Dust On The Stylus

Whistling Jack Smith - I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman mp3

2011-07-19T02:51:00.001+01:00

Deram
DM112
1967

In 1966 Decca which, the Rolling Stones aside, was something of a stuffy label created a new hip offshoot called Deram. They released intelligent artists like the teenager Cat Stevens, what would come to be known as 'progressive' bands like Procol Harum and The Move, and also some baroque English pop like Honeybus.

In that latter vein they also released the early David Bowie material that everyone cringingly remembers for Laughing Gnome but actually has a lot of worthwhile songs (check out Let Me Sleep Beside You and In The Heat of The Morning for starters). I have to suspect it was those more whimsical A&R folks who agreed to release the Whistling Jack Smith single.

Jack Smith didn't exist. The track was the creation of songwriters and session musicians. There was a huge youth fashion for stuff from the very early 20th century, indeed Sgt Pepper and those Beatle outfits were part of it. The tune is clearly an attempt to sound like First World War soldiers' marching songs, which helped provide the title (Kaiser Bill being Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany at the time of the First World War, batman being not the borderline psychopathic comicbook superhero but the term used for a soldier who is the PA, groom and valet to a high ranking officer). The made-up whistler's name is a play on Whispering Jack Smith, a popular singer from the 1920s.

The real artists were Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway, a prolific English songwriting team. They'd written stuff like Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart and You've Got Your Troubles, records with a dark melodramatic edge to their catchy popness. In the 70s they would go on to write I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing for that Coke advert, but try not to hold that against them.

Back in 67 they were clearly arsing around and came up with this infectious daft tune that nonetheless has something strident and hefty to it. It became a huge hit. So how do you promote it?

Up steps the 21 year old Billy Moeller, younger brother of Tommy Moeller, guitarist with Unit 4+2 (and co-writer of their glorious hit Concrete and Clay - check out the comically literalist promo film shot on a building site). A good looking mod about town, he was great on telly and in the mags.

But really, how do you go on TV and do whistling? How do you do it without making it a comedy act?

Really, you're not just miming whistling a novelty tune that goes round and round, but you didn't even have anything to do with making it. Of course you'd cover your deep-set embarrassment with a bit of eye rolling and mugging for the cameras, right?

Watch and admire as Billy gives it gusto and swagger, and pretty much pulls it off.

The monster success of the single spawned an inevitable rush-released album including a cover of 1950s proto ska classic Tom Hark.

download I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman (3.5MB MP3)

And if that's not enough instrumental oddity, try the Ram Jam Band's corking reggae version of I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman, or this momentarily amusing moog version.

The Flirtations - Nothing But A Heartache mp3

2010-12-12T14:30:00.002Z

Deram
DM216 (45-DEM-85038 in the USA)
1968

Right from the opening two notes of the hard dark intro you know this is going to be a heavy deep drive of a tune.

The Flirtations were a genuine black American soul band who'd translocated to London. Back in the US they'd won a Supremes soundalike competition, but the lead vocal on Nothing But A Heartache is a world away from Diana Ross' velvet simper. It's a strong, solid brick wall of delivery that's perfectly suited to the brass punch of the production.

The producer was Wayen Bickerton, who co-wrote the song with Tony Waddington. This duo would squander their talent but rake in the dosh by writing all that Bay City Rollers/Showaddywaddy style twaddle for the Rubettes in the 70s (though any reasonable person is still in awe of that high voice at the start of Sugar Baby Love, almost as much as the packet-tastic kecks they wore presumably to facilitate hitting the aforementioned run of high notes).

Nothing But A Heartache, though, is a long way from all that. A dense, dynamic soul corker like the toughest end of Motown's tunes, it's nonetheless got something of a British production to it, that plucking bass sound (bass amplification was just being invented), falling-down-a-stairwell drums and epic pop-soul vibe that we heard on stuff like Love Affair's Everlasting Love (for an illustration of what a fabulous bombastic difference the production makes, compare Love Affair's version with the Robert Knight original).

Despite not being a hit, Nothing But A Heartache became the title track of the Flirtations album (Deram, DES-18028) in 1969.

At once ominous and euphoric, it passes that best of Northern Soul tests; when it finishes there's nothing you want more than to hear it again immediately. As long as nobody makes you incongruously dance about on the remains of a 12th century Welsh abbey's pillars while you sing along.

download Nothing But A Heartache (3.9MB MP3)

The King on Long Play - Gregg 'The King' Peters mp3

2010-11-02T19:50:00.004Z

Reelin & Rockin (USA)
R&R1003
1981

Elsewhere I once said

Sometimes Youtube lets you down. There are all these recent performances of people doing their classics from decades ago, lacking the power of the original. Yet to the uninitiated, and to the future, these pedestrian geriatric videos will become what we were excited about.

It's recently struck me that for Elvis this actually happened before the internet. Since the 80s, Elvis impersonators have all gone for the rhinestone jumpsuited 70s Vegas Elvis. If that's all Elvis had been nobody would ever have paid any attention to him.

Several years ago I went off on one about precisely this point.

The thing that gets me is that all the Elvis impersonators are 70s Elvis in flared catsuits and shades.

Elvis hit so hard because he was a fiery pioneer. This was a guy who went round in a pink shirt and bolero jacket - clothes that'd draw flak in contemporary cosmopolitan environments - when he was an unknown teenager in the postwar Deep South.

Elvis took all the dark, brooding libidinous rhythm and outsiderness of the blues and added the tension that only white culture's repression can generate. This incendiary hybrid is the basis of rock n roll. Elvis served it up with explosive sexuality and dynamic power that swept away all that came before it.

The young Elvis' swaggering kinetic energy is impossible to imitate. So feeble unimaginative twats devoid of talent do an 'Elvis impression' by putting on a rhinestone studded romper suit and going uh-huh-huh. It makes Showaddywaddy look like authentic rock n roll.

The prevalence of these half-arsed half-brained tosspots shifts the popular notion of what Elvis was. We've seen so much of this that it's come to be the first image in our minds when his name gets mentioned.

Just like Grease, this lame light entertainment disconnects us from the fire and fury, the passion and drive of rock n roll. A social revolution is morphed into predicatable entertainment, mild amusement at stale cliches; everything rock n roll came to save us from in the first place.

Look at this and tremble, then. It's straight outta Brooklyn from 1981, one 12 inch slab of clear vinyl, two teeth-gratingly clumsy disco medlies of Elvis songs.

Gregg 'The King' Peters doesn't bode well at first glance. I couldn't help noticing that he has two Gs in the name just like the marginally less wrong Old Gregg, and even on the badly photocopied sleeve he looks nothing like Elvis. Then the needle hits the plastic and he ritually slaughters Presley classics in the manner of a Vic Reeves pub singer with the added tremolo of a man driving a tractor sideways over a rutted field with lead weights tied round his conkers.

Their claim to be 'on long play' is immediately undermined by the bold capitals on the cover saying EXTENDED PLAY SINGLE. Mind you, small mercies and all that. Ten minutes of this crime against ears is twenty minutes too long. An actual LP of this bowel-tremblingly inept cackfest is an unthinkable abomination that was edited out of the draft of the Book of Revelations on grounds of decency.

Catalogue number is RR-1003, implying it's the third record from Reelin and Rockin. What the hell else had these taste-free fuckers released?

Of course, it could be a ruse like they do in the porn movie industry of making something appear good enough to warrant a sequel. If you call your movie Transsexual Horse Lover 2 (a real title, by the way) it implies there was an earlier one that was so good that they made another.

Incidentally, is that a transsexual who loves horses? Or a lover of transexual horses?

Frankly, a bestial transsexual or indeed a transsexual horse could do a better Elvis record than this.

download The King On Long Play - Rock Songs (9.7MB MP3)

For those masochists among you for whom this isn't painful enough, leave me your email address and I'll send you the MP3 of the even worse B-side, a 5 minute long 126bpm medley of Elvis love songs.

James & Bobby Purify - Let Love Come Between Us mp3

2010-09-15T19:47:00.001+01:00

Bell (USA)
BELL685
1967

Kinnell, I feel like I've overslept by hours and come stumbling out of the house still clambering into my clothes with a piece of toast hanging out of my mouth. It's been a long long time since I put summat up here. Promise I won't leave it anything like so long next time.

James and Bobby Purify are best known in the UK for their only hit here, the heartmelting sweeping swoony soul of I'm Your Puppet. Many years earlier they did this springy, sprightly, shiny uplifting Northern Soul corker. It's another one of those exuberant Northern Soul tunes, like Do I Love You by Frank Wilson or The Tams' Be Young Be Foolish Be Happy, that give me an instant sunshine grin.

Time to clear the furniture and click your fingers as you show the floor what your booty's for.

download Let Love Come Between Us (3.7MB MP3)

Tom Robinson - Glad To Be Gay 79 mp3

2010-04-09T12:48:00.004+01:00

Island
12WIP6598
1980

A long time ago I posted another track from this album, Pete Townshend's acoustic version of Won't Get Fooled Again.

I explained then:

The Secret Policeman's Ball was a comedy/music fundraiser for Amnesty International. The four shows at Her Majesty's Theatre, London ran on consecutive days from 27th-30th June 1979. Two live albums came out from the gigs, one comedy one music.

Performers included Peter Cook, Rowan Atkinson, Billy Connolly and most of the Monty Python team for the comics, and Pete Townshend, Tom Robinson, Neil Innes and John Williams in the muso corner.

Tom Robinson performed on the last night, 30th June 1979, at the end of a varied month. On the 1st, his birthday, he'd performed in America on Tom Robinson Band's final tour. For Gay Pride Week, 18-23 June, he'd done a run of shows with jazzier arrangements of gay songs, released on the album Cabaret 79.

I suggested in that post of the Townshend track that I might do a Glad To Be Gay month here, posting all the various versions of the song that Robinson's done over the years. It is such a bold, pioneering song, so brazen and angry and militant, a stance simply without precedent in popular culture.

Well I've gone one better than a series of posts here. I've done a whole Glad To Be Gay website that's just gone live this week. It has all the versions, explains the references in the lyrics, MP3s, streaming audio, and a big interview with Tom about it all.

Robinson always saw the song more as campaigning journalism than art, and frequently updated the lyrics. There's no point in saying 'make sure your boyfriend's at least 21' in these days of an equal age of consent of 16. Other things would come along, like the Spanner trial, rampant tabloid homophobia and, especially, the onset of Aids.

There have been at least ten versions officially released, but for me the Secret Policeman's Ball one stands out in particular. It always had a special intensity, a laser focus and venom to it, but I didn't know why until I interviewed Robinson.

It's a quality you hear better on the record. In the video, his visual acknowledgement of the warm response from the audience - clapping along, singing on the chorus - tempers the impact. Until, that is, he gets to a verse reinstated after being cut from earlier versions of the song; here the video becomes more intense than the record.

Have you heard the story about Peter Wells
Who one day was arrested and dragged to the cells
For being in love with a man of 18
The vicar found out they’d been having a scene
The magistrates sent him for trial by the Crown
He even appealed but they still sent him down
He was only mistreated a couple of years
Cos even in prison they look after the queers

It's this verse that is the reason for the power of this version. Tom was furious that Amnesty asked him - the most prominent gay rock star - to perform for them even though they refused to acknowledge gay prisoners as human rights cases.

He explained

What happened to Peter Wells was a genuine scandal and a reason to be very fucking angry. But, specifically with the Secret Policeman’s Ball, Amnesty had ruled that gays did not count as political prisoners and therefore they didn’t support gay prisoners. That’s why I was singing it and that’s why I was so angry, because I was singing it to an Amnesty audience. Hence the venom. Amnesty asked me to come and perform, OK, well have this then.

download Glad To Be Gay 79 (6.3MB MP3)

Just to be clear, Amnesty now actively supports the human rights of LGBT people.

If you want me to send you the other Robinson track on this album, 1967 (Seems So Long Ago), leave your email address in the Comments.

= = = = = =

UPDATE: SPECIAL ONE-OFF LONDON GIG, 1st JUNE

As his career as a broadcaster and standard bearer for new music on BBC 6Music has taken off, his touring has declined. So it's something of a rare treat to have Tom perform a one-off concert at Shepherd's Bush Empire in London on his 60th birthday, 1st June.

There'll be an extensive set from Tom and band with assorted guests like TV Smith. As he hurtles towards retirement age he's called the gig - what else? - Glad To Be Grey.

Tickets are £15. You can get them online via the gig's site. If you go in person to any O2 Academy box office and pay cash, you get them without any of the ripoff booking fees.

Fuzzbox - XX Sex EP mp3

2010-03-17T12:32:00.003Z

Vindaloo
UGH11
1986

People try to tell you that the 80s was all Thatcherite greed and squeaky corporate Stock Aitken Waterman pop. Yet far more people were listening to Crass than making millions off privatisation. Still more were putting money in the collection buckets for the miners strike.

It's this 80s that spawned Fuzzbox (as they were always known due to their full name - We've Got A Fuzzboz And We're Gonna Use It - being too unwieldy for anyone to use).

As a teenager at the time, this first EP of theirs hit me like an amphetamine pessary. The songs were rough and playful, sleazy and aggressive, assertive and boisterous, big-hearted and defiant. I played the opening song, XX Sex, over and over and genuinely thought I might have found the greatest track ever recorded.

These were simple shambolic and heavy riffs. Like the Jesus and Mary Chain's seminal album Psychocandy a year earlier, they took classic pop structure and layered it with distortion.

Unlike the Mary Chain, this was four women conscious of having something to say. It wasn't from a swanky London major but on some provincial indie label. Their songs addressed sexism yet, like Strawberry Switchblade before them, they eschewed the brand of feminism that saw dressing up as a sop to male desire. It's no coincidence that the EP was issued with some copies on pink vinyl, some on blue.

They exuberantly self-defined even as they declared that they were still searching for who they were. More than anyone else, Fuzzbox paved the way for the Riot Grrl bands of the early 90s, yet unlike some of those they never got pretentious.

They got in there, made their point and fucked off. No noodling about. The longest song on the EP is short of three minutes. The other three clock in at under two minutes each. This was all the integrity of punk with a new pop effervescence.

Ignore their corporate makeover and plasticised comeback attempt a couple of years later. This is the real fucking deal.

download XX Sex (2.7MB MP3)

download Do I Want To? (2.6MB MP3)

download Rules and Regulations (4.2MB MP3)

download She (1.8MB MP3)

The Rattles - Zip a Dee Doo Dah mp3

2010-02-05T12:21:00.003Z

Philips
BF 1277 345617PF
1963

A vintage Merseybeat style version of Zip a Dee Doo Dah? What more could you want in life?

And this is no twee Freddie and The Dreamers stuff, it's got that tough, bright, raucous jubilance of the Swinging Blue Jeans' Hippy Hippy Shake or I Want To Hold Your Hand.

Such is their beat music proficiency that you'd never know they were in fact German, they've got that transatlantic thing down perfectly.

It's no surprise, because The Rattles cut their teeth on the same hard Hamburg rock n roll circuit as the Beatles, and were the first German band to get a contract at the Star Club where the Beatles forged that punchy buoyant post-Chuck Berry rock n roll sound.

Zip a Dee Doo Dah is actually the B-side of The Stomp ('Stompin, oh yeah, Stompin...'), a track that sounds like you imagine it does. This track, though, is the one most likely to get you out of your chair and bouncing round the room.

After this they had a Thamesmen-to-Spinal Tap style makeover, and then came their only international success, a ploddy single called The Witch in 1970. And, like the Tap, they're still going.

download Zip a Dee Doo Dah (3.3MB MP3)

Fortran 5 - Bike (Sid Sings Syd) mp3

2009-12-06T12:41:00.005Z

Mute
12MUTE126
1991

Fortran 5 were an early 90s sampletastic ambient dance outfit, sort of like a cross between the Justified Ancients of MuMu and The Orb. Producing a broad mix of tracks and ideas, and remixing for bands as diverse as Erasure and Laibach, it is nonetheless the genius one-joke novelty of Sid Sings Syd that calls me back more than anything else they did.

You know that bit in the end credits of Spinal Tap where David St Hubbins is explaining the tapes he's listening to?

I've been listening to the classics, I belong to a great series. It's called The Namesake Series cassettes, and they send you the works of famous authors done by actors with the same last name.

So I've got Denholm Eliot reading TS Eliot, I've got Danny Thomas doing A Child's Christmas In Wales by Dylan Thomas. Next month it's McLean Stevenson reads Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure Island, I believe.

Fortran 5 painstakingly sampled Sid James to make him say the words of Bike by Pink Floyd. This was 1991. None of this was done by googling any samples, this must all have been from sitting there watching hour upon grinding hour of Sid James movies on VHS, occasionally exclaiming, "There! He said 'cloak'! Rewind it while I press record!".

There's an extra twist in the fact that the session was helmed by producer Stephen James, son of Sid. It was released on the B-side of the Groove EP, and later on the album Blues.

For their next project they moved a step closer to David St Hubbins territory, actually getting Derek Nimmo into a studio to sing Layla by Derek and The Dominoes. Genius.

download Bike (Sid Sings Syd) (7.8MB MP3)

Wilson Pickett - Sugar Sugar & Cole Cooke and Redding mp3

2009-11-16T16:35:00.004Z

Atlantic
45-2722
1970

Known to everyone for mid-60s belters like In The Midnight Hour, the late 60s found Wilson Pickett applying his gritty yawp to some unusual covers. The drawn-out anguish in his version of the Supremes You Keep Me Hanging On is just glorious.

More incongruous - and regular Dusters will know I'm a sucker for the weird shit - is his cover of Sugar Sugar, a bubblegum pop tune so twee the Monkees turned it down for being too cheesy, so it was released by a fictional band of cartoon characters, The Archies. It was the monster hit of summer 1969, and still high in the charts when Pickett gave it his solid soulful treatment. (For an equally unlikely take, check out Bob Marley's version, a Jamaican 45 that finally got worldwide release on The Complete Wailers box set).

For the B-side, Pickett did another bizarre recut. Abraham Martin and John was a late 1968 American hit for Dion, previously best known for turn of the 60s edgy-end-of-cleancut pop fare like Teenager in Love, Runaround Sue and The Wanderer. This song was quite different, a reflective ballad grieving the deaths of progressive public figures Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and John Kennedy. The verse simply replaced the name in order to draw a sense of moral lineage between the three men, adding a fourth verse for Bobby Kennedy.

Has anybody here, seen my old friend John?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He freed a lot of people, but it seems the good, they die young
But I just looked around and he's gone.

Here in the UK we best knew it as a top ten hit for Marvin Gaye, whose impeccable intelligent subtlety of phrasing and gliding molten chocolate voice perfectly suited the lyric's mix of stoicism and thoughtful melancholy. For reasons unknown (was Motown already showing a fear of Marvin getting into political ideas that would lead to such a battle to get the What's Going On album released?) this version was never released in the USA.

In his preamble to the song, Wilson Pickett credits Moms Mabley's then-current 1969 version as his inspiration. Pickett, however, remoulds it as a tribute to three giants of soul music who died young.

I have simultaneous contradictory feelings about it. On the one hand it's an inventive, touching and sincere nod from one soul singer to his antecedents, drawing on soul's gospel roots to address mortality.

Yet it also seems a tasteless belittling of the fact that dying of lung cancer, being shot in dubious circumstances or going in a plane crash aren't the same as being assassinated by reactionaries because of your political beliefs. You know Bob Dylan's comments at Live Aid about how it would be good if some of the money could go to help American farmers? It's a bit like that.

Whatever, it's certainly a great piece of vinyl era oddity, which is exactly what this blog's about.

download Sugar Sugar (4.3MB MP3)

download Cole Cooke and Redding (5.4MB MP3)

The Spotnicks - Hava Nagila mp3

2009-10-18T17:16:00.002+01:00

Oriole
45-CB1790
1963

Several years ago I had my musical gland squeezed in the middle of the night by a track played on Charlie Gillett's show for the BBC World Service. He was playing a selection of tracks that first made the West aware of other musics, antecedents for what we call world music. The one that made me sit bolt upright, switch the light on and write the details down so I could buy a copy was Soul Makossa by Manu Dibango. It has a couple of killer funk-soul hooks but with this great spacey loose funk groove that was unlike any of the American funk or soul I knew.

That was the clue that 70s soul wasn't just an American affair, that there was stuff around the world that would be every bit as rich, dirty and face-twistingly funky.

Earlier this year my dear friend the venerable Gyrus sent me a copy of Nigeria Disco Funk Special: The Sound Of The Underground Lagos Dancefloor 1974-79. Like most various artist compilations it's not of consistent calibre, but fuck me when the spectrum ranges from the good to utter riproarers that's no bad thing.

Then more recently I found this page of 70s Iranian funk. Who'd have thunk the funk would be out that far? The authorities banned pop music in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution, but it seems up till then there was some magnificent stuff being made and played in Iran. As an extra reason to hate their vicious regime, the Iranian funk page gives us a clue to what musical talent has been suppressed.

Weirdest of all is the version of Hava Nagila, a traditional Hebrew tune of celebration. Iranians doing an African-American style version of a Jewish tune. It'd be worth hearing just for the on-paper incongruous nutness of it, but play it and hear that it stands tall and firm on its own merits too.

This, in turn, sent me off to dig out the version I already have, an equally improbable early 1960s Tarantino style surf guitar version done by a Swedish band who wore spacesuits on stage.

download Hava Nagila (3.4MB MP3)

The Freshies - I'm In Love With The Girl On The Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk mp3

2009-09-04T10:35:00.004+01:00

Razz (through MCA)
MCA 670
1980

This fabulous piece of perky provincial powerpop faintly pestered the charts outside the top 40. Nice postpunk Skidsy guitars combine with 60s harmonies to give it a crisp playful momentum that matches the lyrics.

Mistakenly seen at the time as something of a novelty record, it's actually more the kind of indie wit that the Wonder Stuff would make a career of.

The lyrics are a fine documentation of that attitude, so common at the time but slightly mystifying now, that records were in and of themselves sacred and wonderful artefacts. And so, just like the way people disproportionately fancy bar staff due to some subconscious primal understanding of them as providers, we'd readily swoon at cool people working in record shops.

It takes the minimum of effort to have this song remind me of the woman who worked in Our Price in Southport. How I hoped she would be impressed by my pre-ordering cool records like Starfish by The Church. If she was, she hid it very well.

The Freshies continued that vinylophilic theme with their ploddy follow-up 45 I Can't Get 'Bouncing Babies' by The Teardrop Explodes.

But before that there was a problem to overcome with the Virgin Megastore single. This being the 1980s before everything was sponsored, and with the BBC putting masking tape over brand names when using cereal boxes to make stuff with sticky-backed plastic on Blue Peter, the namecheck in this single's title was a commercial hindrance. So it was recut as I'm In Love With The Girl On A Certain Manchester Megastore Checkout Desk. (Hear that version here).

Perhaps the rewording accounts for the words bring in the wrong order on this version's label ('Virgin Manchester Megastore' instead of 'Manchester Virgin Megastore').

Freshies mainman Chris Sievey later invented a Freshies fan, the staggeringly unfunny 'comedy' character Frank Sidebottom. Somehow he ended up doing Sidebottom for years on end, along the way spawning a cohort, Caroline Aherne's - who'd have thunk it possible - even less funny Mrs Merton character.

But never mind, because this single is such a glorious uplift.

download I'm In Love With The Girl On The Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk (4.1MB MP3)

Lunar Funk - Mr Penguin Pt.1 mp3

2009-05-26T18:57:00.001+01:00

Bell (USA)
45 172 (Bell 1225 in the UK)
1972

Over at one of my favourite blogs, The Quiet Road, Jim has posted a Youtube video of the Mothership Connection. I see no reason why we shouldn't let the funk seep on over to our place.

