underground came in 1983. It happened to be on the Piccadilly line at King’s Cross, and I was genuinely intrigued at how deep down I had to go to get to the platform.

All the way down on the escalators I was quietly singing this song to myself, and to my amazement when I finally reached the end of the escalator ride down into the bowels of the city, I found I could indeed make out the distant echo of faraway voices boarding faraway trains.

Thankfully, I never met the atheist nutter, not knowingly at least.

The album version is closing out this ICA just as it did with the All Mod Cons album.  Where the single version fades out, the album version ends abruptly, followed by the  sound of a train departing the platform and a musical refrain of a guitar solo. It always felt as if this was the ‘real’ version of the song, with the horrific realisation that the victim of the mugging had in fact been murdered…….

I know it’s not the most upbeat of thoughts on which to end an ICA, but that’s entertainment.

 

JC