If, like me, you had never heard of this record before you saw a second hand copy, I sincerely hope you would feel as I did. Namely, any record called Mr Penguin by something called Lunar Funk has to be worth hearing.

Whilst it doesn't have the heavier sturm und thang delivered by some of their contemporaries, it grooves along with fuzzy guitar, trippy vibes and tricky rhythm.

Most importantly, it has what - as the venerable Adam Warne rightly observed - any track needs to be truly funky: a man with a deep voice saying funky stuff.

download Mr Penguin (4.1MB MP3)

If you're a funkafreak and want me to email you the Part 2 that appears on the B-side (pretty much another three minutes of the same), leave your email address in the Comments.

Salford Jets - Who You Looking At mp3

2009-04-29T11:31:00.002+01:00

RCA
PB5239
1980

Dexys Midnight Runners' first album, a humid soul tangle, was brought to the limelight by the number 1 hit Geno. The second album, all that soul but with celtic folk sounds woven in, had it happen with the bigger hit Come On Eileen.

Then there was a huge wait before Don't Stand Me Down, a third album released with no flagship single and had them sat in corporate suits on the cover. It bombed. Yet it is every bit the equal of the first two, and in many respects excels them. A true lost classic.

To me, the giant on there is This Is What She's Like, one of the most extraordinary and brilliant love songs I've ever heard. A twelve minute epic, the lyric is a conversation, one party asking what 'she' is like and the other trying to explain. But he does it with non-verbal phonetics as words fail him.

Before that, he tries by listing a lot of disparate, curiously specific things that she's not. All those things that annoy, the things that denote people who are clueless and hopeless at root, things that make you want to give up on people, things that 'she' is such a refreshing change from.

Well you know how the English upper classes are thick and ignorant?

You know the newly wealthy peasants with their home bars and hi-fis?

People who describe nice things as wonderful.

And, first on the list, the kind of people that put creases in their old Levi's.

Imagine the level of tosserliness required to do it to the extent that your jeans have a discernible lightening down those creases. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Salford Jets.

I find it heard to believe the crease could be lightened by mere ironing. What did they do, delicately paint down their kecks with a bleachy cotton bud?

The EP pictured is a 1979 collection of I Want To Hold Your Handish beaty pop, with an arrow logo and a couple of skinny ties to cash in on the waning mod revival.

Fed Up of Stalybridge had the main letter in last Thursday's Manchester Evening News. They complained young people had abused them in the street.

Such hostility to strangers is, they assert, getting 'increasingly common'. 'Have people always displayed such an aggressive "watchoo lookin at?" attitude?'

To answer that question let us welcome back Greater Manchester's all-time most negligible band. Ladies and gentlemen, once again I give you the Salford Jets.

The year after the EP they released a single of breathtakingly brainless, affected spilt-pintery. Scraping into the charts at number 72, Who You Looking At? features two verses and a chorus of cod-punk twaddle. They even drift into that Estuary English accent so essential for pseudo-punk.

Who you looking at
When you're walking down the street?
Who you looking at?
You better not be looking at me
I said who you looking at?
Who you looking at?
Who you looking at?
It better not be me

Fractionally redeemed by a brief tasty organ break, nonetheless it's one of the most ludicrous, risible records ever manufactured.

download Who You Looking At (3.1MB MP3)

Seventeen - Bank Holiday Weekend mp3

2009-04-02T22:12:00.001+01:00

Vendetta
VD001
1979

I said in an earlier post that I couldn't remember if I'd seen The Alarm in December 1985. Well, for those of you who who've bitten their nails to the quick awaiting an answer, relief is at hand.

A rummage around brings to light the ticket stubs. Saw them in November 84 (I remember hitch-hiking home and listening to the American election results on the radio. Reagan re-elected. Fuck.)

And again the following May.

With another tour in December they certainly weren't slacking. And they undoubtedly did really good gigs, but by late 1985 my interest in them had waned. They were becoming a bit too straightforward, a bit - as it was known at the time - rockist.

They'd come through a couple of years earlier with several bristling singles and an aptly titled confident and earnest debut album, Declaration.

Lyrically they had broad-brush politics about justice, hope and the concerns of the ordinary person, a gift for terrace-anthem choruses, and a specific obsession with war imagery (soon adopting a splattery poppy as their logo).

Musically they had real gusto yet tempered it sonically with sweeping layers of strident acoustic guitars and emotionally with a melancholy tint.

The sound was thus intricate yet epic, bold and provocative yet ornate and even wistful, it could curl like a creeper vine or explode as big and startling as their hairstyles.

If you could repress your cynicism - or had yet to form any to speak of - then they were fresh, exciting and involving. I still stand by that first album as being all those things.

Though I'd personally lose interest as my tastes went a little toward darker and more oblique music (REM, The Church), at least The Alarm didn't go as dull as Big Country. And you've gotta respect a band that would cut their fourth album, Change, in two different vocal versions, one in English and one in Welsh. Especially a band from as anglophone a part of Wales as Rhyl.

But let's let the screen go into that heat-haze effect that tells you it's a flashback.

Before they were The Alarm they were a post-new wave mod band called Seventeen. Taking that Merseybeat brightness with a bit of solidly chuggy new-wave guitar, like The Members or The Chords or the Lambrettas, only they don't seem to have been as good as those ones. Who, in turn, weren't that good themselves.

(Before this, incidentally, singer Mike Peters was in a punk band called The Toilets. Worth doing it just for the name I reckon).

Seventeen issued a single, both sides written by the future Alarm mainstay team of MacDonald and Peters. The A-side was Don't Let Go, but it's the B-side, Bank Holiday Weekend, that catches my ear. You can see them trying to latch on to the mod iconography of bank holiday punch-ups on Brighton beach, but as its fifteen years later and they actually live in a seaside town they know that the truth is somewhat different. Bored families, tacky tat for sale, the deflation of something looked forward to being dull.

I've no idea, but I'm guessing this was their only release and quite possibly a DIY job, given that it has the catalogue number VD 001. I love that prefix. When I was in a band, our fake record company for what turned out to be our only release was Rampant Records, letting us use PANTS 001. You've got to take the opportunities for smut where you find them.

There's no clue at all that these people would go on to do anything of worth. In that way, it's opposite of the Johnny and the Self-Abusers single (a piece of slinky arty punk that, after a namechange to Simple Minds, gave way to one of the most vacuous and execrable careers in the history of eardrums).

download Bank Holiday Weekend (4.4MB MP3)

By the way, if you're some Alarm completist gagging for the MP3 of Don't Let Go as well, leave your email address in the Comments and I'll send it to you.

Tom Robinson - Never Gonna Fall In Love (Again) mp3

2009-03-11T19:20:00.001Z

EMI
EMI2967
1979

I found this in Oxfam in Headingley circa 1993. I knew Tom Robinson's raised fist classics (2468 Motorway, Glad To Be Gay) and the more thoughtful mysterious side (War Baby, Atmospherics), and that he'd just returned to form as an acoustic troubadour with a new batch of songs with his trademark mix of biting cynicism and warm hearted optimism.

But nothing prepared me for what I was about to receive. It's a smirky saucy swirly gay disco track with a hands-in-the-air chorus. This bright shiny setting is a great juxtaposition for Robinson's dry throaty vocal tone.

Never meant to be so friendly
Never made the room look nice
Never heed a word of warning
Never take my own advice
Ooh, I got a brand new problem
He's pretty and he's five foot ten
I've been in love three times this week
I'm just about to fall again

In a 2004 interview for the excellent radio show and online resource Queer Music Heritage, Tom said

In many ways one of my favorite gay songs of all the ones that I wrote that had a specifically openly amorously gay theme, I like "Never Gonna Fall In Love Again" because I sent the lyric to Elton John and he came back with the music for it, and so it was a collaboration between two gay artists. And he is a great songwriter, there's no question, so it's got good changes and a decent melody. And his version of course was a slow ballad and…a bit drippy to be honest.

And although he sent me back a demo which had all the pronouns as I'd written them, when he recorded it himself he kind of slurred them a bit, so where it's "I wish he didn't make me rabid" his is "I wish-he didn't make…" you know it was just a little bit on the ambiguous side.

Ah, but that's all right. That's where he was at the time and what Elton has done (A) for the gay movement, and (B) in the fight against AIDS, with the Elton John AIDS Foundation, you know, is fantastic and we owe a huge debt to the man, so I think he's allowed to slur a few of his pronouns here and there

A wild collision of talents, it's not only co-written by Tom Robinson and Elton John, but produced and engineered by Nick Drake's guy John Wood, and mixed by Sex Pistols producer Bill Price.

To make it stranger still, while the B-side is credited to Tom Robinson Band, the A-side is 'Tom Robinson With The Voice Squad'. Who might this shady group be? Er, it's the Tom Robinson Band.

According to Tom's official site

Although TRB were playing on the record, its hamfisted disco style was so alien to what the band was about that at the other members' request it was released as a Tom Robinson solo single and the group split shortly afterwards.

Robinson didn't let his step falter, swiftly putting on a solo gig of gay songs to mark the tenth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. That show was released as the Cabaret 79 album which, generous gent that he is, is available for free download from his site.

Whilst Never Gonna Fall In Love (Again) is not disco proper - crank it up and there's no Chic-esque bass whoomf - it's a great piece of perky cheeky pop-disco and a real unexpected delight.

download Never Gonna Fall In Love (Again) (4.6MB MP3)

The single donated all performance royalties to London Gay Switchboard, which is still very much in action. If you download the MP3, why not make a donation? Just £1 covers the cost of a ten minute call.

The Charles Randolph Grean Sounde - Star Trek mp3

2009-02-26T18:48:00.001Z

Ranwood (USA)
R1044
1975

The Star Trek theme.

Disco version from the mid-1970s.

Oh yes indeed.

download Star Trek (5MB MP3)

Faith Brothers - Easter Parade mp3

2009-02-11T13:32:00.004Z

Siren
SIREND2
1985

Over on my other blog I did a post about going to see the hybrid reunion-tribute band From The Jam.

In digging around to find old gig tickets from the 80s with which to illustrate it, I found this old listings flyer from 1985.

I love the way bands are expensive in proportion to how long they've been going, and almost in inverse proportion to how good they are.

The cheapest gig on the list and the only one I went to was REM (with the possible exception of The Alarm, saw them a couple of times, can't remember if that Royal Court gig was one). REM's listed support act, as with a ton of gigs at the Royal Court around that time, was the Faith Brothers.

As Sly and Robbie told Michael Franti, reggae isn't a nationality, its a rhythm and it belongs to everyone. In the same way, soul is what you play and what you are, not where you're from.

The Faith Brothers were, like Immaculate Fools, a band who got a mid-80s Big Push from their record company (Virgin, using their Siren imprint) with a double-pack single, Country of The Blind.

They packed a political punch in bright bouncy soul and, despite the universality of musical styles, there was nonetheless something a little arch and polished, just a smidgen of The Commitments in them.

Still, coming out in the year of the miners strike as Thatcher's talons dug into the fabric of society, anything that proclaimed compassion with passion was welcome.

Tucked away on that extra single, Easter Parade is a world apart from the mainstay of their brass-augmented soul kick. Clearly written for just one acoustic guitar, it's propelled by Billy Franks' driven sincerity and - quite an achievement for the mid-80s - is given a subtle and haunting production job, doing justice to its subject, the six week long Falklands War of 1982.

It tells the story from the perspective of a soldier and, unusually for lefties of the time, it has sympathy not only with his injuries but also with him being there in the first place.

Dressed to kill one cool spring morning
Got on board the first from Portsmouth
On the crest of a rising wave
Of hate for strangers of our own kind
But the headlines, cheering crowds and flags
I must admit stirred something in me
That faded as we pulled away
And turned out to be only fear disguised

The bulldogs bayed
The pious prayed
I think it rained
On the Easter Parade

Down south the old and desperate men
Sacrifice the young and ready
On the altar of their crumbling gods
Mourning for a long-lost glory
For nineteen years you chart my life
With your morals and your incentives
In six weeks pull it all apart
For horror's real and you are far away

My mind ingrained
I came home maimed
So was kept away
From the Easter Parade

Hooked on a kind of freedom
I still need to hurt somebody
Too estranged to talk about it
Or get close to anyone

The mother of the nation cries 'Rejoice!'
And I can hardly shuffle
Struck down by what the mean can do
For political ambition
And now the truth begins to surface
Like a spectre from dark water
Rising up to bring them down
I can't take heart, only wonder why

Is our conscience lame
Is a fall to shame
All to be gained
From the Easter Parade

= = =

'The headlines, cheering crowds and flags I must admit stirred something in me'

As the ships sailed from Portsmouth for the Falklands there were vast crowds of union jack waving crowds. In these times of the ongoing unpopular wars of occupation, it's hard for people to realise how much we were still in thrall to jingoistic flag-waving bullshit back then. These days, saved for occasions like the football, it's lost much of its arrogant imperialist overtones.

It's surprising how the atmosphere has changed in a relatively short time. 1982 was only five years since the queen's silver jubilee, an occasion marked by public holidays and everything. I know of people who grew up in fervent Welsh nationalist households who still had a street party with red whit and blue bunting.

Yet look how underwhelming the celebrations for the golden jubilee were in 2002. Anyone over the age of five in 1977 remembers the silver jubilee, yet none of us can remember anything about the golden jubilee without looking it up.

As Thatcher talked to the press when the Argentinian forces had surrendered, you can hear the crowd in the background singing Rule Brittania.

That refrain 'rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves, Britons never never never shall be slaves' has a much more sinister meaning than first appears. Written in 1740 as the slave trade was peaking, with Britain the foremost slave-trading nation, it is not a song about our liberation. It is a song that declares our superiority over all others and that we shall never suffer the kind of slavery that we inflict.

'The mother of the nation cries 'rejoice!' and I can hardly shuffle'

On 26 April 1982 Thatcher stood outside 10 Downing Street as the Defence Secretary announced the recapture of South Georgia. Afterwards, she refused to answer questions, telling the press to just 'rejoice at that news'.

'I came home maimed so was kept away from the Easter Parade'

The jaw-dropping cynicism of Thatcher's victory parade still angers me today. It was to be an overtly jingoistic celebration. Troops who had fought were to march along with their bayonets fixed and buttons gleaming. Except the ones who'd come home with unsightly injuries. They - the ones who'd given the most for the cause - weren't invited in case they spoilt the jubilation with the horror of truth. After a media furore, some were belatedly asked along.

There are still resonances now. Even though we no longer have so much patriotic poppycock about our wars, we are manipulated. The American government makes sure their electorate don't get too riled by what happens to their troops. Just as Thatcher barred maimed Falklands veterans, there are no pictures allowed of American coffins and bodybags coming home from Iraq. Around a third of American troops in Iraq aren't American at all, they're foreigners who will get fast-tracked for American citizenship if they come back alive, thus reducing the pressure on American public opinion.

Timed for the autumn before a general election, the Falklands victory parade pushed Thatcher's popularity higher. It was calculated to do so - she took the salute of the troops, a job normally reserved for royalty.

The Labour party had just split (four senior members setting up the Social Democratic Party, which eventually merged with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats), and with it the Labour vote was divided. Thus a prime minister who came to power on a ticket of law and order and lowering unemployment yet presided over the worst rioting in living memory and a trebling of the number of jobless managed to get re-elected with the biggest landslide in 40 years.

Labour's bold manifesto - unilateral nuclear disarmament, nationalise the banks, abolish the House of Lords - and the fact that, in Michael Foot, they had the most untelegenic leader imaginable was blamed for their defeat, rather than the war and the fucking SDP.

A dashing charismatic young Labour candidate who entered parliament on that manifesto would sweep to power in 1997 on a pro-Trident pro-privatisation ticket. His successor entered parliament at that same election, and whilst he's done a little nationalising of banks under duress, he's still yet to make good on the promised House of Lords reform.

The musical lift into the bridge of the song ('hooked on a kind of freedom...') still catches the pit of my stomach every time like a rollercoaster, which is fitting for the words that allude to the personal disconnection, to what was then only just starting to have a name as post-traumatic stress disorder.

'And now the truth begins to surface like a spectre from dark water'

On 2nd May 1982 the Argentine ship Belgrano was sunk, killing over 300 men, around a third of the total killed in the war. The ship was outside the 200 mile exclusion zone around the Falklands and was sailing away at the time. In July 1984 a senior civil servant leaked documents proving the government knew this, and the ship had been spotted a day earlier than claimed.

The civil servant, Clive Ponting, was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. His defence was that it was in the public interest to know the truth. The judged begged to differ, telling the jury 'the public interest is what the government of the day says it is'. Despite this the jury - being the public rather than the establishment - acquitted him. It was in this atmosphere that Faith Brothers frontman Billy Franks wrote Easter Parade.

Sadly, it was not the start of a flood of leaks on government lies, and Thatcher responded with a new Official Secrets Act that doesn't have a 'public interest' defence.

Truths still come out occasionally, though. In 2003 the government finally admitted that nuclear weapons had been on warships in the Falklands.

Clive Ponting resigned from the civil service and became an academic and a history author, writing a number of books including a critical biography of Winston Churchill and the classic Green History of The World, recently revised and expanded as A New Green History of the World. Check out this excerpt, The Lessons of Easter Island.

Billy Franks has continued songwriting, seemingly as committed and passionate as ever.

download Easter Parade (5MB MP3)

Johnny Johnson & His Bandwagon - Mr Tambourine Man mp3

2009-01-08T13:52:00.001Z

Bell
BLL 1154
1971

Tony Macaulay was one of the great British bubblegum songwriters of the 60s and early 70s, but he was obviously in thrall to Motown and usually put a dose of soul in the mix to leaven the sweetness.

His first major hit - he was only 23 and had written the song two years earlier - was Baby Now That I've Found You by The Foundations, and then a year later Build Me Up Buttercup. In between there were a couple of singles you're less likely to have heard of, of which I strongly recommend Back On My Feet Again, another sunny stomper cut from the same cloth as the biggies.

He wrote a bunch of other singles in the same wide-eyed catchy bouncy vein usually recorded by non-existent bands such as Edison Lighthouse's Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes.

Meanwhile, at the same time as Build Me Up Buttercup, there was a punchy pop-soul band called The Bandwagon in the charts with Breakin' Down The Walls of Heartache. Subsequently something of a northern soul staple and covered by Dexys Midnight Runners on the B-side of Geno, this corker was released on the CBS imprint Direction.

You just know from the name and artwork that the label's a winner. Any time you see a single on Direction, unless it's a piece of Sly Stone perfection, it's something you've never heard of. And yet, if you like the tang of some later northern soul urgency, it rarely disappoints. If you come across anything on Direction, always give it the benefit of the doubt and buy it.

The talents collided in Love Grows' year 1970 with Macaulay writing and producing the (now 'Johnny Johnson and His...') Bandwagon hits Sweet Inspiration and Blame It On The Pony Express as the flagship singles for the Soul Survivor album.

The following year there was this single. You've got a real soul band and a bubblegum producer at the helm, so whether you're thinking Byrds or Bringing It all Back Home it's a scarcely recognisable version of Mr Tambourine Man. Bright, bouncy, brilliant and a bit baffling, it's a fabulous little corner of pop weirdness.

Later in the 70s Macaulay teamed up with another British bubblegum mainstay, Roger Greenaway, to do You’re More Than a Number in My Little Red Book and Kissin’ in the Back Row of The Movies for the Drifters.

Then he swapped soul for Soul, writing and producing Don't Give Up On Us, Silver Lady and other fucking awful sickly syrupy shite for the Starskyless Hutch gone dewy-eyed romance singer David Soul. They sold gazillions and clutter up charity shops to this day.

download Mr Tambourine Man (4.4MB MP3)

Millie - My Boy Lollipop (German) mp3

2008-11-07T12:06:00.000Z

Fontana (Germany)
267376TF
1964

Millie Small recorded a load of stuff (including one of only two Nick Drake covers recorded during his lifetime, an inexplicable take on Mayfair), but it's this utterly perfect two minutes that she'll always be best known for.

It's the song that brought ska to global attention, a delightful skippy groove with a harsh slap of a production.

When I'm DJing I keep My Boy Lollipop and Superstition separate and always visible. If ever I paint myself into a corner or summat's floundering and flagging, I throw either of them on. They set themselves completely apart from any tune you may have just played, and they are utterly incendiary to a dancefloor.

This isn't the version you know, mind. It is, as the sleeve proudly proclaims, the Deutsche Originalaufnahme.

Unlike others who sang versions of songs entirely in German, Millie veers randomly between that language and her native English. This, though, only serves to make it all the weirder.

Corker.

download My Boy Lollipop (German version) (2.9MB MP3)

The Wasters - Accept My Love & Don't Stop mp3

2008-10-26T17:41:00.002Z

Uni (USA)
55148
1969

I know absolutely nothing about this band, but what does that matter when the music is sooooo good?

They have a mix of early 60s sweet soul vocals with a late 60s warmth underneath, something about the way bass amps have been invented bringing proper bottom end on to records, but there's much more, a gorgeous summery sweep with outstretched arms that exalt and uplift.

Although the vocals do remind me of early Smokey Robinson and even earlier rich romantic doo-wop groups like the Five Satins, there's also another foot in the Stylistics-style 70s soul.

Accept My Love is a melty ballad that swoons and languidly sparkles, but the one that really really gets me is the flip, Don't Stop. You wouldn't believe how many times in a row I get compelled to play this sucker.

Loose wah-twangs droop and snag around a brass punch and a gossamer funky beat, late 60s Northern Soul at its irresistible best. Turn it up and let your feet show you what they were made for.

[MP3s deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry! See 'Deleted Tracks' in the sidebar if you'd like these tracks emailing to you]

Little Stevie Wonder - Workout Stevie Workout mp3

2008-09-07T14:52:00.002+01:00

Tamla (USA)
TAMLA 54086
1963

I remain profoundly and, in all likelihood, immovably unconvinced by the freemarketeering pro-nuclear corn ethanol salesman Barack Obama. Anyone who can say 'clean coal' with a straight face is not to be trusted on anything.

But seeing Stevie Wonder singing Obama's name, though. Before I saw that I didn't think anything could ever persuade me to step into the ring and be the puppet of ecocidal vested interests. Now, however, I totally get why Obama's up for it and suspect that in his position I'd go for it too.

Just imagine it, only with Stevie Wonder singing your name.

.

Even allowing for the tracksuit misjudgement, tell me this wouldn't do it for you too;

Those, though, are as nowt. Check out Superstition on Sesame Street.

It's the song as we know it but with - is it possible? - even more funk. Then it goes into an uber-funky jam for two minutes, then a false ending. Then - you fucking what? - a minute of Stevie singing 'Sesame Street'! Over Superstition!

Bear in mind that, ten years into a career of classics, the guy was only 22 or 23 here; he has the kudos, the track record, the long-term immersion in music that make it seem to be something he breathes. Set free from the bonds of this earth, he's adrift in funk heaven. At the same age 'young' pop stars like Noel Gallagher and Morten Harket were still years away from making their first records.

But it's way back to the start we're going to go now. As Little Stevie Wonder, he released his first single in 1962 aged 12. Already he was good enough to not only sing but play drums on it too.

The breakthrough came the following year with the storming live single Fingertips Part 2 (Marvin Gaye on drums that time), a spontaneous freakout that sounded like a James Brown's band squirting gospel as they fell down a stairwell.

The follow-up was this equally frenetic riproaring gospel swirl, Workout Stevie Workout. It's an irresistably joyous, contagious, uplifting soulful geyser to bounce you round the room.

[Sorry! MP3 deleted to make way for new ones]

Immaculate Fools - Immaculate Fools mp3

2008-08-21T18:34:00.007+01:00

A&M
AM227
1985

Belle and Sebastian. The Selecter. Living In A Box. Slowdive. Tin Machine. Talk Talk. The Colour Field. Goodbye Mr MacKenzie. Madness.

The list of bands with eponymous songs is an unsurprisingly short one. I suppose Big Country almost got there with In A Big Country, and Dexy's had an oblique stab at it with Kevin Rowland's Band.

It's surely a tougher thing to do when you're a solo artist, so kudos to Bo Diddley and two other nearly-made-its, Julian Cope's Julian H Cope (his middle name's actually David) and Mr Jeays by Philip Jeays, a songwriter and performer whose talent is only matched by his gobsmackingly inexplicable obscurity.

Anyway, in 1985 there was this proper eponysong, Immaculate Fools. They appeared out of nowhere and had the smell of a serious wedge of record company loot behind them. Production by Colin Thurston (Duran Duran, Magazine, Human League) and mixing by the legendary Glyn Johns (Beatles, Stones, Who, Zeppelin, you name it). Beyond the big name techies there was the real mid-80s sign of a Big Hype, the double pack 7 inch.

They were another of those bands who, like Bauhaus, Tubeway Army or Psychedelic Furs, made something decent out of having plainly spent their adolescence obsessing over Bowie. This may even have been a reason they went with producer Thurston. He was, with Bowie and Iggy Pop, one of the 'Bewlay Brothers' team that produced Lust For Life.

The song is a glorious pop swooner. The way it just rolls in from the intro, the stately glide, a little arty and knowing, somehow simultaneously contrived and effortless, graceful and swaggering, and a chorus that sticks in your head for days.

There is a video on Youtube, but I'd recommend just listening first. They look soooo 80s. Floppy fringe? Check. Waistcoats? Check. Mullets, too many tom-toms, big glasses, peroxide? Yep, all there. It distracts from the real worth here, the richness of tone, the way the dry English voice cuts over the warm, woody soar of the chorus.

It scraped to number 51 in the charts, no other hits. A one-hit wonder I bought at the time and know very little about, but it still sounds great today and more people should hear it. Now that's what doing an MP3 blog's all about.

The back cover warns me that home taping is killing music and it's illegal.

It's also anachronistic. Don't tape this track, help yourself to the MP3 instead.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones, sorry!]

The Flaming Ember - Westbound No.9 mp3

2008-07-25T19:37:00.004+01:00

Hot Wax (USA)
HS7003
1969

Holland-Dozier-Holland were the powerhouse songwriting team at Motown. Dozens and dozens of the finest soul and pop songs you'll ever hear. Reach Out I'll Be There, Where Did Our Love Go, This Old Heart Of Mine, You Can't Hurry Love, and one I've had on repeat play recently, Baby I Need Your Loving.

By 1967 they felt they weren't getting a chunky enough cut of the Motown financial pie. Failing to get redress, they left the label. Motown pointed out that they were under contract until the early 70s and couldn't write anywhere else.

Holland-Dozier-Holland started their own labels, Invictus and Hot Wax. They were just producing, you understand. Not writing, no, because that wouldn't be legal. Instead, song after wonderful song was being written by a mysterious team called Ronald Dunbar and Edith Wayne.

You know that gradual yet total way that Elton John went from supposedly straight and married to out and proud? Well over the years denial has morphed into complete acceptance that Dunbar-Wayne is Holland-Dozier-Holland.

Oddly, their performers overlapped with Motown a fair bit. Their first signing, 100 Proof Aged in Soul, featured Joe Stubbs, ex-Contour and brother of the mighty Levi.

Soon they got an established Detroit band, the Flaming Ember. They'd released half a dozen singles on the great soul label Ric-Tic but when Motown bought up the label the band got dropped, and Motown's former employees stepped forward to catch them.

This single's got that fabulous sharp twangy distorted guitar like on Behind A Painted Smile (the thing Edwyn Collins appropriated for A Girl Like You), it's got a dose of that late 60s/early 70s soul thing for gritty social description and a sticky catchy chorus, all belted out by a great gutsy voice.

I've done it again; misheard a white record for a black one. And, again, I'm not alone. Flaming Ember bassist Jim Bugnel says

Eddie Holland held off releasing our Westbound No. 9 Album in L.A. because there were two black stations in L.A. that would not play songs by white artists, so he waited until Westbound No. 9 hit No.1 on those stations and then he released the album in Los Angeles and booked us on Bandstand.

There's a lot more of this post-Motown Holland-Dozier-Holland that's worth checking out. I'm presuming you know already Freda Payne's belter Band Of Gold (but maybe didn't know it was Holland-Dozier-Holland).

Chairmen of The Board did some wonderful singles (check out Give Me Just A Little More Time, Everything's Tuesday) and then they, like so many of their contemporaries, got the funk (go get their version of Sly Stone's Life & Death). Now it was time to step into the funk-light, and no less a funkadeity than Parliament released their first album on Invictus.

This MP3, though, is from a very specific point in soul history as the gloss of the 60s has peeled away and yet the dirt of funk is yet to be revealed.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones, sorry!. See 'Deleted Tracks' in the sidebar if you want this MP3 emailed to you]

Teardrop Explodes - Traison (C'est Juste Une Histoire) mp3

2008-07-17T13:27:00.004+01:00

Mercury
TEAR312
1981

And those foreign language versions just keep on coming.

Today I discovered what is already one of my favourite MP3 blogs Crying All the Way To The Chip Shop - superb writing and equally good choice of eclectic tunes - and because its recently posted a Teardrop Explodes track, I feel moved to post one too.

By 1981 Julian Cope had already made one or two weird corners in his back catalogue, and on the B-side of the 12 inch of Treason he made another, re-recording the vocal in French for no apparent reason. At least with the Motown ones they presumably were made for a purpose, to sell better in places that spoke the language.

This track, though, registers low on the Cope scale of weirdness, compared to stuff like the LAMF 'ambient metal' album, or forming a band called Queen Elizabeth and calling the second album Queen Elizabeth 2 - Elizabeth Vagina, or his 1999 CD Odin; one track, 73 minutes and 42 seconds of him going aaaaaawwwwwwwhhhhmmmmm.

I'm guessing you wouldn't want to listen to that one very much, so I'm sticking with Traison (C'est Juste Une Histoire).

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones, sorry!. See 'Deleted Tracks' in the sidebar if you want this MP3 emailed to you]

If you don't already know it, check out Cope's website. It's a lot more than the usual biog and merchandise. The man himself has a lot of personal input - there's a monthly Address Drudion piece as well as his album of the month review. But there's a lot more beyond too, with the Unsung section of album reviews posted by anyone, the Modern Antiquarian featuring a gazeteer of over 3,000 stone circles and ancient sites, and the political bit that I helm, U-Know.

Four Tops - Gira Gira & Piangono Gli Uomini mp3

2008-07-09T16:12:00.002+01:00

Tamla Motown (Italy)
TM8023
1967

Time for another foreign language version. Two, actually.

Motown did quite a lot of these. The Supremes' Where Did Our Love go becoming Wo Ist Unsere Liebe for the German market, the Velvelettes francophonically turning As Long As I Know He's Mine into Puisque Je Sais Qu'il Est Moi, and Martha and the Vandellas blueprint for Town Called Malice, I'm Ready For Love, became the Spanish single Yo Necesito De Tu Amor.

The Temptations did My Girl both in German (although calling it Mein Girl was kind of cheating) and in Motown's second language, Italian. The lightness and delicacy of that song somehow makes it one of the funniest to hear in a different language.

But my favourites are these, a great Italian 45 with Gira Gira (Reach Out I'll Be There) and Piangono Gli Uomini (I Can't Help Myself).

Levi Stubbs' great aching yawp is one of the most affecting things ever recorded. Such power and pleading, such a cry, such soul.

So hearing him apply that to what you're sure must be a phonetic lyric sheet that he doesn't understand is just brilliant.

[MP3s deleted to make way for new ones, sorry!. See 'Deleted Tracks' in the sidebar if you want these MP3s emailed to you]

The Dovells - You Can't Sit Down mp3

2008-06-12T23:02:00.006+01:00

Parkway
P867
1962

I bought this single not knowing anything about the group, but just from listening to the first minute and being blown away. I love the way it bursts into life, no slow intro or gradual build-up but a flying kick to the head before you've had any warning. It's a rip-roaring early 60s beat freakout, but who were the band?

I hadn't consciously thought about it, but I presumed they were a black group. Evidently so did a lot of people listening to American radio in the 60s, and this band of white cleancuts would play more black venues than white, including shows at the Apollo and with Ray Charles.

It wasn't necessarily the vocal sound that made me think it wasn't a white record so much as the looseness and kinetic energy of the track.

The very early 60s was a strange time, as rock n roll's first thunder rolled away and diminished and the world was unknowingly waiting for the Beatles to rejuvenate everything. Into the void stepped a lot of twee and sanitised Connie Francis pop, the sort of thing Radio 2 still loves to play in the daytime.

There were also a lot of dance-craze records. As a generation of white folks emerged who'd grown up with rock n roll, they came out on to the dance floor. It was still unknown territory so they needed a bit of instruction, hence records came out that would have specific moves. It also regulated rock n roll dancing and thereby made it less threatening. There was the Hitch-Hike, the Twist, the Watusi, the Mashed Potato, the Stomp and loads more.

And then once there was a hit record, every artist desperate for a hit - and not caring about much creative worth or any long-term prospects - would jump the bandwagon and do a new tune about the dance, telling us how all the kids love doing this all night long.

The Dovells were labelmates with Chubby Checker, whose The Twist had started the biggest dance craze of them all (even though his version was in fact a cover of a Hank Ballard track).

You name it, some bugger twisted it; Florida Twist, Peppermint Twist, Spanish Twist, everybody Twisting The Night Away even though Mama Don't Allow No Twistin'.

Oddly, that general 'sequels are never better' rule is bucked, and two of the best twist records are bandwagon jumpers, Twist and Shout and Chubby Checker's own Let's Twist Again (on which, incidentally, the uncredited backing singers are the Dovells).

Even though these were as unashamedly commercial as a toy given away with a Happy Meal, some of the tracks are genuinely great. As Julian Cope pointed out, the funny thing about rock n roll as an art form is that anyone can make it work; paradoxically, a facsimile of rock n roll is usually the real thing.

The Dovells grabbed on to the stomp bandwagon in late 1961 with The Bristol Stomp. Check out this vintage performance. Despite the suits and ties, the shit-eating grins and the hilariously sedate audience (I can laugh for hours watching a loop of the bit from 0.32 to 0.37), there is some real pace and verve. There's this thin veneer of corny choreography struggling to cover the volatile bubbling youth energy. They just don't stop moving, it reminds me of footage of the Two Tone bands.

See what I mean?

By the way, they claim that 'the kids in Bristol are sharp as a pistol when they do the Bristol Stomp'. Does this mean the kids are rather blunt then? I mean, pistols can be pointy at best, but hardly sharp.

Whatever, that fizzing energy really burst through on You Can't Sit Down, everything good in them to the fore with a real wildness, jittering, pounding and then exploding, a contagious sense of raucous party that propels you skywards. It's one of those records that could be issued to hospitals - if a patient doesn't start dancing to this then it's time to pronounce them clinically dead.

The Dovells' lead singer and - when they took the occasional break from cover versions - main songwriter Leonard Borisoff quit in late 1963, and then came back in 65 with an utterly brilliant solo single. As Len Barry, he wrote and recorded 1-2-3.

I've known and loved that record since I was a teenager but, yet again, I'd not thought about it but sort of just presumed it was a black singer. It ranks right up alongside any mid-60s Motown and soul you can find, great production and even though it's a song of devotion there's such a gorgeous melancholic edge to his voice.

Motown also thought it was like their stuff. Specifically, they thought it was like Ask Any Girl, the B-side of the Supremes' Baby Love. Barry denied it, but Motown sued and the courts thought Motown were half right and split the royalties.

There is one bit you can spot, the chords dropping after the title's said, but really it was a bit harsh to have Motown trousering half the money. I find little sense in a world that takes royalties from 1-2-3 and My Sweet Lord but leaves Noel Gallagher alone despite using All The Young Dudes for not one but two big-earning hit singles (Stand By Me and Don't Look Back in Anger).

If you haven't already got it, go and get Len Barry's 1-2-3.

Meantime, roll back the carpet, get ready to air-sax and stick this one on.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones, sorry!. See 'Deleted Tracks' in the sidebar if you want this MP3 emailed to you]

Roddy Frame & Edwyn Collins - Consolation Prize mp3

2008-05-15T22:38:00.003+01:00

WEA
YZ521CD
1990

Paul Weller said he split The Jam because they'd become too big to make a difference. It sounds a bit odd until you think it through. He'd hit a level where normal life was impossible, where there were a small army of people dependent on him for a job and, worst, where fans adored anything he did simply because it was him. If he'd released an album of him reading Benny Hill scripts it would've sold shitloads.

So I think good fortune comes not with being a megastar, but in having the space to really explore and express. That means a certain level of commercial success, but still an ability to walk down the street unnoticed so you're still in the real world, and nobody wanting you to do a record just like your last one.

However, being so unnoticed can mean you get one hit and for the rest of your life everyone wants you to sing that one song to them. Marc Almond's autobiography starts off with yet another cabbie calling his wife saying 'you'll never guess who I've got in the back' and making him sing Tainted Love.

How much worse it must be when the one everyone knows you for is, like Tainted Love, a cover, or some novelty nonsense. Consider Jeff Beck's prowess and then the fact that Hi Ho Silver Lining is his best selling record.

Occasionally, fate is fairer and the one hit is representative. The Church's Under The Milky Way is a case in point, and so was Aztec Camera's Oblivious. Sparkling, sensitive, a mysterious lyrical swirl curling round some soaring and unfeasibly complex jubilant intelligent acoustic guitar driven pop.

That sanity protection lower level of fame can perhaps be assisted a little by hiding behind a band name. Like Matt Johnson's The The, Aztec Camera is just Roddy Frame and whoever's with him, or like Mark E Smith put it, 'if it's me and your gran on bongos, it's The Fall'.

When he was 16, Roddy left school at Easter without taking exams because he already had a record deal lined up with legendary Glasgow indie label Postcard. Releasing beautiful songs with that trademark intricate guitar playing and a bracing freshness that he'd written himself. And he was dead good looking too.

There's just no justifying all that, is there? You can explain away something that comes to you from luck, or the fruits of hard work, but sheer talent has no excuse at all.

A jump to Rough Trade for an album, then a major label deal followed and a big world tour. And he was still only 19.

A couple of years later he was back with the Love album, a bit laden with late 80s polish, whose first two singles - including the wonderful How Men Are - slow burned into the lower end of the charts. Then came his second stab at being a one-hit wonder, the monster hit and soundtrack of summer 1988, Somewhere In My Heart.

So a lot was expected of the next album, Stray. Creatively it delivered, commercially it didn't.

Second single was Good Morning Britain. It gave a verse each to the four nations of the UK and their tribulations. Scotland and its suffering at the hands of Thatcher (they got the poll tax earlier than the rest of us) and new prisons (a fine use of money saved by cutting health and education spending), and getting the backhanded accolade of European Capital of Culture. Northern Ireland and the Troubles; Wales and the housing crisis caused by large numbers of English people buying second homes but the dream that then Labour leader Neil Kinnock would displace Thatcher (any port in a storm, I suppose). England and its institutionalised violent bigotry.

Yet the whole thing was interspersed with a chorus that said the shame of the past is easily discarded and held a bright hope for the future, culminating in a key change for the final verse that declared love is international and you've got to give what you can; you don't fight to win, you fight because there's things worth fighting for.

Frame said the song was written in honour of Mick Jones and the Clash, and indeed it sounds a lot like Big Audio Dynamite and features Mick himself. The last line is 'worry about it later', lifted from Complete Control (while I mention that, check out this hilarious mishearing).

Frame was clearly very proud to have worked with his hero, crediting the record to Aztec Camera and Mick Jones, and having a picture of the two of them on stage on the cover.

I saw three gigs on the tour. At Liverpool, Jones came on for the encore to do a couple of songs.

A week later in London, he was on for a good half dozen.

By the last night of the tour, a glorious hometown Saturday night in Glasgow, Jones came on for half the gig.

It was the early 90s and a hideous hybrid was occurring in the music industry. It was still 80s enough that remixes were shitty, repetitive, clumsy affairs, but dance music culture had become widespread enough to make people do multiple remixes of the same track (anyone else get the Chilli Peppers' Give It Away? Sheesh).

The 12 inch of Good Morning Britain features three mixes. The CD has a further two but, mercifully, it also had two live tracks taken from that effervescent last night of the tour. One was, unsurprisingly, Good Morning Britain. The other was something really special.

In the encore Roddy had got his companero and old Postcard labelmate Edwyn Collins out. Edwyn inexplicably wore a big furry hat, and the euphoric night - end of the tour, home town, audience really vibing - combined with their clear affection for one another as they performed Consolation Prize, a song from Orange Juice's debut album.

That lovelorn literate wit that we too often think of as being a Morrissey invention is already there, in 1982, coming out of Collins' pen.

A thousand violins will play for you
While you sit and roll your deep blue eyes
A thousand to win, a thousand you lose
But I'll be your consolation prize
All you do is sigh

I wore my fringe like Roger McGuinn's
I wore it hoping to impress
So frightfully camp, it made you laugh
Tomorrow I'll buy myself a dress
So ludicrous

I don't mean to pry, but didn't that guy
Crumple up your face a thousand times?
He made you cry

I'll be your consolation prize
Although I know
I'll never be man enough for you

The two men alternating verses, doing call and response and both enjoying the strum and roll of the guitars, it's warm, funny, and touching.

Even then, Collins felt like an elder statesman, early 80s indie so far back in time, yet he can only have been about 30. And Jones must've only been about 35, now I think about it, and he seemed like he was from properly far back in music history like Charlie Parker or Gustav Mahler or someone.

Three years ago Edwyn had a double stroke that left him unable to speak, read, write, walk or sit up. He has determinedly regained much of what he lost, and continues to improve. His memory has been severely impaired, as he explains

After my stroke I'd lost all the songs I ever wrote. I could recognise them as mine when I heard them on a stereo but I couldn't remember any lyrics. That took ages, writing them out and relearning all the phrasing.

Yet he did it. Far from being beaten or maudlin, in interviews he seems genuinely happy and keen to keep writing, with songs already written since the release of his new album. Furthermore, he's just finished a tour. Taking over on guitar was none other than Roddy Frame.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones, sorry!. See 'Deleted Tracks' in the sidebar if you want this MP3 emailed to you]

Oh, while we're here, check out this fabulous picture from my Strawberry Switchblade site of Edwyn with Postcard founder Alan Horne and future Strawberry Switchblade guitarist Jill Bryson. It's 1981 and they're outside Postcard HQ in Glasgow.
[pic:Peter Mcarthur]

David Bellamy - Brontosaurus, Will You Wait For Me mp3

2008-05-03T23:56:00.003+01:00

MD
BWON1
1980

Ye gods! It turns out that The Dinosaur Record isn't the only time those songs got an outing.

There's this single from everyone's favourite climate change denier, hirsute TV naturalist (but not, as far as I know, a TV naturist), David Bellamy.

Led by squidgy 70s synths, Brontosaurus, Will You Wait For Me gives us Bellamy all over-excited and a tad forced-wacky, sort of like an adult trying to hide how much MDMA is still in their system as they have to amuse a toddler.

Flip the disc and we get O Stegosaurus. Eschewing the tender verse vocals of the Dinosaur Record's version, the bits between choruses feature Bellamy telling us some fun facts about Stegosaurii. Where they lived, when, how big they were (demolishing that 'half a mile long and ten feet tall' claim once and for all).

But, it's a Mike Croft composition. If we're not going to have a factual error about a triceratops inventing rock n roll or an 800 metre stegosaurus, what can we have instead?

Bellamy doesn't let us down. He tells us that stegosaurii were 'gentle monsters who always ate up their vegetables as they went about their everyday business in their own prehistoric world'.

The single is dated 1980, the same year as the album, so I don't know which came first. Did the single come first and then Mike Croft's own versions come later, much like Carole King kept us waiting for Tapestry before we got her own renditions of Natural Woman and Will You Love Me Tomorrow?

Or is it that the album came first and then Bellamy picked up on it, much like Aretha Franklin brought Otis Redding's Respect to greater prominence?

The cover (upon both sides of which original owner Susan Wooller has written her name - did she think people mightn't notice the first one, or was she expecting the cover to be torn asunder by a frenzied audience thus requiring her name on both halves?) says 'Dinosaur characters (Bron and Delilah) copyright of Dusty and The Dinosaurs'.

It turns out there's a 1982 book, Dusty and The Dinosaurs - Primeval Pop, by that same Mike Croft.

A book, an album, getting established stars to do the vocals? It's all gone a bit Jeff Wayne.

Then, like Thomas Pynchon, Croft kept us waiting. It was ten years before we saw the two sequels.

It was a heady time for Moses style two-tablet deliveries from major artists; almost as if it were planned, three of them were equally spaced over a year.

In September 1991 Guns n Roses simultaneously released Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II.

March 1992 saw Bruce Springsteen simultaneously release Lucky Town and Human Touch.

Then in September 1992 Mike Croft simultaneously published Dusty and the Dinosaurs - Drakula Island and Dusty and the Dinosaurs - Delilah's Rescue.

Proper music will return next post, promise.

[MP3s deleted to make way for new ones, sorry! If you want them emailed to you, leave your address in the Comments]

The Dinosaur Record

2008-04-28T23:17:00.002+01:00

Super Tempo
STMP 9017
1980

Several years back I was one of a team of committed audio monganauts called Radio Savage Houndy Beasty. We blagged space on the local student radio station and did some late night far out stuff, really abrasive challenging stuff, some really beautiful stuff, some blissed out dreamy soundscapes, spoken word comedy, lots of swearing, all powerfully fuelled by a big blue bong. Trawl the downloads if that intrigues you.

It felt like a band that jammed, but we used other peoples recordings as our instruments. Lots of sound effect records, samples and loops (where other people tend to pick good beats and breaks, we'd be more likely to have foghorns and washing machine noises), and a lot of crap records found in charity shops.

When I first saw The Dinosaur Record I presumed it'd be an album of stories or something. But it's actually ten twee anthropomorphic songs for children.

Written by a team of Mike Croft and Chris Croft, with backing vocals from Janine Croft, Rachel Croft and Emma Croft, it's clearly a family affair. Thank fuck for that, I'd hate to think anyone had paid kids who sing so badly out of tune.

Brontosaurus, Will You Wait For Me is a song about a child wanting a pet and finding a brontosaurus to whom the youngster implausibly asserts 'I could take you home, nobody would know'.

Our credulity is stretched even further in Triceratops Rock by the bold claim that 'the rocking triceratops invented the rock n roll'.

Reggae rhythms lope away under the lyrics of O Stegasaurus, which at least stays closer to the facts. Praising the animal's 'own special style', the singer laments not sharing a world with them. Describing himself as the 'biggest fan' of this particular dinosaur, we get somewhat unnerved by the declaration that it is 'lovelier than any man'.

And then, just unable to go a whole song without a ludicrous factual error, he describes it as being 'half a mile long and ten feet tall'.

The stegosaurus was in fact around 30 feet long and 14 feet tall, and looked like this.

If it were half a mile long and ten feet tall, it would look like this.

I'm sure you'll agree that, compared to other stegosaurii, that stegosaurus does indeed have its own special style.

The RSHB reworking of Brontosaurus Will You Wait For Me can be downloaded here, but frankly nothing can make you as baffled as the straightforward originals, one of the all-time great 'what the fuck?' albums.

As you'd expect from a record designed to be cared for by small children, there's a hell of a lot of crackle.

[MP3s deleted to make way for new ones. If you'd like me to send you them - via a transferbigfiles.com link so they don't overload your inbox - then leave your email address in the Comments]

Madness & Elvis Costello - Tomorrow's (Just Another Day) mp3

2008-03-11T01:37:00.002Z

Stiff
BUYIT169
1983

Abba. Everyone neatly summarises and dismisses them in their mind as garish pop with big bouncy choruses and lots of female-fronted twee tackiness. Shiny, shallow, samey.

Yet even the most cursory flick through their singles tells another story. There are several dark disco classics, the blokes get to sing one, there's another with reggae rhythm, and an ominous brooding six minute single with no chorus.

By the same token, Madness are often seen as cheery cockerney chappies, a sort of seven man Two Tone Tommy Steele. But even early on they tackled other things, the lyrics to Embarrassment dealing with mixed race unmarried parenthood, the elegant gossamer anti-tory Yesterday's Men, and numerous darker lyrics such as Grey Day and Tomorrow's (Just Another Day).

Which is where we find ourselves. The 12 inch featured one of those irritating 80s remixes, all n-n-n-n-nineteen stutters and superfluous sections of the bass and drums on their own. I'll not waste your time with that.

Flip it over though and there's this re-recording with Elvis Costello on vocals. The jazzy setting is perfect for Costello's plaintive-with a-hint-of-malevolent tone. It hangs uneasily and brings so much more out of the song than the proper version, really pulling forward the alienation and depression's paradoxical turmoil/drudgery blend that flows through the lyric.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

You don't really think of Madness as having weird corners to their output, yet this is the third one of theirs I've posted (the others were the Spanish version of One Step Beyond and Listen to Your Father).

Frank Wilson - Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) mp3

2008-02-22T02:06:00.003Z

SOUL
S35019
1965
never released

bootlegged in UK as In, IN6326, late 1970s.
reissued in UK as Tamla Motown, TMG1170, 1979.
reissued again as Tamla Motown 982 153 2, year unknown (2004?)
reissued again (bootlegged?) as Soul, TMG1170, year unknown.

My copy, you'll not be surprised to learn, isn't an original. The last one of those to change hands went for £15,000.

This pressing mocks up the original label design, but uses the catalogue number of the 1979 UK reissue.

I first heard of this record reading Stuart Maconie's book Cider With Roadies, which chronicles his life growing up and the evolution of his marrow-deep love of music.

Whilst not having the profound spiritual depth of Nick Hornby's 31 Songs, nonetheless it's a deeply insightful piece of music writing. Few people can be so genuinely in love with popular music in all its forms that they really truly understand Gentle Giant, punk and Chic, and can explain to you exactly why.

Maconie also has a taste for the extremely experimental, and his weekly Freak Zone radio show is a must-hear. Which you can do not only on the radio but for a week afterwards online (at poorer quality; you can get a podcast of highlights).

He's also a very funny man, and I laughed out loud more times than there are pages in the book. Take this bit about Slade;

Noddy Holder was not, as I originally thought on hearing the phrase, some kind of bizarre Enid Blyton-related implement, but a jolly, worryingly raucous individual from Walsall. His trousers were generally too short, the better to display his 12-hole oxblood docs, the footwear of choice for the man about town with a great many heads to kick in.

He had a penchant for long multicoloured patchwork jackets of the sort favoured by Dr Who and Jesus' favourite stepdad Joseph, although there the similarities with leading religious figures ended. Like Gary Glitter he looked permanently, antagonisingly startled and he had adopted the aforementioned riotously verdant 'sidies' last seen on Jimmy 'Wacko' Edwards.

Best of all though was his hat. He nearly always sported a top hat with small circular mirrors attached. It was the kind of thing desperate mums make for their offspring just before fancy-dress parties when they have no clear idea what to send them as.

Amazingly, though, Noddy Holder was not the most ridiculously dressed person in Slade. That honour has to go to Dave Hill. Dave was the group's second guitarist and had a guitar that bore the legend Superyob. He usually wore a jumpsuit made of the foil that you baste turkeys in and platforms of oil-rig-derrick height. All of this though paled in comparison with his coiffure, a sort of demented tonsure with a great scooping fringe. He looked like a glam rock version of a medieval monk.

Noddy's co-writer in Slade was Jimmy Lea, now, amazingly, a psychotherapist. In 1973 the thought of being psychoanalysed by a member of Slade would have been hilarious and terrifying, rather like Liam Gallagher being Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The line up was completed by the brooding, taciturn drummer Don Powell. Not much to say here other than that, at the height of their fame, Powell was injured in a car crash and afterwards suffered bouts of short-term memory loss. I don't intend to make light of this but even then I used to wonder what it must have felt like to 'come to' in the middle of a set and realise, 'well, I'm obviously a drummer of some sort. Wait a minute, isn't that Noddy Hol- bloody hell, I'm in Slade!'

Anyway, Maconie was also a resident of Wigan in the early 70s. The chapter on the town's legendary soul scene included this description of

what is often regarded as the best and certainly the rarest Northern Soul tune, 'Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)', one copy in existence, current asking price £15,000. More important than the price, it is utterly wonderful.

If you want to know what the magic of Northern Soul is, get yourself a copy (it's readily available on CD compilations, only the vinyl is worth the price of a terraced house in Whitehaven) and allow yourself to be swept away by its life-affirming, luminous, lump-in-the-throat beauty and effervescence.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no ailment or depression so profound and weighty that two and a half minutes in the company of this fabulous tune won't lift and banish. Excuse me while I go and put it on.

You see why that sent me scurrying off to find it?

Wilson was a writer and producer who did a fair few records in the 60s but really hit a winning streak at the end of the decade and into the 70s, notably with the post-Diana Supremes. One of his songs for them, Stoned Love, is a corker in much the same vein as Do I Love You.

But in 1965 he had a dalliance with the idea of being a performer. Just the one single was made. It seems that a few hundred were pressed but it was never properly released. It was forgotten about until discovered in the 70s by Northern Soul fans in Britain.

As Nick Hornby points out in 31 Songs, Ian Dury's Reasons To Be Cheerful Part 3 is an amazing inventory of British traits. The line 'singalonga Smokey' may be about the American singer Smokey Robinson, but the British have always had a big love of black American music. We know we can't do it like them, but we really get what they do, it really speaks to us.

When the Stax Revue came over they were stunned to be mobbed at the airport and play a string of sold out concerts; this simply didn't happen to them anywhere else, not even back home. Even the standard term Northern Soul refers to that North of England scene in the early 70s.

To this day, old soul artists are amazed at the depth of knowledge and appreciation UK fans show compared with anyone else. Just the other week I heard Geno Washington on the radio making that point. No wonder it was British soul fans who discovered Do I Love You. We singalonga Smokey.

In the late 1970s, prior to any official release, British soul fans pressed a bootleg single of Do I Love You, with the label crediting it to Eddie Foster (In Records, IN 6326).

I've always loved Motown, and yet I'd kind of presumed that the classics were the best. It's a fair assumption. Anyone who's had a deep trawl through, say, first generation punk bands will know that there's a reason why we only know one song from Eddie and The Hot Rods or a couple from the Members but dozens from the Clash. It's cos the rest were shit.

Motown, however, is a case apart. Check out a compilation of Gladys Knight's Motown years and it's all killer no filler. Go a tad more obscure, get a Tammi Terrell and it's the same. And further it goes, into artists you've never heard of, until frankly if you did the maths Motown seem to have transgressed dimensional boundaries in the 1960s; there seem to be more hours of great Motown recordings than there were hours in the decade.

Then, if the released stuff wasn't enough, came the Motown Connoisseurs compilations. These were put together by Richard Searling, a Northern Soul legend whose credentials stretch as far back as being one of the original Wigan Casino DJs.

On Motown Connoisseurs Volume 1 there's a huge variety of Motown songs, all unreleased or painfully obscure, almost all of them as good as the classics that everybody knows. Volume 2 does more of the same, with the excruciating exception of a Four Tops track from the 80s.

However, Motown Connoisseurs Volume 1 featured Chris Clark's version of Do I Love You. Clark was Motown's first (and, for a long time, only) white signing. She possessed little of the charisma of her label mates and even less of their talent. Her version of Do I Love You is Wilson's backing track with Clark's anaemic voice failing to do it justice. It's like watching a wet tissue break over the front of a speeding train.

Searling then put together Northern Soul Connoisseurs. This has Frank Wilson's Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) on it. But it's a different version, a remake that lacks the urgency and effervescence of the single I've got. (It's quickly distinguished by the ad-lib "here's another thing I wanna say to you now" at about 0.58 just before the second verse).

In a further insult/injury interface, the recent reissue 45 (Tamla Motown 982 153 2) has Frank Wilson's inferior version backed with Chris Clark's!

The other week I was in a bookshop playing a top quality Motown compilation and there amongst all the tunes even your gran knows was Do I Love You, seemingly taking its place among the classics. But, again, it was the inferior version. This made me want to post the more yawping version here.

The single is a slightly shonky affair (hence my suspicion of it being a bootleg) and has endearingly/irritatingly missed off the first note. But three seconds in to the track you just don't care. You're off, soaring away on the greatest euphoric Motown stomper of them all.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Incidentally, Amazon do all those Connoisseurs albums for £3.33 each. If you're buying a £12 CD or DVD, it can be cheaper to buy one of these and qualify for free postage than to just buy your one item. Go get 'em!

Florence's Sad Song 45rpm & 33rpm mp3

2008-02-01T15:09:00.001Z

Music For Pleasure
FP10006
1972

A year or two back Dave Boulter and Stuart Staples of The Tindersticks did an album called Songs For The Young At Heart. They got an impressive range of guest vocalists in to sing songs remembered from childhood.

The dependably heart-squeezing voice of Cerys Matthews doing White Horses, The Go-Betweens' Robert Forster doing Uncle Sigmund's Clockwork Storybook, Puff The Magic Dragon by Bonnie Prince Billy (I can't ever get into using the quotemarks round his middle name, it feels too much like the way newspaper headlines denote allegation).

Jarvis Cocker does a reading of Marriot Edgar's poem The Lion and Albert, and the CD is packaged in a book with pages made of card like books for the under 5s. Stuart Murdoch from Belle and Sebastian does Florence's Sad Song from the feature length film of the Magic Roundabout, Dougal and The Blue Cat.

The Magic Roundabout. Fucking mad as you remember it being. Then there are the songs, words written and sung by narrator Eric Thompson (father of Emma).

Florence's Sad Song is about as depressing a song as you've ever heard, a hopeless emotionally blacked out lament with startling lyrical similarities to I Am A Rock; the singer rues ever having been trusting and open, and resolves to construct a permanent and impenetrable psychic barricade to keep others out.

Yet look what you get on the back, a drawing of the artists to colour in with crayons or paints. You don't get that with System Of A Down.

There is one thing that can make this black pit of a song go one darker. Play the fucker at 33rpm.

[MP3s deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Kool & The Gang - Celebramos mp3

2008-01-14T14:13:00.001Z

De-Lite
DEX2
1981

Been a while since I posted one of those foreign language versions, so here's Celebration sung in Spanish, from the B-side of the 12 inch of Take It to The Top.

It was a great day when I found this record. I'd just been to see The Church, one of my favourite bands ever, in Brighton. The Church have been going so long and inspire such fervent devotion that there's quite a community of those of us who go to all their UK gigs. I've not missed one in 20 years. There was a day off after Brighton before the London date so we were going to hang out by the sea.

I rang T when I woke up, and he was in a big record fair he'd found in one of the posh hotels on the seafront, so I met him there. I'd not been to one for years, since the days of trawling the live tapes for those early REM gigs. These days you don't get the acres of live bootlegs at record fairs.

Indeed, I wonder how they can keep going at all in an age of Ebay, Gemm and Netsounds. I wasn't the only one feeling there was something surprising about a concept that felt intrinsically anachronistic, but I'll come to that later.

I mooched around, half interested but a bit skint and frankly looking forward to the pub, when I found a stall with a box of 1960s soul 45s. Always something of a soul boy (my birthday party every year sees me DJing a five hour 60s soul set), in the last couple of years it's started deepening. I'm spending embarrassing amounts of money on vintage American singles. Go and find, say, Real Humdinger by JJ Barnes or You Can't Sit Down by the Dovells and you'll understand why.

There were loads and, as always, I'd not heard of most of them. Some I knew the artist but not the track, others I knew the label but not the artist. The stallholder, as any decent soul stallholder should, had a little record player with him. Fatal. There were a good 50 quid's worth that I fell for.

I went and asked T what I should do. He shall forevermore be held in the highest esteem, for he did what any good friend should. He took me out of the building. To the cashpoint to get out a chunky wedge that I couldn't really afford to spend, then into the pub for a swift pint to loosen my judgement and grease the hinges on my wallet, then back to the record fair.

I stood with him whittling the choices down a little. There was one tune, Out On The Floor by Dobie Gray, that gave me The Grin, that instant liftoff sensation hearing something so irresistably exuberant and uplifting, the feeling I got the first time I heard Do I Love You by Frank Wilson or The Tams' Be Young Be Foolish Be Happy. Worth the cost of everything by itself.

Feeling all pleased and excited, on the way out my eye was caught by an Everything A Pound box of 70s and 80s soul. I picked up Celebramos.

I love the it-is-but-it-isn't feeling of these foreign language versions, the seeing your mum with a nosejob effect of having the same very familiar backing track and voice but a different language.

Spanish was a common choice for many bands as the population of Spanish speaking countries who love Western pop is probably second only to English. Indeed, on Celebramos the lyric is clearly a sop to them with the numerous references to 'los Latinos' and a shoutout listing of assorted Central and South American countries.

Just as I'm paying a bloke comes up to me and says he's doing a study on why people still buy vinyl in the age of the MP3 player. We go off into a room and I fill out a questionnaire about what I've bought and why.

The one that sticks with me is 'If push comes to shove and you were only allowed to listen to one track for the rest of your life, what would it be?'. Apparently other people had problems with that. I didn't. Natural High by Bloodstone (but the original single version, not that one you get on the Jackie Brown soundtrack with the weird double length splice on the intro and the inexplicable unforgivable spell-breaking uptempo bit at the end). The sweetest, softest, most beautiful track ever, like sinking into a warm bath of chocolate duvets.

The guy wants a picture of me with one of my new acquisitions. I want to hold up a real classic, The Contours' Do You Love Me?, original American 7 inch on Gordy. But from a distance it'll just look like a single with a purple label. It's not the Gordy single but the gaudy single that he wants.

There is only one record I've bought with a picture cover. (You're way ahead of me here, aren't you?). A record I only really bought for a laugh, and cos it was cheap. A record that has some blokes looking like twattish 80s Scousers in their tacky tracksuits on the front.

So somewhere out there there's a picture, me being represented and this thing being the archetypal piece of my vinyl, the proudest purchase from a room of thousands of records. Sheesh.

There is, however, a certain neatness in the way that the 'why in the age of the MP3 player?' vinyl he asked me about ends up as your MP3.

[MP3 deleted to make room for new ones. Sorry!]

David Bowie & Bing Crosby - Peace on Earth / Little Drummer Boy

2007-11-23T19:43:00.001Z

RCA
BOWT12
1982

Wikipedia is hardly a reliable source to quote. If anything in it is remotely controversial then it gets attacked. My favourite was Tony Blair's entry saying 'Tony Blair spilled popcorn down his pyjamas last night'.

Still, if you need a quick grasp of something uncontroversial then it usually points the way.

Having railed against anti-rock n roll cardigan wearing singers in my last post, I'm forced to make an exception for Bing Crosby. His Wikipedia entry informs us

Crosby also exerted an important influence on the development of the postwar recording industry. In 1947 he invested US$50,000 in the Ampex company, which developed the world's first commercial reel-to-reel tape recorder, and Crosby became the first performer in the world to prerecord his radio shows and master his commercial recordings on magnetic tape. He gave one of the first Ampex Model 200 recorders to his friend, musician Les Paul, which led directly to Paul's invention of multitrack recording.

Bing is the butterfly that flapped its wings and caused the hurricane of popular music as we know and love it. It's distinctly possible that if there was no Bing, there'd be no multi-track recording, or at least it would have been developed later. Which would mean it wouldn't have tallied chronologically with, say, Brian Wilson's hermit urges or The Beatles' ingestion of LSD.

And talking of drug intake, how about Bing on the bong;

A 2001 biography of Crosby by Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins says that Louis Armstrong's influence on Bing "extended to his love of marijuana." Bing smoked it during his early career when it was legal and "surprised interviewers" in the 1960s and 70s by advocating its decriminalization, as did Armstrong. According to Giddins, Bing told his son Gary to stay away from alcohol ("It killed your mother") and suggested he smoke pot instead. Gary said, "There were other times when marijuana was mentioned and he'd get a smile on his face." Gary thought his father's pot smoking had influenced his easy-going style in his films.

There's a clear clash of drugs in the 1977 Bing and Bowie recording of Little Drummer Boy/Peace On Earth. Bowie, living atop a mountain of cocaine in Berlin with Iggy Pop, careers into Bing and his lifetime of weed.

Bing was recording a Christmas TV special. According to research done by Paul Farhi of the Washington Post,

The original plan had been for Bowie and Crosby to sing just "Little Drummer Boy." But "David came in and said: 'I hate this song. Is there something else I could sing?' " Fraser said. "We didn't know quite what to do."

Fraser, Kohan and Grossman left the set and found a piano in the studios' basement. In about 75 minutes, they wrote "Peace on Earth," an original tune, and worked out an arrangement that weaved together the two songs. Bowie and Crosby nailed the performance with less than an hour of rehearsal.

The duet was released as a single for Christmas 1982, but more, the limited 12 inch featured a peculiarly huge 6 inch label and the spoken preamble to the piece. It's absolutely mad.

It starts with the doorbell going, appropriately enough, 'bing bong'. Bowie asks if Bing's the butler, what happened to Hudson and if Sir Percival is around - I get the strong impression Bing played several roles in the show.

But then Bowie talks about having the usual Christmas 'presents, tree, decorations, agents sliding down the chimney'. There is no meaning to this, it's coked up paranoid weirdness.

Of course these days it's on YouTube. Imagine Bing's just docked out a bammie and press play.

Bowie then went a filmed an episode of Marc Bolan's TV show Marc. He did Heroes on both shows. In a peculiar kiss of death effect, both Bolan and Bing died before their shows were broadcast. Just what the paranoid, magick influenced, narcotic-basted Bowie needed. Imagine how much he quivered and clasped his hands to his head every time his agent called after that. Sadly, the offer from the Jim Davidson Show never came.

The Marc show performance, like all of human history, is also on YouTube. This time it's a specially recorded backing track as well as a live vocal. Imagine watching this in 77, having grown up on the outlandishness of Aladdin Sane and all that, and he's just standing there, no theatrics, normal hair, no make up, with a frankly pedestrian production on the track, somewhat idly delivering the lyric. Then he hits the second verse ('I will be king...') with such force, such a desperate cry in his voice.

Literally gave me tingles first time I watched it. You so see that he was making music he had to make at this point, it's got that artist using their art to figure themselves out feeling, like Woody Allen's criminally overlooked Stardust Memories.

Bowie has more bizarre corners to his career than any other major figure in music. Less than a year later he was releasing his narration of Prokofiev's Peter And The Wolf (which he really does start with 'are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin') and releasing Stage, a live album where all the tracks have been sequenced in their order of original release - why? - and there's a whole side of stuff from Low. A live version of the ambient Eno collaboration Warszawa! With crowds cheering! What the fuck is that about?

Meantime, let the onset of the festive season and this spaced oddity fusilli your mind.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

The Higsons - Music To Watch Girls By

2007-11-03T20:12:00.001Z

Upright
UP9
1984

The Higsons were an early 80s British band doing punchy angular white funk, kind of like Talking Heads but without any hint of genius.

For such a short, low volume career they pack a huge quantity of weirdness. For some reason, despite not being a ska band, they got signed to 2 Tone and released two singles in the label's twilight days, Tear the Whole Thing Down and Run Me Down.

Then there was this, an inexplicable cover of the 1967 Andy Williams track. Whilst too much of a Val Doonican to ever be a Rat Packer, Williams certainly belonged to that anti-rock n roll element of American popular music.

I fuckin hate all that Rat Pack revisionism that admires the slimy, arrogant, suit and tie singers who'd sing about sweet love then go home and drunkenly beat their wives. Anyone who tries to pretend that Dean Martin was cool is someone who can't deal with music expressing things that are real. Schmaltzy soulless and smug, Memories Are Made Of This was everything that Elvis came to save us from.

Despite it having Rat Packesque overtones, dubious gender politics and originally being a vehicle for a be-jumpered crooner, it's a hard heart that doesn't like Music To Watch Girls By.

'Watch that sound each time you hear a loud electric sigh' is an endlessly fabulous and thrilling line, and the dark descending melody underneath propels you with a relentless swirl that's glamourous yet sinister, poppy yet uneasy.

The Higsons version was produced by Warne Livesey, who within a year or two would be doing astonishing work on The The's epic and classic Infected album.

In a final twist of oddity, lead singer Charlie Higson went on to be the bloke in the Fast Show, the one who did Bob Fleming and Swiss Toni.

Making a record is a lot like making love to a beautiful woman; it's all very well having your solid seven inches but you've got to keep moving at the right speed to make sweet music.

Is it me, or does the Scott Walkerish bloke on the cover look like Louis Balfour presenting Jazz Club?

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Prince Buster - Respect

2007-07-06T16:10:00.001+01:00

Blue Beat
BB 335
1966

Glastonbury is the only festival that, no matter what happens, at the end you feel like a survivor. Which is a whole lot better than feeling like Survivor. Which, in turn, has got to be better than feeling Survivor.

Those outside have a whole load of misperceptions. The only time it reaches public consciousness is when there's a big problem, usually a mudbath. The photos in the papers are always of some pair of eyes staring out from a two metre mudball. People must think it's like that every year, and that everyone who goes gets in that state.

If it were like that, hardly anyone would go. As opposed to it selling out all its 177,000 tickets in an hour, with an even bigger number failing to get one, and all before anyone knows what bands are playing. Can you imagine anyone buying a ticket for fuckin Reading or V without knowing who was on?

And even if it is muddy, it's utterly brilliant. I don't care what the weather's like or what happens to your stuff, if you don't have a good time at Glastonbury it's your own fault and I've no sympathy for you.

It's a measure of the weirdness of the festival that this year I managed not to see the Stooges or The Who but I did see Chas and Dave. Still, it was a smaller crowd than for the Who, which means I got a good view of the band. Which, with Chas and Dave, only makes it worse.

There were good reasons for missing those two class acts. I missed The Who to do my all-time dream DJ set, in the Lost Vagueness Diner on Sunday night, spinning rock n roll and Northern Soul to a massive and utterly having-it crowd.

The Stooges' blinder was me-less cos I was, again, over in Lost Vagueness. Madness played a secret set in the Ballroom. Oh to send a postcard back to 13 year old me telling him about it. Night Boat To Cairo! Baggy Trousers! Embarrassment! It Must Be Love! House of Fun! Shut Up! Our House!

Very few bands have such an all killer no filler repertoire; every song a total belter, such exuberance, but always with that nice snarly bite that makes all ska grip you; you have to go as far out as John Holt before you could put any cheese or schmaltz into the genre.

They opened with One Step Beyond (brilliantly put together video of it on Youtube) and closed with Madness. These are both covers of Prince Buster songs, the man they paid tribute to in their debut single The Prince.

Buster - still alive, kicking and self-proclaiming as the Sexiest Man in Jamaica - originally released One Step Beyond as a double A-side with Al Capone, which The Specials lifted for Gangsters. What a 45 that was.

Coming hard on its heels was this, a cover of Otis Redding's Respect. Slightly marred by a too-loud maraca overdub, it's got a fabulous flinchy groove and, common to Jamaican 45s of the time, a sense of a loose party going on in the studio, of it all being a joyous jam. Check out my favourite bit, the backing vocals near the end behind Buster ad-libbing. there's such a sense of music being how these people live, of it just moving through them and pouring out of them.

[MP3 deleted to make room for new ones. Sorry!]

Kinnell, a quick bit of googling finds a copy of this single in mediocre condition going for 45 quid! And a few seconds more googling finds something much much more alarming. Survivor are still going!

Indians In Moscow - Jack Pelter & His Sex Change Chicken

2007-06-10T21:39:00.001+01:00

Kennick
KNK1004
1983

Well from one slab of coloured vinyl to another. This one's white (probably to do with the B-side being called Salt).

A while back I posted Indians In Moscow's Naughty Miranda, a delicious dotty bouncy tune of grisly patricide (you don't get too many of those). I said then I'd try to get round to posting the equally deranged Jack Pelter & His Sex Change Chicken, and have finally been prompted by Sara-Louise Allison leaving a Comment saying their dad played the keyboard on it.

My dad played sax on James I Love You by my old band Bigmouth. Not nearly as cool, as you can tell by the total lack of me ever posting any Bigmouth stuff.

Jack Pelter's brilliant insane relentlessness shows Miranda was no one-off. What a fulminating mindswamp these people inhabited. Anyone know if they ever did any more?

[MP3 deleted to make room for new ones. Sorry!]

Age of Chance - Kiss

2007-05-14T13:34:00.001+01:00

Fon
AGE5
1986

I'm really sorry. I only just noticed that the last three postings were all bad tunes. Compelling and captivating, in a watching as you pass a car crash kind of way. But bad nonetheless.

Today I change that.

Last time Prince toured Europe he didn't even play the UK. The nearest he came was frigging Rotterdam. I've been whining about it ever since.

Then he announces that he'll do some European dates this summer. All 21 of them in one month and in London. Not so much a gig residency as a tenancy.

The first seven - at the new O2 Arena, the old Millennium Dome - went on sale on Friday, and I fuckin well got some. Face value only 30 quid, which is a lot compared to other gigs I go to but nothing compared to others at the O2.

The Stones are trousering 70-150 notes per punter. Which is fair enough, they are the best live band ever, capable of blowing anyone else off the stage.

Barbra Sodding Streisand is charging up to 500 quid! Excuse me? I get the very strong feeling I'm missing something here. Isn't she basically Elaine Page?

Not content with his excessive style, Prince is dishing out a free copy of his new album to all ticket buyers, a move that made his record company go 'what new album? he never told us about a new album'. What a dude.

So, being from Leeds and going to see Prince, I present the only other Leeds/Prince interface I can think of.

It's 1986, less than nine months after Prince's sinewy upright funk original was released, and Leeds' own Age of Chance come at it like a runaway steam train. Hard, heavy, electronic yet dirty, like a prototype for Pop Will Eat Itself and Jesus Jones. What's more, they release it on pretty green vinyl to boot.

Play it as loud as you can to get that full 'Alternative Night at Mad Hatters in Southport circa 1987' effect.

[Sorry! MP3 deleted to make room for new ones!]

Cliff Richard - Jesus

2007-05-10T15:22:00.001+01:00

Columbia
DB8864
1972

No, really.

I found this one in Oxfam in Bradford. With that title, you've gotta give it a go. And my, how it rocketed past my expectations and into the stratosphere.

To start with, the lyric is breathtakingly brazen:

Jesus, Jesus won't you come back to earth?
Jesus, Jesus come back to earth

We apparently want him to save us from people who think 'the world is OK' (yeah, I know it's an abomination since we were cast out of the Garden, eh Cliff?), from 'the love of death' (not at all paradoxical from people who worship an image of a man dying very slowly).

But the best is yet to come. Cliff repeatedly belting out

Save us from the Devil!
Save us from Satan!
Save us from hell!

We've been gently immersed in decades of Cliff's emetic yuletide sludge, so hearing him say anything so loud and proud is a great comic shock.

However, it's the tune that does it. There is something really good about it. Really though. It's got this funky rolling drum pattern, a real groove that's something akin to Young Americans with a Ringoid looseness (albeit with a tinge of something from the Hair soundtrack). And the flanged drums, five years before White Man In Hammersmith Palais.

Then that guitar, nasally distorting like a stylophone until it finally breaks free into what you've been gagging for from the first note, its own free flying freakout solo.

It's a tremendously sticky song - I do warn you that you'll have it going round your head for fuckin ages.

I implore readers to leave suggestions in the comments for excuses to use when someone catches you singing 'Jesus, Jesus won't you come back to earth' or 'save us from hell! save us save us!'.

[MP3 deleted to make room for new ones. Sorry!]

Steve Jones - Suffragette City

2007-04-12T22:14:00.001+01:00

MCA
DMCAT1371
1989

Well I gave you what Steve Jones was doing a year after the Sex Pistols' demise.

But fast forward ten years through his forgettable band The Professionals and heroin habit, and where do we find him?

He's a permatanned LA rocker, baby.

Having already done an album in 87 featuring a song called Drugs Suck, he was back with a new album called - ye gods - Fire And Gasoline. Co-produced by that master of faux-rock (The Doors 'reunion' tour, anyone?), Ian Astbury.

From the flagship single Freedom Fighter and bonus track on the CD issue of the album, I give you his cover of Suffragette City.

You've got to give him marks for trying. The guitar work is gritty and he's managed to get some distance out along the road to sounding like an Iggy Pop record. (He was in Iggy's band around this time and plays the killer guitar on Cold Metal).

But it's the late 80s, so it was recorded one instrument at a time to a click track with no fire and no balls, and with the drums horribly far forward in the mix. Why did everyone in recording studios back then think the snare drum had to be louder than the vocals, and the bass drum not far behind it?

Despite all this sterility I'd have still just about let him off if it wasn't for the 'aaaaaaaaaah wham bam thankyou baby'.

Erk?

He compounds the error by going for another chorus, this time with the even more inexplicable 'aaaaaaaaah wham bam thankyou Sam'.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones, sorry!]

These days Jones - still resident in LA - does Jonesy's Jukebox, a really eclectic and entertaining radio show for Indie 1031. Thanks to the magic of the interweb you can hear it right where you are now, if you click here when he's on air.

Sadly, his contract with the station means he's not allowed to swear. The man who called Bill Grundy a dirty bastard and a dirty fucker, some of the best swearing ever!

To make up for that, why not download this seven minute epic built on a loop of Jones saying those immortal swearwords, 'dirty bastard dirty fucker'.

Brian Wilson - Smart Girls & Spirit of Rock n Roll

2007-02-28T21:38:00.001Z

unreleased
1990

You know why people say Brian Wilson is a genius? Because he is one.

To see beyond the limits of your field of work, to be bold, inspired, to expand and redefine your entire artform in a way that nobody had conceived of before and that makes pretty much everyone who comes after you respect your work and a serious proportion of them take heavy influence; that is what he has done. That is genius.

And still he hears it in his head. How else can he do all those breath-takingly heartmeltingly beautiful multitracked harmonies by himself?

Brian Wilson has made some of the most transcendently beautiful music ever recorded, and also some of the worst. Weirdly, he and many of his fans seem unable to tell which is which.

I know of Beach Boys fans who listen to a bootleg of 20 minutes of dogs barking because it's the recording session for the dogs you hear at the end of Pet Sounds.

The emotional strength of his work comes not through profound insights in the lyrics, but through matching complex harmonies and visionary arrangements with straightforward heartfelt words. I strongly suspect the latter quality is to do with an arresting of Brian's development thanks to fame.

I went to see Ray Davies reading from his (more or less) autobiography X-Ray. The book's written partly in the voice of a 19 year old, because that's how old he was when You Really Got Me hit, and a part of him got stuck there.

It made me make sense of Brian Wilson, the way that his songs have this childlike wonder, this simple approach to love. The trick is that his music is so luscious and ethereal that it elevates it, it seems so heavenly that it calls on the bit in the middle of us where, for all our adult wisdom and sophistication, we still just want to love and be loved and nothing else in our lives really works if that stuff ain't right.

After a decade in the void following Beach Boys Love You, he came back with an eponymous solo album in 1988. Despite the record company administering overdoses of big name producers, Brian still managed to make what we want the most, what he does best; a record of wide eyed tender wonder with a strong melancholic undertow drenched in astonishing harmonies (all vocals done by the man himself, too).

He recorded a follow-up, Sweet Insanity, that remains unreleased. For good reason. With the arguable exception of Don't Let Her Know She's An Angel, it's fucking awful.

There are, however, two curiosities on it that you should know about.

One is The Spirit of Rock n Roll, fairly unremarkable except for the fact that it's a duet with Bob Dylan. (Incidentally, for another Dylan-backed career anomaly, check out Leonard Cohen's riotous Don't Go Home With Your Hard-on, featuring not only Dylan but Allen Ginsberg too).

The track appears to feature the same twat who played saccharine sax on every bad record in the 80s. I reckon there have only been four sax players in the history of pop records. Each decade has the same sound. I can imagine how busy that filthy honking sax player was in the 50s. At the turn of the 80s insipid Saccharine Sax came along - first on Echo Beach, I think - and stayed for ten years or so.

But this is all as nothing to compared with what you're about to receive. Sweet Insanity's outstanding mp3 from Hades is Smart Girls.

Taking appallingly heavy-handed samples of Beach Boys classics and working them into his - ye gods - rap lyric, Brian tells us of a personal revelation.

He used to write songs about pretty girls. Now he's realised that it's just shallow crass objectification of women. He now wants them to look nice and be very clever with it.

Wouldn't it be nice
If PhDs
were stroking me with hypotheses?

Think that's bad?

God only knows what I'd be
Without smart girls
Hip hop and harmony
I'm wiser now, I know where it's at
Intelligence is an aphrodisiac
So if you're seekin' that perfect mate
Listen to Brian, beauty's good but
Smart girls, talkin' 'bout smart girls
Sexy legs with high IQs
Smart girls, I love the smart girls
You brainy babes with your attitudes

The song offends on pretty much every level possible. The utter stupidity and unintentional irony of saying you're beyond sexist objectification of women by narrowing the perameters. The shoddy production. The shit rhymes. The slimy sexual politics. The thorough desecration of his own titanic talent not just in performing this crap but in hacking into his perfect recordings from the past less like a sampling producer and more like a googly-eyed frothy-mouthed crack addled murderer flying round the tape archive with a jetpack and a chainsaw.

It's by far the worst thing he's ever recorded. And that really is saying something.

The Sweet Insanity album was so self-evidently shite that it never came out and, worse, gave the record company the leverage they needed to make him do a tired retread of old hits for his next album, the entirely superfluous and negligible I Wasn't Made For These Times. Ever since, his proper new albums have suffered from Eric Clapton guest appearances.

We should be enormously thankful for his amazing backing group the Wondermints who've given him the confidence to tour again and got him to finish the frankly astonishing Smile project.

[MP3s deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

The Greedies - A Merry Jingle

2006-12-12T22:01:00.001Z

Vertigo
GREED1
1979

Get this: Huw Lloyd-Langton, Hawkwind's original guitarist, later toured in Leo Sayer's live band.

What the hell was that like? Was there swirly coloured oil lamps and a twelve minute wigout in the middle of One Man Band? Did they at least get Leo belting out Silver Machine in rehearsals? Oh for a bootleg to confirm it.

From Hawkwind, I jump to Silver Machine's vocalist; when I saw Motorhead the other week - utterly and perfectly rock, by the way - they covered Thin Lizzy's Rosalie and dedicated it to Phil Lynott. What Lynott up to 27 years ago? Let me take you back...

It's Christmas 1979, YMCA may be at number one but there's an altogether seedier thing happening lower down the charts.

The Sex Pistols played their last gig the previous year, Lydon's already a year into Public Image Ltd, Sid's dead, but what are the other two up to?

Cook and Jones close the year with a bizarre one-off single. It's them and Thin Lizzy doing a medley of We Wish You A Merry Christmas and Jingle Bells.

What does it sound like? Exactly like Thin Lizzy and the Sex Pistols doing a Christmas medley. That dark murmur of Lynott's voice with the balls, bite and beef of Jones's guitar; the quasi Brian May squealing from Lizzy's lead guitar and the heads down fizzy power of Cook's drums.

Why? Fuck knows. But here it is.

[MP3s deleted to make room for new ones. Sorry!]

The The - Armageddon Days Are Here (Again) (Orchestral version)

2006-11-27T15:30:00.001Z

Epic
EMU10
1989

Hello! Hello! It's good to be back, good to be back, hello! hello! hello!

Ah, even that relevant lyric quote might be a bit too much these days. It's impossible to play any Gary Glitter without feeling soiled and uneasy.

And yet do we get the same thing from listening to Wagner? Would we get it from listening to Ted Nugent, if he'd ever recorded anything worth listening to?

Glitter took that Joe Meek Have I The Right powerstomp sound and liberally splashed it with glam rock's futuristic vaudeville sensibility, resulting in some stonking dense glam classics loaded with with heavy, moronic genius. And what's more the majority of the good ones had an exclamation mark in the title. Can't ask for more.

Yet last time I DJed a Glitter record I was abruptly informed by a jittering skinhead that I should desist as the artist was a nonce who wanted his balls cutting off.

On a glamrock tip, I recently listened to The Sweet's run of four perfect singles (Blockbuster, Ballroom Blitz, Hell Raiser, Teenage Rampage).

They're everything glamrock should be, loaded to the gills with hooks, guitar-driven, utterly outlandish, sleazy, teenage, raucous, yet poppy as hell. God knows what parents brought up on rationing and How Much Is That Doggie In The Window made of it all.

Hell Raiser contains a line that is all of glamrock lyricism distilled; 'She took me completely by surprise with her ultrasonic eyes flashing like hysterical danger signs'.

You've got an impressionistic wide-eyed swirl of teen thrills, wildness, space-age visions, frenzy and danger, and all of it absolutely meaningless codswallop. Fuckin great.

They kicked out those four faultless singles in just a year, January 1973-January 1974. It overlaps with Slade's equally great run of four from September 1972-June 1973 (Mama Weer All Crazee Now, Gudbuy T'Jane, Cum On Feel The Noize, Skweeze Me Pleeze Me). And that overlaps with Bolan's riffiest singles.

Bowie gets a lot of credit for glam rock, and Ziggy Stardust unquestionably had a massive prototypical influence, but at the end of the day the genre was more boistrous than Bowie's cerebral approach could muster. He clearly had more poise and talent but lacked the kinetic power and sonic attack of the others I mentioned. In your head Suffragette City's fast and dirty, but play it alongside 20th Century Boy and it sounds positively pedestrian.

After the breathless chart anschluss of the glittertroops, Bowie came back in February 74 with Rebel Rebel, his only proper glam rock single and the last great yawp of the movement. Dig out those Sweet tracks and see how stupendously potent and incalculably exciting they still sound.

Anyway, Ballroom Blitz starts with a fast and frisky snare drum shuffle and 'are you ready Steve? Aha! Andy? Yeah! Mick? OK! Well alright fellas let's GO!'.

It made me get out Mind Bomb, The's The's 1989 masterpiece (with The The - a one-man project by Matt Johnson - every album is a masterpiece), as Armagedon Days Are Here (Again) cheekily starts with that Ballroom Blitz intro altered to 'Are you ready Jesus? Aha! Buddha? Yeah! Mohammed? OK! Well alright fellas, let's GO!'.

The lyrics are more relevant today than ever.

Islam is rising
The Christians mobilising
The world is on its elbows and knees
It's forgotten the message and worships the creeds

It's war, she cried, It's war, she cried, this is war
Drop your possessions, all you simple folk
You will fight them on the beaches in your underclothes
You will thank the good lord for raising the union jack
You'll watch the ships sail out of harbour
and the bodies come floating back

If the real Jesus Christ were to stand up today
He'd be gunned down cold by the C.I.A.
Oh, the lights that now burn brightest behind stained glass
Will cast the darkest shadows upon the human heart
But God didn't build himself that throne
God doesn't live in Israel or Rome
God doesn't belong to the yankee dollar
God doesn't plant the bombs for Hezbollah
God doesn't even go to church
And God won't send us down to Allah to burn
No, God will remind us what we already know
That the human race is about to reap what it's sown

Johnson has an incredible gift for getting to the core truth of his subject and expressing it totally and simply. It's just as true whether he's addressing politics, religion, urban humanity or the deepest workings of the heart.

I've put the orchestral version of Armageddon Days up here. After all my glamrock ramblings, this version skips the Ballroom Blitz intro. But it's not on any album, (only on the B-side of the single version), and the just voice and strings arrangement is phenomenally arresting and tense.

[Sorry! MP3 deleted to make room for new ones.]

Rose McDowall - Don't Fear The Reaper & Crystal Days

2006-11-04T20:01:00.001Z

Rio digital
7RDS3
1988

Sorry I've been away for so long. I'll get back to more frequent postings soon. Meantime, here's an oddity for you.

Blessed with a distinctive, pure captivating singing voice, Rose McDowall first made records with Glasgow Punk band The Poems, releasing a couple of indie singles in the early 80s. A brief pop stardom beckoned with her next band, the duo Strawberry Switchblade. I run their foremost fan site - do check out its downloads page for the version of the Velvet Underground's Sunday Morning. It's quite simply one of the most beautiful things ever recorded.

Strawberry Switchblade split after just one album, and Rose had an album's worth of bright Switchbladey songs which she demoed. These only saw the light of day a couple of years ago as the limited edition Cut With The Cake Knife CD (available here).

I believe this single was culled from those sessions. There's a story that Rose really didn't want it released but failed to stop it. Certainly, while the A-side's an interesting take on the Blue Oyster Cult classic with rolling bass and some wonderful flamenco guitar, it does sound a bit thin, weedy and, well, like a demo.

The B-side, the Rose-penned Crystal Days, is another matter. Bright, shining pop with a big chorus, a darker melancholic undertow somewhere in there, festooned with Rose's trademark harmonies, it's a delight of a track.

A re-recording was issued as Crystal Nights under the name Ornamental.

Rose has continued to make beautiful pagan music ever since. Check out her site for more info.

[Sorry! MP3s deleted to make room for new ones]

Indians In Moscow - Naughty Miranda

2006-08-10T10:04:00.001+01:00

Kennick
KNK1002
1983

A bouncy backing on cheapo electronics with a jaunty Caribbean rhythm and a graphic lyric of psychotic patricide. What more can you ask from pop music?

Saw this one on The Tube in 83, and it was one of those records that if you've ever heard it once, you remember it forever. Bright, breezy and utterly insane.

The other side, Miranda, was a bit of a cop out. The same music but an altered lyric. Still not quite right, mind, detailing as it does her father's jailing for untoward activity and keeping of prize octopi.

But it's this track that really does a job like no other. The way she bounces along with the rhythm in the line 'I slit his guts with my blunt Hedgeplay scissors and sucked out his brain with a straw' is just brilliant.

I got a subsequent single, Jack Pelter and His Sex Change Chicken, on lovely white vinyl, which is worthy of posting here. I'll try to get round to it soon.

[MP3 deleted to make room for new ones. Sorry!]

Cuddly Toys - Madman

2006-06-30T20:11:00.001+01:00

Fresh
PURL7/FRESH10
1980

Madman was one of two songs written by David Bowie and Marc Bolan in September 1977.

Marc had been the acoustic elfin kid, the glam rock pioneer and prime star, then gone through a mid 70s cocaine fuelled two-parts-glam-one-part-soul period (which everyone slags off but I really like).

Then he moved back to London, got into punk, went teetotal and was getting it together.

It's hard to explain just how much punk was hated by the establishment. Even within the music press, it was decried as just noise and not proper music, as encouraging violence and glorifying squalor. But Bolan saw in it the same vigorous youth energy he'd always loved in early rock n roll. He wrote articles defending it, praising punk bands for 'holding a mirror up to society'. He got The Damned in as the support on his 1977 tour.

He was given a TV show, presenting and playing two or three songs and introducing other bands. There was some cack that the Industry paid to be on - Bay City Fuckin Rollers in 1977, for fuck's sake - but he also got on The Jam, The Damned and Generation X.

His own band was still a load of sessionists in overalls, but as the Marc show's punky versions of his old hits demonstrated, he was ready to head out into something with more balls.

For the last show, his old mate from way back came over to play a new song. Bowie and Bolan had been friends in the early 70s. Their shared producer, Tony Visconti, recalls the two of them having long conversations about the importance of retaining artistic control and not letting managment dictate your career. When Bowie's band The Hype played their only gig in 1970, Bolan was the only audience member who'd got into their spirit of outrageous costumes and came along dressed as a gladiator.

They played on a couple of tracks together that year; the single Oh Baby, credited to Dib Cochran and The Earwigs, and Bowie's original single of The Prettiest Star (might put either or both up here if anyone wants 'em).

Then Bolan became a huge star while Bowie released a rapid succession of great records that nobody bought. Hunky Dory, with Changes as the flagship 45, and it utterly stiffed! What the fuck else was anybody buying that justifies that?

When he demoed his next album, the song that went on to be Lady Stardust was called Song For Marc.

As Bowie's star ascended far higher, Bolan went a long way down the avenue of peculiar concept album titles. Zinc Alloy And The Hidden Riders of Tomorrow; or A Creamed Cage in August. I shit you not. Great album, mind.

But by 77 both of them had been through weird times and were getting it back together. Bowie had gone to Berlin and abandoned any attempts at commercialism whilst being monstrously prolific. That year he'd already put out Low and co-written and played on Iggy Pop's The Idiot and Lust For Life. He'd just finished Heroes when Marc talked him into coming on the Marc show.

On 9th September they recorded it. Bowie did Heroes, and he and Marc were going to do two numbers they'd just written together, Sitting Next To You and Madman. Both are exactly the kind of wired, simplistic and compelling artrock that you'd expect 1977 Bolan and Bowie to come up with of the top of their heads, loose yet anguished.

Filming of the show had over-run, and they were only half a minute into the first song when Marc fell off the stage and technicians on a work-to-rule overtime ban stopped filming. Bastards.

On 15th September Marc had a night out in London with friends and his partner, Gloria Jones. In the early hours of the 16th, their car failed to make a corner and hit a tree on Barnes Common, killing Marc instantly. He was two weeks short of his 30th birthday.

By strange coincidence, not only did Bowie appear on Marc's show only to have the presenter die before it was broadcast, but the same thing happened that year with his appearance on the Bing Crosby Christmas special.

It's said that Marc had given a tape of Madman to some fans. Whatever, the song first saw the light of day as this Cuddly Toys single in 1980.

The band on the back are wearing glittery clothes - waaaaay out of date for 1980 - and the personnel are listed as Sean Purcell, Tony Baggett, Faebhean Kwest, Billy Surgeoner and Paddy. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that, ahem, Faebhean was the singer.

According to the practically definitive Illustrated David Bowie Discography (who've taken their astonishing downloads section down, grumble grumble), Madman was written by Bolan, Bowie and Steve Harley.

The originals of Madman and Sitting Next To You have appeared on numerous shitty bootlegs over the years, but in 1995 all takes of them were released in decent audio quality on a bootleg CD called Marc Bolan With David Bowie And Other Friends (Bolan Collectors Series MBCS102). There's also The Last Sessions, which does the same job.

I'd give my nads for a copy of either disc.

[MP3 deleted to make room for new ones. Sorry!]

Frazier Chorus - Anarchy In The UK

2006-06-16T19:18:00.001+01:00

Virgin
VS1192
1989

I know nothing of this band other than this one single.

The A-side is Sloppy Heart, a piece of 80s slow sterile breathy overprecious cack, po-faced style over substance, self-conscious and empty, like someone's surgically removed the sliver of soul from Dream Academy.

Just look at them ferchrissakes! That peroxide ponytail, you bunch of mega-eighties ponces!

The B-side has much the same delicate faux-luscious arrangement and style, but it's Anarchy In The UK. It's utterly hilarious, especially the plinky bell sound the keyboard uses for playing the guitar solo.

Just like the delight of finding a drunken version of King Of The Road on the B-side of REM's So. Central Rain, so this cracks the mask of the A-side which (I'm guessing) is more typical of Frazier Chorus' output.

They keep it up right to the end, and it's all the funnier for not having any clumsy humour introduced.

[MP3 deleted to make room for new ones. Sorry!]

Pete Townshend & John Williams - Won't Get Fooled Again

2006-06-05T20:27:00.002+01:00

Island
12WIP6598
1979

The Secret Policeman's Ball was a comedy/music fundraiser for Amnesty International. The four shows at Her Majesty's Theatre, London ran on consecutive days from 27th-30th June 1979. Two live albums came out from the gigs, one comedy one music.

Performers included Peter Cook, Rowan Atkinson, Billy Connolly and most of the Monty Python team for the comics, and Pete Townshend, Tom Robinson, Neil Innes and John Williams in the muso corner.

Incidentally, that's the British classical guitarist and then Sky member John Williams, not the guy who does the music for all the Spielberg movies.

One of these days I'll sort out doing a Glad To Be Gay month, putting up the dozen or so released versions of Tom Robinson's masterpiece (the Secret Policeman version is particuarly good, the first updated lyric and delivered with more venom than on any other).

But for now, Pete Townshend's startling acoustic Won't Get Fooled Again. It's credited to the unlikely combo of Townshend and Williams, but you have to strain to hear anything that could be the latter fret-fingerer.

Not that it matters. The real glory is hearing Townshend's masterful riffing unaccompanied. For all his electric powerchordery, it's that clipped staccato approach, that tight twitchy tension that grips you so hard.

These are tight, mean hard riffs right in your face. The sparse setting makes them all the more powerful in the same way that a psychotic killer creeping up behind you and whispering in your ear is much scarier than seeing them come screaming from 800 metres away.

I'm this far in and I haven't even mentioned that this is one of his greatest lyrics; whilst not shying away from the late 60s revolutionary fervour, he points to the way all changes of leadership are just a switch of the brand name on your shackles.

A couple of years back there was a documentary on Jagger's latest tedious solo effort, and it showed Townshend recording a guest guitar spot. On the album it's buried politely in the mix, but on the TV show it had Pete in the studio, greying and a tad rotund, yet as soon as his guitar was on it was a loud, violent ak-ak-ak-ak of power and control that blew your head off. This track has much the same effect.

[MP3 deleted to make room for new ones. Sorry!. Leave a note with your email address in the comments if you want me to send it to you. I've also encoded Pinball wizard and Drowned from the same album, if you want either of those too just say]

Mari Wilson - Dance With A Stranger

2006-05-25T22:40:00.000+01:00

Compact
PINK10
1985

Mari Wilson is best - perhaps solely - remembered for her beehive hairdo and matching 60s kitsch sound on her one proper hit Just What I Always Wanted.

She followed it up with a cover of Julie London's jazzy ballad Cry Me A River (limited edition had a free hanky!), setting the course for this subtle and affecting version of Peggy Lee's Dance With A Stranger as the title song for the movie.

If it doesn't look like how you remember Mari Wilson on the cover, that's because it isn't. It's the movie's lead actor Miranda Richardson.

I saw Richardson outside Russell & Bromley's in Southport around this time, pretty soon after seeing Mike Score out of A Flock Of Seagulls outside a shoeshop in Liverpool's Church Street. What was it with me and minor celebrities adjacent to Merseyside footwear retailers in the mid 80s? Who knows?

Anyway, Richardson's familiar for being Queen Elizabeth in Blackadder II. A more different role is hard to imagine.

The film tells the tempestuous story of Ruth Ellis, last woman to be judicially hanged in the UK, and the violent relationship that culminated in her killing her boyfriend. Scripted by Shelagh Delaney of A Taste Of Honey fame, it's got that same unglossy sense of real lives that made her name, and Richardson's performance opposite Rupert Everett is superb.

Rather like Blue Velvet, they've taken a sweet contemporaneous song and made it eerie by juxtaposing it with a dark and troubling film. Once you know that, the recontextualising leaves a twist on the song forever. The song is all about meeting a stanger, it is light and full of understated tingle at the potential in meeting someone who makes you go all fuzzy inside. Yet you approach the film knowing the ensuing affair is brutal and ends horrifically. This provides the key element in most great pop music; to address simulataneous conflicting emotions.

Faithful to the 1951 original, Wilson's version is remarkably warm; this was the 80s, a time of such shiny digital sterility, yet this sounds so authentic that you could readily believe it was recorded any time in the last 50 years. Dreamy, soft, playful, intimate, seductive, but with an uneasiness lent to it by the film, it's a lost gem.

[MP3 deleted to make room for new ones. Sorry! Post your email address in Comments if you'd like it emailed you]

Jack Frost

2006-05-15T15:08:00.000+01:00

Arista
261354
1991

Jack Frost was a chance happening, a duo of Grant McLennan of The Go-Betweens and Steve Kilbey from The Church. Both eminent songwriters in their dayjob bands, they worked swiftly and easily together on this eponymous album. The drum machine on some tracks is dated, but there's a warmth, a mystery, an intricate and rustic evocative feel to the album that perpetually rewards me.

Five years later, they reconvened for the very different, much more rock second album Snow Job.

It's with sadness that I've been inspired to post these four tracks. Grant McLennan died in his sleep on May 6th, aged 48.

Steve Kilbey does a blog with an astonishingly disciplined daily posting policy. Unsurprisingly, several of them have been moving thoughts and memories of Grant.

I've picked four songs from the first Jack Frost album to post. Civil War Lament is astonishing, an almost music-box prettiness to it but with the melancholy heaped on by the lyric, from the perspective of a dead soldier watching from his grave as his beloved goes about her life.

Number Eleven is quite unsongy, an atmosphere hanging seething lightly like the mirages the lyric is set among.

Providence aches, melodic yet metronomic, resigned yet yearning.

Despite being the first song they wrote together, Didn't Know Where I Was shows the punchier direction of the second album better than any other on the debut. Snow Job is certainly a good record, but there's something rich and alluring on this first Jack Frost album, something deceptively simple, enigmatic, internal and yet present and unpretentious that always pulls me back, pulls me in further and yet is never fully revealed.

In one post, Kilbey talks about the album.

grant wasnt some minor talent now gone
and everyone trying to make him into something more
believe me, he was the real deal
he picked up a guitar and sang
and you hadda original
no mistaking his voice, his songs
i saw on amazon they gotta few copies of the 1st jack f record
do yerselves a favour
if you aint got it, get it
im so proud of that record

civil war lament
grant had already written this
i loved it and i got to sing it
he could knock songs like this off
like most people write shopping lists
i liked the ambiguity of
"and all you do is carry on"
to grant this meant that she continued
to me it had other connotations
we thrived on this kinda ambiguity

number 11
grant n i imagined we were lost in a plane crash
i know you can keep me warm
beautiful, grant, beautiful

providence
one of my fave songs ever by anybody anywhere
obviously you can hear grants bits and my bits
so sad
so much sadness in this song
"remember when we were lovers, the things we used to do"
it always gives me goosebumps
so romantic,
so lost.

didnt know where i was
our 1st song we wrote together
sorta velvets-y i guess
" a damaged doomed charles bronson, stumbling on this earth"
who else could write stuff like that
boy, im gonna miss him

As with the death of any good artist, we mourn his passing but are grateful for the work he leaves behind. Thankyou Grant.

it was a fucking privelege to work with him
i loved this man
i will play providence and other jack f songs
till the day i day
and i hope that when i get to fucking heaven
grant is waiting for me
his guitar strapped on
"now, steven, are ya ready for our third album

[MP3s deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

La Granja - Magia En Tus Ojos

2006-04-20T11:21:00.000+01:00

We conclude Yay Yay Billy Bragg Rah Rah Rah Week with She's Got A New Spell sung with Spanish lyrics.

From La Granja's Azul Electrica Emocion album, it doesn't appear to be a translation - Magia En Tus Ojos means 'magic in your eyes'.

[MP3 deleted to make room for new ones. Sorry! Post your email address in Comments if you'd like it emailed you]

Paul Young - Man In The Iron Mask

2006-04-17T22:31:00.000+01:00

CBS
A6321
1985

Oh I am a bad man. Here it is, when it should surely be consigned to the dark corners of the record collection that only get visited in order to settle bets.

On the B-side of the Tomb Of Memories single, Paul Sodding Young slaughters Billy's early heartbreaker. I suppose there's worse covers out there. I mean, I've heard Anita Dobson's jaunty uptempto cover of You've Lost That Loving Feeling. At least Young respects the tempo and gravity of the tune, even if he's not really got the chops for it.

This twat was commonly called soulful in the early-mid 80s, yet with hindsight his voice is anything but, a startlingly paperthin small-range shallow rasp that makes Sinitta look talented, a sort of one man Robson & Jerome trying too hard.

Yet Squeeze's master songwriters Difford and Tilbrook grace the A-side of this single with backing vocals. Fuck knows what that's all about.

Go listen to Billy or X-Mal Deutschland's version, see how they deliver proof - as if we needed it - that Paul Sodding Young should be strung up by his conkers.

And there's more. You think this is weird? Try Young's cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart. I'm not making it up, it really exists.

For now, soil your ears with Paul Sodding Young's ritual dismemberment of Man In The Iron Mask. Sorry. I haven't felt like this since I uploaded Deacon Fucking Blue's cover of Julian Cope's Trampolene.

Another Bragg cover in a couple of days!

[MP3 deleted to make room for new ones. Sorry! Post your email address in Comments if you'd like it emailed you]

X-Mal Deutschland - Girl In The Iron Mask

2006-04-13T22:43:00.000+01:00

Metronome
889 708-7 (7"), 889 709-1 (12"), 889 709-2 (CD)
1989

Wow, have you seen the new Billy Bragg reissues? They're doing them all as double discs with every extra track we know and a few we don't. Billy and Johnny Marr in Billy's front room in 1986 doing Back To The Old House, A Lover Sings and the Stones' The Last Time!

I've just got the swanky box set and it's superb.

Billy's not only released non-album B-sides, he's put a lot of exclusive tracks on compilations over the years.

I'd planned to post a wonderful yet obscure version of Man In The Iron Mask from a 1984 compilation LP called Jamming! A New Optimism. It's better even than the album version, with a gorgeous plaintive trumpet solo. But nope, that's on the new reissues.

So, it's time for other people's takes on it.

On the single of I'll Be Near You, 4AD-ers X-Mal Deutschland did this version with a gender change in the lyric. It appears to have only been released on this single, and only in Germany. Talk about rare.

They give it the gorgeous solemn stillness and ache of Bragg's original with a tender softness of vocal delivery.

Pop back in a few days for another cover of the song.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

============================

Oh, there is actually a bit of unreleased Bragg available for download. He's just - like only just, like recorded it on 22nd March - rewritten Dylan's Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol in memory of Rachel Corrie. It's downloadable from here

Birdland - Hollow Heart

2006-04-04T17:18:00.000+01:00

Lazy
LAZY13 (LAZY13T 12")
1989

Birdland were a breakneck amphetamine firecracker of a band. Four guys from the English midlands with peroxide bobbed hair, shrill, pacey, feedback sodden yet melodic, like Psychocandy on 78rpm.

A big influence on the early Manic Strret Preachers, their 1989 debut single Hollow Heart blazed so bright. The 12" had three songs on the A-side, all crashing into each other in a wail of feedback, no gaps. And that's exactly how they played it live.

I saw this band devotionally. I first went cos a friend recommended it and you got a free live LP. What a great idea! In the days before burnable CDs, bands just did not give away their music at gigs. Birdland figured that to press up a one-sided vinyl LP with no outer sleeve was cheap, if it's live there's no recording costs, and it'd surely bring enough extra punters in to cover its costs. And yet it's not a con-gimmick, everyone gets something worthwhile. It worked on me.

God, they were fucking incredible. Fast and guitarry, taking punk speed, 60s Stones cocksure energy, Patti Smith art-primal attitude, and shooting out these white hot shards of kinetic force with something soaring and pop in there.

The later singles had their merits - good songs and a lot of energy - but sounded somewhat two dimensional. There was a full-surround fury to the live shows that only the tracks on Hollow Heart and its follow up Paradise get close to.

It's like when you listen to Merseybeat bands like Gerry & The Pacemakers or Billy J Kramer & The Dakotas and they all sound so twee, but it doesn't take a big effort to mentally scrub them of their record company gloss and put them in leather jackets belting out rock n roll to a sweaty walled Cavern and see what the fuss was about.

When Birdland's album came out I hitch hiked round Britain following the tour, 13 gigs in 15 days. Every one amazing, though often radically different vibes. Sometimes an hour and a half and five triumphant encores. Sometimes the gear goes wrong ten minutes in and they'd smash everything up and leg it.

The first 10,000 copies of the album, incidentally, came on white vinyl, white label, in a plain white sleeve with 'BIRDLAND' printed on the front in white (you have to tilt it to the light to read it). Oh fucking yes. They were great for that sort of thing - singles coming with a limited edition 4-track EP version with posters and a badge and what have you.

No band can sustain such power and intensity for long, so we can't really lament their passing. We should just be glad that we have those blinding screaming early singles like Fuzzbox's XX Sex or Birdland's labelmates The Primitives' Stop Killing Me.

Birdland hit that thing in a way that no other band ever quite did. Still sounds so incredibly exciting and explosive, an amphetamine pessary of a record.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Lieutenant Pigeon - Opus 300

2006-03-17T14:22:00.000Z

Decca
F13365
1972

This is the maddest thing a major label ever released on 7 inch.

A distorted marching drum beat, the single repeated word 'mother', with a spliced in section of jazzy calypso singing 'get your shoes from the menders and don't be late'.

Madder, it's done by a band consisting of three blokes and one of their mums.

Lieutenant Pigeon are a great one hit wonder. Out of nowhere they got to number 1 with Mouldy Old Dough. Bizarre, hyper-real nightmarish and insanely catchy, with the only lyric being the title, it somehow won an Ivor Novello songwriting award.

The follow up, Desperate Dan, barely scraped into the top 20 and there were no more hits after that. Opus 300 is the B-side of Desperate Dan, and it is just fucking nuts.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Cowboy Junkies - Dead Flowers

2006-03-06T14:58:00.001Z

RCA
COWBOY1
1990

Cowboy Junkies are, to my knowledge, the only band who consistently do cover versions that far exceed the originals.

Whilst they have a major songwriting talent in guitarist Michael Timmins, it's in the way they tackle the works of others that we get the clearest view of their power and worth.

They find a dark melancholic stillness in the heart of a song, and Margo's strong yet delicate voice curls like smoulder smoke through the core of the track and up beyond it.

Neil Young's Powderfinger, Springsteen's State Trooper, they even do Sweet Jane in a way that - coming from a very different angle - equals the Velvets' original.

It appeared they'd drawn the short straw on the Rubber Soul tribute album This Bird Has Flown, doing John Lennon's worst song, Run For Your Life. Disposable, unimaginative, misogynistic, disowned by its writer, we'd be none the poorer if it had never existed at all.

Then the Junkies work their magic and once again do a cover that teases out a sombre and compelling atmosphere. Their Run For Your Life is a brilliant seething sinister threat of a track.

The Rolling Stones' 1971 masterpiece Sticky Fingers has several classic riffy corkers, but also a couple of astonishing Cowboy Junkies-esque slow dark spacious tracks in Sister Morphine and Moonlight Mile.

The Junkies, though, went for Dead Flowers. The Stones do it upbeat with Jagger's voice delivering the lyric in a semi-comic twang. Cowboy Junkies see the lyric has an unrelenting broken, morbid, desolate sentiment perfectly suited to them. Slowing it down, giving it their classic arrangement of guitar, voice, bass, subtle drums, mandolin, accordion and slide guitar, they make it entirely their own.

Dead Flowers comes from an aborted first attempt at recording the album that would become 1990's The Caution Horses. The tracks from that session have recently had a full release as Sharon. It was only released on the cassette single of Sun Comes Up It's Tuesday Morning, and on two promo-only CDs.

I got it on one of the latter, a limited promo CD that came with initial copies of 1992's Black Eyed Man bought at HMV shops in the UK. It shares the disc with two album tracks and a cover of the traditional tune Captain Kidd (another Sharon session track, previously released on the single of Sun Comes Up, It's Tuesday Morning).

The band released a B-sides and out-takes album that didn't include Dead Flowers. A track that's better than most bands best efforts, just left lying around on a long forgotten promo. Twenty years and still making magnificent, ornate, sad and beautiful music. Talent to spare.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Red Guitars - Good Technology

2006-02-27T00:40:00.000Z

Self Drive
SD006
1983
(reissued 1984 SD009 7" and SD008 12")

In December the venerable Zoe over at Goldfish Nation did a post quoting the lyrics for this track. I asked her about it and she didn't know the song, so it's nudged me to post it here. With the pulling-me-apart pace of my life these days it takes me ten fuckin weeks to get round to doing a half-hour job. I need to amend this.

Incidentally, whilst I can refer to Zoe as 'Zo-ster' (rhymes with 'toaster'), I find it very difficult to find a way to spell the word. 'Zoster' looks like it rhymes with 'roster'. 'Zohster' likewise. 'Zoaster' looks like there's a syllable break there, 'Zo-aster'. The hyphenated version used above delivers the right phonetics but looks a bit clumsy. I'd be grateful if you'd tell me of a solution to this problem.

So, on with the music. Good Technology is one of those tracks that grabs you by the ears on first listen, the sort of thing that even before it's halfway through you know you love. Tense pulsing background with sharp spikes of guitar, it's clearly not long after early Talking Heads and New Romantics. It swells and spreads, expansive and awkward, but the thing that sets it apart and makes it worthy of remembering 20 years on is the arresting lyric.

We've got photographs of men on the moon
We've got water that is good for us
We've got coffee that's instantaneous
We've got buildings that are very tall
We've got cigarettes that are low in tar
We've got policemen can tell us who we are
We can reproduce a work of art
We've got missiles can tear the world apart
Good, good, good, good, good, good technology

We've got trains that run underground
Aeroplanes that fly very fast
We've got music that is popular
We've got machines that sound like orchestras
We've got ability to transplant a heart
We've got freezers full of body parts
We've got computers that can find us friends
We know roughly when the world will end
Good, good, good, good, good, good technology

We've got animals with transistors in
We've got pills that can make you slim
We've got factories turning frozen chickens out
We've got ovens that cook in seconds flat
We've got plastics that are indestructible
We've got deodorants that make us smell of flowers
We've got detergents to clean up the sea
We've got sounds can turn you inside out

Sometimes I wonder what it is all about
There's lots of leisure time to sit and work it out
There's a TV show I've got to see
Good, good, good, good, good, good technology
Good technology

It's that final bit that does it for me. After this random list of the things that we have, the mundane and the extraordinary, the fucked-up and the fantastic, it turns to the liberation from drudgery offered by labour saving devices. And what do we do with the time given us? Watch telly.

As I've said elsewhere

These days the hearth is the TV. Living rooms are arranged exactly like a hundred years ago, but with that one difference. The average Briton watches four hours of TV every day!

Which is really worrying. People would spend four hours looking at a hearth, but TV is so one-way. It doesn't present you with coloured patterns that let your mind wander and exercise, it tells your mind to shut the fuck up while it tells you what to think about and what to think about the things you think about. It delivers itself as absolute and authoritative. It shows 'experts' in whatever field, who are always portrayed as more informed and eloquent than you, which takes away your sense of power and feeling of ability and worth, and the idea that you might be able to go out there and affect the things that affect you.

And they are lying, TV is so superficial that its main task is to stop you realising its superficiality and artificiality. They pretend things aren't carefully edited to make implications. They try to make it look like the situation being shown is normal, and not rendered fake by an intrusive TV camera being there. We think if someone looks shifty on TV they must be shifty, whereas it's probably actually cos they're not used to having 600 watts of lightbulb in their face while they try to explain years of experience in an eight second soundbite. It's all about veneers. I've actually done TV shows where I've been portrayed as an authoritative expert, and I got believed. I found the MPs and ministers and journalists were bluffing even more than I was!

It doesn't matter that loads of TV is junk. The problem is that it treats everything the same, that a war or a football match or a McDonalds special offer are treated with equal import. It's OK when junk is undisguised junk, when it's meant to be forgettable nonsense. But when it pretends to be serious it distracts us from the real serious stuff, it lowers the standards of what we consider serious. As TV has become the dominant medium, other media have learned that they must imitate TV or die. Have you noticed how our newspapers now look like TV, and our radio sounds more and more like TV? Even when the TV is off, it has set out the methods by which we understand what's going on. The result is a whole TV culture that makes us as individuals insignificant and disconnected, and everything seem irrelevant and unreal.

Four hefty paragraphs, yet Red Guitars say it all in three lines. That, my friends, is what we mean by poetry.

Background stuff about the track - recording info etc - is on this page.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Feargal Sharkey - Listen To Your Father

2006-01-20T00:29:00.000Z

Zarjazz
JAZZ1 (JAZZY1 picture disc)
1984

Less than a year after singing Never Never for the one-off Assembly single, Feargal Sharkey did another great oddity.

Madness had been around for years and had just left Stiff Records to set up their own label. Peculiarly, they didn't kick off with their own stuff, but with this.

It is basically a Madness single with Feargal on vocals. It was written by Madness' Carl Smyth (aka Chas Smash), and Madness play all the music.

Like other Smyth songs such as Michael Caine, there's no clear meaning but somehow the words fit the music brilliantly; impressionism rather than literalism.

Madness shifted to a more reflective vibe for much of their remaining work (basically the Mad Not Mad album) as typified by the haunting elegant anti-Tory single Yesterday's Men. This, though, has all that gleeful pounding stomp we knew and loved them for.

A year later, autumn 1985, and Sharkey was back with his eponymous debut album and it's flagship single, the Maria McKee-penned A Good Heart. It was all a bit glossy and saccharine, lacking the kick of the Undertones, the emotional punch of Never Never and the kinetic bounce and boistrousness of Listen To Your Father.

At the end of 1985 Madness did a new year's eve concert at Hammersmith Odeon, and Sharkey came on and did Listen To Your Father with them (relased on the Mad Not Mad Party bootleg album if you can find it).

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

The Assembly - Never Never

2006-01-06T18:38:00.000Z

Mute
7TINY1
1983

He didn't hang around much in the early 80s, Vince Clarke. Formed Depeche Mode and wrote their debut single I Just Can't Get Enough, then promptly left them to form Yazoo. Barely a year of that, then split.

A few months later he got together with EC Radcliffe of The Silcon Teens and put together The Assembly. Clarke wrote Never Never and thought Feargal Sharkey's plaintive pleading tone would suit the song. They rang Sharkey who readily agreed and swiftly cut the track.

Thinking it would always be that easy to get well known high calibre singers on to their record, they started planning an album but nothing ever came of it and this single remains an anomaly.

The lyric is one of relentless isolation, beautifully complemented by the starkness of Clarke's electronics, yet there is a sparkling splendour to it too. This song of alienation and coldness is one more example of how we can put our darkest feelings out and create something of beauty and consolation, something affecting and gorgeous that has the net effect of enhancing those it touches.

Grant McLennan of The Go-Betweens said, 'it's neither fair nor reasonable to expect sadness to confine itself to its causes'. Letting it beyond its causes into art and bright pop music is certainly nothing new, and in that arena we can see that it also seems neither fair nor reasonable to expect the only effect of expressing sadness to be more sadness.

The tremendous ache and tingling icy beauty of Never Never are utterly captivating and, provided you're not a hopelessly alienated outcast like the protagonist, the fact of something so gorgeous existing scatters shards of silvered affirmation all over you, it prods your heart and makes you feel more alive.

Veteran British sessionist Clem Clempson gets a credit for guitar on the track but I'm buggered if I can hear a guitar in it.

There were a few such peculiar 'let's get an established singer' projects around that time. The previous year Heaven 17 put together British Electric Foundation Presents Music of Quality and Distinction Volume One, an album featuring all kinds of oddities; Tina Turner doing Ball of Confusion, Gary Glitter doing Suspicious Minds, Billy MacKenzie doing Bowie's The Secret Life of Arabia. MacKenzie also wrote a lyric for an excellent Yello single, The Rhythm Divine in 1987, that had Shirley Bassey doing lead vocals (the 12inch had a version of MacKenzie's own take).

See what I mean? Loads of this sort of thing at the time.

Within a year of The Assembly, Vince Clarke put together Erasure and Feargal Sharkey recorded Listen To Your Father, a corking one-off single with Madness that I'll put up as the next post here.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Tom Robinson - Truce (live)

2005-12-27T19:20:00.000Z

Well haven't I been the slackest of music bloggers this month. Damn me and my inability to share the hidden musical gems I have. I had this plan to do a bunch of great lesser-known christmas songs - The Cocteau Twins' Frosty The Snowman, The Dickies' Silent Night, The Greedies' A Merry Jingle and others - but it's just all been too hectic and I'm sadly finding that when I get busy Dust On The Stylus is the first thing to suffer.

Still, one festive one's making it up here. As I've left it till after christmas I thought I'd go for something a little sharper than most seasonal songs. A strong candidate was Legendary Pink Dots' Government Health Warning. Set to out of tune playing of the chords of Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmastime, the lyrics deal with that age old tradition, drunken car crashes:

They followed stars
and drank in bars
and wrapped their cars
round lamp-posts
as the posters whistled "Think before you drink!"
They didn't!

Toasted ghosts in different angles
tangled up in metal
as the cameras clicked and stretchers rolled
and sheets were laid out white.

It's Christmas.
Happy birthday Christ.
Let's have another drink!
Fa la la la la....

Great as it is, I've plumped for Tom Robinson's Truce. Like Government Health Warning there's an ascerbic tinge giving it a refreshing knowingness that makes the point with dark wit.

It's a motif common in Robinson's political songs, giving them all the power of the uncompromising protest song but with an additional under-no-illusions clarity borne of having tried and failed and thus seen how big the dissenter's task is, yet still being just as big-hearted and determined to try.

Glad To Be Gay, one of his earliest political songs, is still the giant among his works. There had been no out-and-proud rock star before him, let alone one so militant.

Even today, it's not easy. When Jonathan King got seven years for having sex with teenage boys in the early 1970s, one had to wonder if the same treatment would've been dished out if it was Mick Jagger fucking girls. King was treated harsher cos of the differences, namely he's ugly, he's a smartarse, but mostly because he's gay.

Robbie Williams, a man who's flirted with a homo-friendly image for ages, recently sued The People and a couple of other idiot gossip rags for alleging he'd had gay sex.

Of course, a newspaper should not make false allegations and when it does it should be punished.

But again, I doubt the newspaper would've been prosecuted if they'd wrongly alleged Williams had had sex with women. Certainly, in asking for an apology for 'the injury and distress caused', he's made it clear that he regards allegations of being gay is derogatory to his character.

In 1979 after the split of the modestly named Tom Robinson Band, Tom did a gig of gay songs to mark the 10th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. He mixed his own songs with some great covers - notably Noel Coward's Mad About The Boy, which the 'Noel wasn't gay, really he wasn't' Coward estate refused to allow men to cover.

Among the Robinson originals were several that were never released in studio versions. Prime among these is Truce, a solo acoustic guitar and vocal number with all the yearning, wit, bite and boldness of Robinson's best work.

The live tape was released in 1982 as Cabaret 79 (Panic Records, NIC2), and then - the place I've lifted it from - reissued in 1997 as part of Robinson's excellent Castaway Records reissue series with quality rare bonus tracks thrown in (Castaway, CNWVP003CD).

Truce

Truce, call a truce
Stop all the firing and the fighting
Christmas morning, 1914
What would the good Lord say?

Truce, call a truce
Stop all the shelling and the shooting
Froehliche Weinacht Kamerad, Freundschaft
Let's all be friends for a day

In the man made hell
In the putrescent smell
In the mines and mud and trenches
The men from the Rhine
Crossed over the line
For a truce with the Tommies and the Frenchies

But the very next day
There were hand grenades
There was gunfire, gassing and slaughter
As we blasted the Hun
To Kingdome Come
With machine guns, shelling and mortars

It was nice to pretend
We could all live as friends
With the Christmas angels calling
But the dream turned sour
In a matter of hours
And we made it all up in the morning

Truce, call a truce
Stop all the bitching and backbiting
Who'd leave their lover
Or send in the bailiffs
This one day of the year?

Truce, call a truce
Stop all the sackings and the stealing
Who'd rape a schoolgirl
Or cut off someone's pension
And spoil all this Christmas cheer?

There's a couple of days
When the bashers of gays
Who oppress, arrest and charge us
All leave us alone
To return back home
For a truce with our mothers and our fathers

But the very next day
It's back to the fray
And setting our homes in order
Bashing lesbian mothers
And underage lovers
Disowning gay sons and daughters

Well it's quaint to pretend
We can love our fellow men
With the Christmas angels calling
But the dream turns sour
In a matter of hours
And they make it all up in the morning

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Incidentally, Robinson has released about a dozen versions of Glad To Be Gay. Determined not to let it become a museum piece he's updated it frequently - e.g. jettisoning the bit about the older age of consent, adding bits about AIDS and topical cases - and the altered versions have cropped up on loads of b-sides and compilation albums. It'd be cool to maybe do a fortnight of posting all the different versions on this blog or something, if it's wanted. Anyone think it'd be a good idea?

Rolling Stones - Exile On Main Street flexi

2005-11-28T17:50:00.000Z

1972

For those unfamiliar with the format, a flexidisc was a 7inch record pressed on very thin plastic. The sound quality was rubbish to start with, even before it picked up the creases inevitable to such a thin item, but it was enough to give the listener a decent enough clue to the music, and it was cheap and light making it ideal for give-aways.

One such give-away was the flexi that came with the 29th April 1972 edition of New Musical Express.

On one side was some tosh by Curved Air and something called Blind Alley by Fanny, whoever the hell they were. It's the stuff on the other side we're concerned with.

Two weeks before the release of Exile On Main Street, here were excerpts of four tracks (All Down The Line, Tumbling Dice, Shine A Light and Happy), linked by a track called Exile On Main Street Blues. This song is a slow piano boogie with Jagger singing a lyric that strings together a load of the titles of the album tracks. It's a great little oddity, and as far as I know it's never been officially reissued anywhere.

I've put up two MP3s - one's the full flexi, and on the other I've cut out the album tracks so it's a splicing together of Exile On Main Street Blues on its own.

[MP3s deleted to make room for new ones. Sorry!]

The Colourfield - The Colourfield & Sorry

2005-11-10T02:25:00.000Z

Chrysalis
COLF1
1984

The Colourfield are best remembered for the hit Thinking Of You, and its follow-up Castles In The Air. Both songs set Terry Hall's trademark deadpan vocal against airy pretty pop tunes.

But their eponymous debut single was another thing altogether. Hard, dark, brooding, ominous, with a bleak, almost paranoid lyric, it still had one foot firmly in the Fun Boy Three camp. The difference between the bands lies in the guitarryness of The Colourfield, which manifests on this track as a hard Bunnymenish edge.

Constantly pushing forward, sinister and urgent, unlike anything else they ever did, it's a truly magnificent single.

The B-side, Sorry, is a failed-relationship song, and was re-recorded for the Virgins And Philistines album. More typical of what the band would become, it is really too good to have been tucked away on a B-side.

Incidentally, I went to see The Colourfield at Liverpool University on the Virgins & Philistines tour. Hall was as dour and miserable as you'd imagine him to be, and then some. He introduced the album's title track as 'Virgins & Fill-me-arse', and sang the first verse of Thinking Of You as 'I guess you kind of ought to know I ought to be having a shit / But friendship built on trust means everyone gets on my tits'. Miserable bugger.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Brendan Perry - Happy Time

2005-10-28T10:43:00.000+01:00

4AD
SHUFFLE
1993

Sorry for the gap between postings. I had this weird dream where I was in a smallish theatre watching Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen, and me and about 20 other members of the audience got out of our seats and went down the front to dance. We were really giving it some, the tune finished then they went into Under Pressure.

I've no idea what significance there is in dreaming a British trad jazz trumpeter playing Under Pressure (please leave any suggestions in the Comments), but it has been quite unsettling.

Actually, it's got nothing to do with the gap in postings, but I just wanted to mention it. Wouldn't you if it had happened to you?

So, enough of this hoo-hah, let's get on with some sublime music.

This is the gorgeous Happy Time, the opening track from Tim Buckley's 1969 album Blue Afternoon, covered by the bloke from Dead Can Dance.

Brendan retains the soaring sweetness of the song but lends it his trademark Moses-esque gravity.

It was relased on 4AD Presents The 13 Year Itch. 4AD was a hell of a label for weirdness and peculiar releases. There was the time Cocteau Twins had an album's worth of stuff but released it on two EPs of four tracks each in consecutive weeks.

There's the This Mortal Coil project, where assorted mixes of 4AD musicians record covers and stuff.

There was Lonely Is An Eyesore, a compilation with companion video, which had a limited edition box set of both items and some artwork. Not a 12 inch cardboard box, a big fat wooden thing with an engraved lid and dovetail joints and stuff. Mental.

The 13 Year Itch was put together to celebrate 4AD's 13th birthday. It was released for one week in July 1993 before being deleted, and even then only 2,000 copies were pressed. All tracks are unique to the compilation.

Which is a crying shame, as Happy Time alone would justify massive sales. Bright, bubbling, sweeping, liberated joy. Glorious.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Billy Bragg & Dick Gaughan - The Red Flag

2005-09-29T22:46:00.000+01:00

Utility
UTIL11
1990

Billy Bragg's wonderful 1988 album Worker's Playtime contains many of his best relationship songs - The Short Answer, Must I Paint You A Picture, Valentine's Day Is Over, The Price I Pay - all articulating emotional misfirings of various kinds with eloquence, wit and incisive melancholic grace.

But touring in the USA afterwards Bragg met Pete Seeger, one of the original Wody Guthrie era protest singers who, though aged nearly 70 at that time, still fighting as hard as ever.

The arresting effect on Bragg meant the next record came out without the luscious arrangements, the heartbreaks or the kitchen sink drama, but with a brisk and potent shout of political intent.

The Internationale is mostly covers, with Billy looking around the world and - a clear decade ahead of others - looking to home and singing Jerusalem as an inclusive anthem. This is the first time I ever saw it claimed as anything other than repugnant English jingoism.

Jerusalem had long been put alongside songs of racist shite like Land of Hope and Glory. Or Rule Britannia which declares that Britons never shall be slaves. That song was written at a time when slavery was a cornerstone of our national modus operandi. It isn't merely declaring that we are too good for slavery; it says that the subjugation we gladly inflict on others must never be inflicted on us. Remember that next time anyone tells you Last Night At The Proms is harmless patriotic fun.

But Jerusalem is something different. It doesn't declare us to be better than anyone simply because we're from round here. It says this land is fucked over by the industrialists, that we have work to do to improve it, and we must never stop making this a better place for us and those who follow after.

It was a bold, audacious move, to play it straight and sweet, in a manner not dissimilar to Roddy Frame's reading of The Red Flag.

Which is where we get on board with Billy. He teamed up with Scottish political folkster Dick Gaughan - whose Think Again he'd covered on the B-side of Levi Stubb's Tears in 1986 - and recorded The Red Flag set to its original tune; not the grand hymnal plod we know, but a jaunty Celtic jig.

As the sleevenote explained;

The Red Flag was written in December 1889 by Jim Connell, an Irishman. Inspired by the London dock strike he wrote the song on a train journey between Charing Cross and New Cross stations setting the lyrics to the old Jacobite air The White Cockade.

It immediately became popular with socialist singers throughout Britain but for some reason the tune was changed in 1895 to Tannenbaum, the version sung by the Labour Party to this day. Connell was outraged, claiming that the new tune murdered his lyrics. Here we have restored the original, a sprightly reel not a funereal dirge.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Aztec Camera - The Red Flag

2005-09-26T12:34:00.000+01:00

WEA
YZ168
1987

It's the Labour Party Conference this week, so I'm posting two versions of its founding anthem, now an anachronistic call to socialism whose lyrics have about as much relevance to the modern Labour Party as Motorhead's version of Louie Louie.

First up is Aztec Camera's version, from the B-side of the How Men Are single. This comes from a funny time, the mid-late 1980s when Thatcher was winning her third election, hopes of nuclear disarmament were crushed underfoot, a majority of British teenagers believed they would die in a nuclear war, the miners had been broken and with them went, for all time, any real hope of strength in trade unions.

But these worries and struggles had galvanised those of us who opposed. Flailing around in the cess-tides of monetarist greed and arrogance, emboldened by the resilience and comradeship we saw among the miners and their supporters, there was this widespread feeling that somehow socialism was an imminent off-the-peg answer and - even more implausibly - Neil Kinnock's Labour Party would deliver it.

It's easy to look back now and see those times as the abandonment of the socialist dream, as Labour deliberately letting the miners be beaten, as the germination of the Blair tory-lite nightmare, that the old flags were tired and that the party should have ended conference with a chorus of 'we'll sing the red flag once a year'.

But back then, for many, that's where genuine hope lay. Worthy, intelligent people like The Smiths, Jerry Dammers, Tom Robinson, Paul Weller and, er, Bananarama signed up to Red Wedge, a sort of Labour Rock The Vote thing.

And Aztec Camera, hardly the most political band, recorded this version of The Red Flag. On the B-side of the strong, wise yet understated How Men Are, this simple piano and vocal version of The Red Flag shows off that wonderful purity and yearning in Roddy Frame's voice, that dry, plaintive yet consoling lightness and honesty he does so well, removing all the bombast and mumble usually associated with the song.

[mp3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

The Three O'Clock - In Love In Too & Lucifer Sam

2005-09-20T21:56:00.000+01:00

fan club only 45
LSD2
1983

Right, a while ago I posted a couple of tracks by The Three O'Clock, a fabulous shimmery sunny Rickenbacker psych-pop band from early 80s California.

I mentioned then that I'd got a couple of really rare tracks, and if anyone was interested then to leave a comment and I'd take that as a nudge to post them.

But no, nobody did ask.

A few days ago that post got a comment at last, and from someone fortunate enough to catch them on their support tour with REM in 1985.

I read about that at the time, and it was a total dream ticket for me, my two favourite bands on the same bill. Over here we got no-marks called Grown Up Strange supporting REM in 85, while the Three O'Clock only played one UK gig ever as far as I know. And I wasn't there.

Anyway, despite not being asked for them, here are those very rare tracks. They're the two sides of a fan club only 7-inch issued in 1983, and as far as I know haven't been issued anywhere else.

In Love In Too is another one from the band's songwriting team of Quercio/Gutierrez, and Lucifer Sam is a cover of the Syd-era Pink Floyd classic.

The production values aren't as good as the proper releases, but never mind the lavish sonics, feel the rarity.

[mp3s deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

The Style Council - Headstart For Happiness

2005-09-09T15:29:00.000+01:00

Polydor
TSCX2
1983

The lazy simplistic critique of Paul Weller’s career says The Jam were great, The Style Council were shit and the solo stuff’s OK but a bit boring. And that’s complete bollocks. He’s done genius and rubbish throughout his career.

Despite The Jam’s punk frenzy, The Style Council had his most political lyrics and also some tremendous euphoric joy-of-life songs. Headstart For Happiness is one of my favourite things ever recorded. This version was done as an extra track for the B-side of the Money Go Round 12 inch.

It was laid down so soon after it was written that you can clearly hear that Weller’s performing it in the same mood that it was written in. There was a later version recorded with a full band for the Cafe Bleu album, but it's heavy, clunky and lacks the bubbling joy of this take.

The shine, the looseness of the fingerclicks and handclaps, the flying-free feeling are so contagious, and the giddy effervescent sparkling lyrics of new found love have a matching wonderful irrepressible carefree abandon to them.

The positivity and love in the words describing coming together after a week apart from a person who sets your heart aflame and who makes everything go wild and make sense all at the same time are exactly how I feel right now.

Here she is - how could anyone not fall in love with her?

She's the one on the left, I hasten to add.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Pixies - Hey (live in London 1988)

2005-08-29T18:29:00.000+01:00

Sounds Machine 1 EP
MACH1
1988

I was down the front at the Pixies perfomance at the Leeds Festival on Sunday, and fuck me but they rocked like a bag of badgers.

All that bristling jagged power, all that noise and volatile fury, yet delivered with such effortless grace.

They wisely went for a set drawn mainly from Come On Pilgrim, Surfer Rosa and Doolittle. Whilst the other two albums have their moments, and the B-sides are great, it's those two and a half albums that really shine out, music that grabs your ears and shakes them like a ketchup bottle with a stubborn half inch left at the bottom.

The dark lunatic energy saturates it all - the Charles Manson and David Lynch connections are entirely appropriate - yet at the same time it feels like the chassis is made of early 60s Beach Boys surf tunes, all big bright bouncing choruses and simplistic basslines.

And whilst you really would never have thought them as a band of real showmanship - and doubly so in their present middle-aged 75% slaphead incarnation - special mention must be made of Joey Santiago's wigouts.

On Vamos he was wah-ing away, then just unplugged the guitar and touching his thumb to the live lead carried on making noise. Plugging the guitar back in he thrashes away further before placing the guitar on a stand and holding up a hand as David Lovering, without missing a beat, throws a drumstick which Joey catches and gives it a right old Jimmy Page bowing for several minutes, blistering sonic assault spewing out over Francis' insistent acoustic rhythm. That done, he throws the stick back, David justs lifts his hand and - again without missing a beat - brings the stick back into play. Mental!

It's been said that only a couple of thousand people bought the Velvet Underground before about 1985, but every one of them formed a band. It's good to see Pixies, another band whose influence exceeds their commercial success, getting what they deserve at last too.

I have a dusty pile of various artists 7 inches, and most of them are things that came free with late 1980s music papers. In a foolish non-cost-effective way to prop up their flagging sales figures, Melody Maker gave away an EP. None of those muffly flexidiscs, a proper bit of hard vinyl of exclusive tracks by bands you'd like to hear more of.

To keep up, NME and Sounds followed suit. Having painted themselves into a corner, MM did even more. And so it spiralled until Sounds went bust.

In a last bit of poor judgement on the part of Sounds, in 1988 they realised that people were buying an EP'ed music paper as a one-off so they did the Sounds Machine series of three or four EPs consecutive weeks in the desperate hope you'd just get into the habit of buying their second-rate metal obsessed rag.

The first one came out, if memory serves, in autumn 1988. Those of us in what was still called 'alternative' bands had all got deeply into Surfer Rosa by this point. We could feel our creative output being pulled onwards by that album.

It is hard now to convey the anticipation we had at the idea of a new Pixies track, exceeded only by the shock at actually hearing the thing.

Hey, recorded live during their support set for Throwing Muses at the Town & Country Club in London on 1 May 1988, was from another world entirely. The slow build of the first third of it, the anguished electric guitar, was this what all the next album was to be like?

It was months and months of waiting, and I was there in Street Records in Southport on the morning of release to pick up my advance-ordered copy of Doolittle, an album that still amazes, energises, challenges and inspires as much now as it did that day.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

The Colourfield - Windmills of Your Mind

2005-08-24T20:35:00.000+01:00

Chrysalis
COLFX2
1984

Take was their second single, following on from the blinding Fun Boy Three-esque eponymous debut (which I really should post here some time soon). Tucked away on the B-side of the 12 inch was this cover of Windmills of Your Mind.

Originally done in 1969 by British actor Noel Harrison (son of Rex, father of Cathryn), who ran a parallel careeer as a singer in the mid-late 60s, having several hits in the US but just the one in the UK. The song was from the movie The Thomas Crown Affair, and picked up an Oscar for Best Original Song.

The score for the movie, and the music for the song, were written by Michel Legrand, a French musician who started out playing with jazz giants like John Coltrane and Miles Davis before getting into film scores. He has a tremendous talent for sweeping melancholic moods, and nowhere is it better illustated than on this composition.

The lyric was co-written by Alan and Marilyn Bergman who had written ratpack schmaltz like Nice n Easy, but this lyric is something else altogether. A swirl of imagery, like it somehow manages to follow an absent-minded train of thought, cycles and transience with a hint of the maudlin, it trips so lightly over a feeling of isolation and broken love that should by rights be much heavier. A truly astonishing piece of songwriting.

Terry Hall's flat, almost dour tone that overlies his clear intelligence and sensitivity make him as perfect a match for the song as the lyric is for the music.

A fair bit of vinyl crackle on this one, sorry.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Willie Lindo - Norwegian Wood

2005-08-15T22:19:00.000+01:00

Trojan
1974

Willie was part of the Lindo dynasty, a Jamaican muso family who litter recordings from the country to this day. The full title is A Darker Shade of Black (Norwegian Wood). I presume it's some kind of reference to ethnicity, but even if that is the case it's still somewhat baffling.

It's from the 'rare and unreleased' disc of the Muzik City box set, a 4-CD retrospective of the mighty Trojan label.

It's one of those labels like Motown where you wonder how the hell they recorded so many complete masterpieces in such a short space of time.

The Motown Connoisseurs series shows that there's rare and unreleased stuff as good as the classics we all know, and the fact that the first two discs of Muzik City are killer no filler, yet only half of it is on the double CD greatest hits compilation Young Gifted & Black shows some powerful creative magic was at work with these people too.

Trojan's back catalogue has been bought up by an active reissue company, and they're doing a sterling job. Particularly laudable is the 3-CD Ganja Reggae Box Set, fifty reggae tracks about cannabis. There is surely only one genre of music that can generate a title like Babylon Don't Touch My Sensi (Dub version).

There's a great warmth, a wonderful organic texture to these recordings that is inimicable. Everyone thought Lee Mavers from The La's was a nutter for wanting to make their eponymous debut album strictly on vintage 1960s gear, but the fact is he was on to something.

Contemporary technology has brought us many wonders in music, yet we have actually lost the ability to make records that sound like they used to. The slightly muddy tinge to these productions blends the music so it doesn't sound polished or synthetic in any way, and that grants a certain kind of richness of atmosphere that can't be got now.

Coupled with this is, despite many sides being cut with the UK pop market somewhere in mind, the tremendous looseness of the musicians recording it. Used to working fast they didn't labour it, but there's an overall ease of approach, a bright warm vibe that just doesn't crop up anywhere in rock n roll or white music in general up to then.

These records were made with an attitude simply incomprehensible to those with the European obsession with melody, and it would've been impossible to capture in the boffin atmosphere of mainstream British recording studios of the time.

Reminiscing about his studio techniques of the era, Lee Scratch Perry said, 'It was only four tracks on the machine, but I was picking up twenty from the extra terrestrial squad.'

Which I think ably illustrates the fundamental difference between himself and Stock Aitken and Waterman.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Madness - Un Paso Adelante

2005-08-03T19:55:00.000+01:00

Stiff
MO1922
1979
(Spain only)

Been a while since I blogged one of those inexplicable foreign language re-recordings.

So here's One Step Beyond, with that periodic vocal part re-recorded in Spanish.

Belter.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Nick Drake - Blossom & Richard Hewson versions

2005-07-26T22:21:00.000+01:00

Nick Drake made music that is as good as music can get.

As I've said elsewhere,

His work is holy, haunting, enveloping, wise, mystical, graceful and complete. It can float over you on a balmy summer's evening making you feel like a petal spinning on a warm breeze, and yet be right in there with you articulating your thoughts on the darkest of lonely nights.

It goes right into you now and yet - and this is the real magic - it somehow feels just as much in you even when you change, it sort of becomes part of you and grows with you. It achieves what the greatest art achieves, it makes us feel understood, it shows us new ways to see, it informs and affirms.

Nick Drake's potent legacy only increases its power as time goes by. He was so unnoticed at the time that there was only one interview done, and there is no video footage of him at all (except for family cine film of him on a beach as a child).

Most dead musicians have had their back catalogue plundered, and whilst Drake's has been comparitively well handled, it's still left a lot to be desired.

The 1979 box set Fruit Tree was subtitled 'the complete works'. It was nothing of the sort.

The 1985 box set, confusingly also titled Fruit Tree, included a new out-takes album Time of No Reply that added ten new tracks to the canon (three new versions, seven completely unreleased songs). Sadly this one has been allowed to go out of print.

Last year's Made To Love Magic was something of a letdown. It gave us seven new tracks, and six lifted straight from Time of No Reply. When the combined tracks would fit on one CD, leaving half of Time of No Reply deleted was inexcusable; equally, making Drake heads splash out on an album they'd already got half of was a swindle. It's made worse when you know there are great songs of Nick's that have never been released.

Fortunately there's the rather pricey but extremely comprehensive Time Has Told Me bootleg CD. Here's three tracks from it.

Blossom is a Drake composition, from a home tape predating his studio work, probably early 1968. The intricate guitar style, warm vocal tone, use of nature imagery and metaphor, and the bittersweet emotional terrain are all already there.

The other two are Richard Hewson's arrangements. He was hired to arrange several tracks on Nick's debut Five Leaves Left, but the versions were rejected and Nick convinced the production team to get his friend Robert Kirby in instead.

The only arrangement of Hewson's to officially see the light of day was I Was Made To Love Magic on Time of No Reply. The others were rumoured to be lost or even never recorded. However, Time Has Told Me proves otherwise with The Thoughts of Mary Jane and Day is Done.

Whilst Kirby's arrangements give a stark quality and timelessness to the work that's way above Hewson's talent, I do feel that Hewson's versions have been rather unfairly denigrated. ‘Disney’ is the pejorative commonly used, but this is wide of the mark.

Hewson’s work has a sense of English whimsy with a baroque undercurrent in keeping with others of the time, such as Donovan’s Jennifer Juniper, or David Bowie’s Deram material. And certainly, Robert Kirby’s arrangement of The Thoughts of Mary Jane is at least as light, floaty and whimsical as anything Hewson did.

I don't think it's helpful to tell you which version is 'best' though. The different versions illuminate different aspects of the song, and in doing so offer better insight into Nick’s work.

Robin Frederick, who wrote Been Smoking Too Long which Nick covers on Time of No Reply, has written several great articles about how his music works to captivate us. They're quite technical, but this doesn't do the appreciation of the work any harm, quite the reverse.

As she says herself, 'to think that what's important about Nick Drake is his dark romanticism is like thinking what's important about Brian Wilson is surfing'.

The story doesn’t quite end here. There are more recordings in the vaults, and there’s talk of a new album, provisionally titled Family Tree, which will contain much of the stuff from Time Has Told Me and possibly some songs by Nick’s mother Molly which have been described as ‘odd and haunting’ and apparently had strong influence on her son’s work.

[MP3s deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Flash & The Pan - Down Among The Dead Men

2005-07-13T12:18:00.000+01:00

Easy Beat
EASY2 (12inch: EASYT2)
1978, reissued 1983

In 1983 Flash And The Pan had an unlikely top ten hit in the UK with Waiting For A Train. It pulsed along, like if New York white guys did the backing track for Timmy Thomas' Why Can't We Live Together?, but with an oblique vocal about, well, waiting for a train over the top of it dryly delivered by a tinny voice.

The follow-up was the track featured here, Down Among The Dead Men. Originally released five years earlier as And The Band Played On (Down Among The Dead Men) (Ensign, ENY15) it also has that trebly vocal with a cold tone from the American New Wave, but bubbling in the same pot are a bright pop sensibility and that main riff that feels incredibly familiar.

The riff is so sticky, feeling so much like it's already part of your musical knowledge that the song doesn't ever leave you, and indeed it goes round my head periodically to this day. Hence its appearance on the blog.

The lyric is a straightforward telling of the maiden voyage of the Titanic. Why was this a single? How on earth did they think this would be a hit?

The weirdness by no means ends there. Flash And The Pan was the project of Harry Vanda and George Young. This Australian duo started out in the 1960s as The Easybeats, scoring a top ten hit in '66 with Friday On My Mind (later done by Bowie on his covers album Pin Ups).

From that humid, brooding yet soaring pop classic, they went on to write and produce the karaoke favourite Love Is In The Air in 1978. Suddenly we have context for that bright ascending bridge in Down Among The Dead Men that seems so incongruous dropping back down into the darker and more strident main body of the track.

Between these two projects, they released commercially unsuccessful singles under various names (Paintbox, Grapefruit, Haffy's Whisky Sour, Tramp; it was the turn of the 70s, after all). However, they are better known during this period for producing the first seven albums for the band that featured George's younger brothers Malcolm and der-ner-ner-NER-ner-ner-ner AnGUS; AC/DC.

How utterly bizarre that in the year at the end of that collaboration, 1978, they made AC/DC's Powerage and the live album If You Want Blood, simultaneously doing Love Is In The Air and Down Among The Dead Men.

This multiple split personality does give me clues as to why I return to this record; I never completely figure it out, I can't ever get where it's really coming from, different ideas and sensibilities surface on different occasions. And then, of course, there's that riff that does a velcro job to your brain.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Incidentally, I've always loved AC/DC's album title For Those About To Rock, We Salute You. It's so very particular; not for those who do rock, nor those who have rocked, or for those who might rock, not even those who will definitely rock but at some distant or as yet unspecified time. The salute is specifically and exclusively for those who, whilst they have not rocked as yet, will unquestionably begin to do so in the immediate future.

The Jam - Get Yourself Together & Move On Up (live)

2005-07-01T18:26:00.000+01:00

Polydor
SNAPL45
1983

Sorry for the gap in postings, been away a lot. Gonna be away again for another week too. In the meantime...

In summer 1983, about eight months after The Jam split up, they released a compilation album Snap!. It was done as any decent greatest hits should be; all the singles, some classy b-sides, star album tracks. All in chronological order too, so you can see the progression.

The splendour of the double LP Snap! was fucked over and made into a simple singles compilation to be squeezed on to a single CD, although there has been a limited re-issue CD that has the full original running order.

With The Jam and The Style Council, Paul Weller made a point of giving value for money. The B-sides - and often the A-sides - weren't lifted from albums, the sleeve design and notes had passion and care in them.

And with Snap!, there was a limited edition bonus, a 4-track live EP. Recorded on 2nd and 3rd December 1982 during their 5 sold-out nights at Wembley Arena on the farewell tour, there were two unsung Weller classics on side B and two typically well-chosen covers on side A.

As a sucker for a decent or weird cover, it's these two that I'm giving you here.

Move On Up is the Curtis Mayfield classic, a live favourite with both The Jam and The Style Council. White guys can't really cover soul with the same vibe as the original, but then there's no point in facsimile covers.

The thing that white folks bring to music is tension. For all that rock n roll is simplistically defined as a melding of blues and jazz, it's the longing of country music and the uptight repressed tension of pretty much any white popular music that complete the equation, and this is abundantly clear when comparing the original Move On Up with the intensity and punch of The Jam's cover here, executed with a power that way exceeds their studio version.

Get Yourself Together is a Small Faces cover. They did some bona fide classics - All Or Nothing is simply perfect - and this song stands proud amongst them.

The lyric is has a remarkable sentiment for its time. In an era when a progressive writer like John Lennon was writing songs like Run For Your Life threatening physical violence against a girlfriends for looking at another man (gee, when she's got such a caring sensitive guy already why would she want to?), Marriott and Lane wrote this song where the bloke is acknowledging his girlfriend's unspoken pining for her previous lover and offering consolation, support and hope, telling her that she has got the inner mettle to recover and be alright.

To my knowledge, these live tracks haven't been reissued anywhere apart from that limited Snap! CD.

= = = = = = = = = = =

UPDATE: After Paul Weller was given a Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music, his greatest hits albums have been repushed. (How many artists can have three greatest hits albums from different bands and them all be really good?). Universal saw fit to reissue Snap! on CD, together with a limited bonus three CD set that includes the Wembley live EP.

= = = = = = = = = = =

[MP3s deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Deacon Blue - Trampolene

2005-06-08T21:29:00.000+01:00

CBS
CDDEAC8
1989

Only two years after Julian Cope released his thrusting pop-rocking original of Trampolene, Deacon Fucking Blue inexplicably recast the song as an understated low-key extra track on the Wages Day EP.

Whilst I hesistate to say so about anything Deacon Fucking Blue ever did, it's actually nowhere near as bad as it could've been.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Lulu - The Man Who Sold The World

2005-05-29T14:57:00.000+01:00

Polydor
2001490
1974

Following on from the Peter Noone post, here's another example of Bowie playing on a cover of his song by a second rate lightweight British entertainer.

Previously best known for her respectable cover of the Isley Brothers' Shout in 1964, and subsequently for doing Relight My Fire with Take That in 1993, somehow her path crossed Bowie's in late 1973 and he decided to do a single for her.

It was the twilight of Bowie's collaboration with Mick Ronson, and together they put together the tracks. There's clear Ronson guitar, albeit mostly in a low-key strum, and Bowie plays sax and does chorus vocals on the A-side.

The B-side is a slightly pedestrian version of the Aladdin Sane track Watch That Man that gives Lulu the chance to exercise that rasp in her voice that she used to such effect on Shout.

As with Peter Noone's Oh You Pretty Things, you've got to wonder what the vacuous no-mark who was singing thought of Bowie's lyrics of psychological turmoil, alienation and breakdown.

Bowie's career is littered with little dead ends and peculiarities (Peter & The Wolf, for fuck's sake). Expect more here as time goes by.

In the meantime, this excellent Bowie site has loads of great rarities (irritatingly, they're all in the .rm file format). Bowie singing in Italian, Spanish, Mandarin, Indonesian and German, as well as obscurities in English too.

[MP3s deleted to make room for new ones. Sorry!]

Peter Noone - Oh You Pretty Things

2005-05-26T10:49:00.000+01:00

RAK
RAK114
1971

When Peter Noone's manager Mickie Most heard the gazillion demos Bowie recorded in late 1970/early 1971, he decided that Oh You Pretty Things was the ideal launchpad for the solo career of the erstwhile Herman's Hermits singer and proto-Austin Powers.

With Bowie himself playing piano on this version that predates his own take on Hunky Dory, it's a marvel of clashing worlds.

Never mind that the song is about dark things, primarily the sudden onset of a schizophrenic episode. Paste on yer cheery gameshow host shit-eating grin and sing it for all you're worth, Peter.

Which, in point of fact, is not very much.

[MP3 deleted to make room for new ones. Sorry!]

The Three O' Clock - Baroque Hoedown

2005-05-21T02:34:00.000+01:00

Frontier
FLP1010
1982

I loved The Three O’ Clock. Like the classic mid-period stuff by The Jam, they take 60s pop and give it post-punk muscularity with psychedilic tinges. Teenagers making bright shiny intelligent Rickenbacker pop, sparkling textures shimmering with superb 60s harmonies, and always something slightly uneasy and occult swimming under the surface.

The darker side is referenced in their name, taken from an Aldous Huxley quote, 'in the darkest corners of the mind it's always three o'clock in the morning'. Them and The Doors; anyone else taken their name from a Huxley quote?

Lumped in as part of the brief 'Paisley Underground' scene of 60s-influenced alternative pop, a subgenre from which only one band ever made it big.

The Bangles were signed up by Columbia and given a shiny corporate makeover, knocking off the edges of weird and making them palatable for mass consumption. The Three O'Clock's guitarist and half of the songwriting team, Louis Gutierrez, also co-wrote Walking Down Your Street, The Bangles follow-up to Walk Like An Egyptian.

The Three O'Clock, by contrast, sank without trace everywhere outside the USA. There were several more albums, including a production job by Ian Broudie and a release on Paisley Park, but the shine and bounce of their first two releases mean they remain my favourites by far.

The discrepancy between their US and UK popularity left me a little unsure what tracks to put up here. Do I go with a couple of the best tracks? Or is that too obvious for people who’ve already heard of them?

I’ve got a couple of very rare tracks, but if the band are new to you I want to show them in a representative light. So I found a middle option; the opening two tracks from their debut mini-LP Baroque Hoedown.

In America in the early 1980s there was a great but sadly short-lived format for music; the EP or mini-LP. The fact that it had two names sort of describes what was so good about it. It was a five track 12” - more than a single but less than an album.

Before this, you’d had to buy either a single or an album. A single is just the one song, it’s no proof of the artist’s vision or worth. A good single could be a fluke, and the B-side was no way to test it as flipsides were often just dustbins for half-arsed material.

But to go out and buy a whole album by an artist you’re unsure about? What if that good single really was a fluke?

The rise of the CD and decline of the 7" single put paid to this dilemma. If you like a song on the radio you have to buy the album, which may well be a turkey. In effect, you’re being sold a £10 single with 12 B-sides.

Unfortunately, the increased playing time on CDs meant artists expanded their albums to fit the space allotted. As someone who grew up on punk and 60s pop, I hold concision among the top virtues in popular music. I remember wading through the 60 minutes-plus of PM Dawn’s And Now The Legacy Begins (yeah, right guys - it pretty much ended there too, didn’t it) becoming deeply fearful for the future of albums.

Things got even worse in the 1990s with the complete death of the single, which is why downloading became so popular. For all the record industry’s complaints about downloading stealing from artists, it’s often CD sales that are stealing from punters.

A big part of downloading’s popularity is the same reason singles were popular. The basic unit of pop music is the song. People want the song. If they like that song, they usually want to know more by the artist.

The mini-LP gave you a real taste of an artist. With five tracks, there’s space to do something a bit weird that on a single would leave you wondering which of the two tracks was the real direction. Yet on a mini-LP it still had to be tight, to the point, and the punter hadn’t had to splash out the time or money on a full album.

North America never shared the UK’s passion for the 12” as a standard format for every single. Also, the UK has always loved non-album tracks on singles (in the UK it was seen as making the single good value, whereas in the US putting the tracks on the album was what made that good value, The throwing on of UK non-album material is why the Beatles released several ‘extra’ albums in the US).

This meant that British artists had enough tracks around from singles from which good mini-LPs could be easily compiled (as with, say, The Jam or The Alarm). Alternatively, American record companies could test the Stateside water for a new British artist by trimming their debut album down to a mini-LP (as happened with The Waterboys).

New American artists specifically recorded mini-LPs. The first proper releases by many bands of the time were in the format. REM’s Chronic Town is a masterpiece example.

In these days of CD reissue, mini-LPs present a problem. REM tucked the brilliant Chronic Town away as bonus tracks on a compilation of 80s B-sides. Another of my favourite bands, The Church, only got around to reissuing their wonderful 1982 Sing Songs mini-LP in 2001. Many bands simply leave them deleted.

Baroque Hoedown is available as the bonus on the CD of The Three O'Clock's first album-proper, Sixteen Tambourines (for a couple of years in my mid teens that was my favourite record). The album continues in the vein set out on Baroque Hoedown, so do go get the whole thing if you like what you hear here.

If these tracks get a positive response in the comments (or if there's people saying 'I've already got this, gimme something I've not heard') I’ll put up the rarities as well.

[MP3s deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Premiere Classe - La Fille Qui Rit

2005-05-14T13:55:00.000+01:00

unknown label
CART252
1982

Like my copy of Holland Tunnel Dive by impLOG, I got this record in the mid 80s off Steve The Busker and loved the obscurity. There was even less to know about this - the lyrics are in French and the record just bears a blank green label with felt pen saying 'PREMIERE CLASSE with POUPEE FLASH'.

The authenticity of the French vocal said it was from France or Belgium. The still-novel enthusiasm for the synths said it was early 1980s. Beyond that I knew nothing.

Whilst Poupée Flash is an inventive piece of electropop, it was the B-side that enthralled me with its soft seething dark charm. The gentle languidly playful vocal, the opiated mystique of an atmosphere in a keyboard driven pop song, the understatement of piece made me come back to it again and again when making compilation tapes for people.

I always had to credit it as 'b-side of Poupée Flash'. But in these days of Google I've just found out - like just now, the last ten minutes - that the mesmerising B-side is called La Fille Qui Rit. The record came out in 1982 on Polydor in France (Polydor 2056937) and was popular in Belgium and the Netherlands. It also commands high prices at online record shops.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Aztec Camera - Jump (loaded version)

2005-05-05T12:12:00.000+01:00

WEA
12 inch : AC1T
1984

As mentioned in that Smiths post, I have great respect for bands who put good stuff on B-sides. Fuck instrumental versions of the A-side, haven't ya got anything more to say?

Loads of my favourite artists had some of their best work tucked away as extra tracks.

As Peter Buck said in the sleevenotes to REM's 1987 B-sides compilation Dead Letter Office;

No matter how lavish that packaging, no matter what attention to detail, a 45 is still essentially a piece of crap usually purchased by teenagers. This is why musicians feel free to put just about anything on the B-side; nobody will listen to it anyway, so why not have some fun. You can clear the closet of failed experiments, badly written songs, drunken jokes and, occasionally, a worthwhile song that doesn't fit the feel of an album.

I'd add another couple of categories - artists like The Jam, The Beatles and The Smiths who were simply so talented and prolific that they could release good albums and good singles with good B-sides; and secondly that great staple of the B-side, the inspired cover version.

Aztec Camera were great for B-sides on pretty much every category. There has been a B-sides album released in Japan (Covers & Rare, WEA WMC5-671), but it misses off a couple of corkers, and it should be available worldwide.

Not only did they use their B-sides for some gorgeous original songs, but they were masters of the unexpected cover. You can expect to see a few crop up on this blog in times to come. True Colors, The Red Flag, Dylan's I Threw It All Away and, for now, this. Van Halen's Jump, recorded only six months after the original, as the B-side of All I Need Is Everything.

It was the flagship single for Aztec Camera's second album Knife, and their first release since signing to a major label. Would the corporate muscle have pushed out the subtlety, intelligence and quirkiness that characterised the previous releases on Rough Trade and the legendary Postcard labels?

This B-side was here to make the answer plain. Roddy Frame (the band's one-and-only in the same sense that Matt Johnson is The The) utterly disarms the cock-rock and makes it a gentle tongue-in-cheek acoustic glide.

On the 7 inch, that's all there is. On the 12 inch there's the Loaded Version, where it carries on longer and a squealy widdly-widdly metal guitar solo comes in and rocks away, getting louder and louder until it drowns out everything else. Mental.

[MP3 deleted to make space for new ones. Sorry!]

The Smiths - Jeane

2005-05-01T18:43:00.000+01:00

Rough Trade
RT136
1983

Before I get started on this wonderful lost Smiths gem, let me nudge you towards an article. Thurston Moore's written this piece about how cool mix tapes are. The bit relevant to us here is his conclusion;

Once again, we're being told that home taping (in the form of ripping and burning) is killing music. But it's not: It simply exists as a nod to the true love and ego involved in sharing music with friends and lovers. Trying to control music sharing - by shutting down P2P sites or MP3 blogs or BitTorrent or whatever other technology comes along - is like trying to control an affair of the heart. Nothing will stop it.

Go Thurston.

So then. It's 1983 and the Smiths release their second single, This Charming Man. The Smiths were a total bolt from the blue. The music was intelligent, melodic, mature yet swimming in youthful vigour and intent. The lyrics were not only so wry and literate, but depicted angles and situations not normally the preserve of pop writers. They were also one of the few bands who you had no idea what music they listened to at home. What the hell were their influences?

On top of this, they were one of those bands who clearly loved records as artefacts and were determined to give people something of real worth. A serious proportion of their singles weren't lifted from albums, and they came with B-sides and extra tracks that were not only exclusive to the singles, but were frankly as good as the A-sides.

Such a prolific output led to several compilations sweeping up those non-album tracks (Hatful of Hollow, Louder Than Bombs, The World Won't Listen), yet somehow Jeane slipped through the net and appears never to have been issued anywhere but on the B-side of the This Charming Man 7 inch.

A powerful urgent stomper of a track, the lyric has a lover finally conceding the truth to their partner, that their affair is over and their shared home now seems shabby and squalid. The angle, and the chosen details that describe it, were thoroughly arresting for me as an adolescent so used to that Stylistics attitude of 'I'm only poor but we have each other, I find my happiness when I look in your eyes' sort of stuff.

Jeane says precisely the opposite

Jeane
The low-life has lost its appeal
And I'm tired of walking these streets
To a room with its cupboards bare
Jeane
I'm not sure what happiness means
But I look in your eyes
And I know that it isn't there

Those words set against the pounding music, draped with Morrissey's falsetto; it was utterly captivating, proof that This Charming Man wasn't a fluke and this band could deliver us great things.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Alvin Stardust - Be Smart Be Safe

2005-04-28T02:49:00.000+01:00

Magnet
MAG39
1975

What the fuck was going on in 1975? A nation badly in need of the punk revolution. People talk about how we needed it to rescue us from prog, but they forget about the other twaddle. The dreadful childish novelty element, from stage-school twats like Brotherhood Of Man to one Wombles hit after another. Bill Oddie was the fourth most successful songwriter in the UK in 1975.

And Alvin Stardust issued a strange looming cover of Cliff Richard's Move It. But that's not quite what we're looking at here today. We're flipping that single over to find its B-side, Be Smart Be Safe (The Green Cross Code Song).

In the early-mid 70s Alvin was a mean moody glam rocker. He also fronted a big advertising campaign promoting road safety for kids.

Alvin's followed on from the success of the one with Mud in where they all leave the house - dressed in their trademark sky blue and gold outfits with a clear implication they just wore them all the time - then Les Gray spots kids crossing the road between parked vehicles and goes and puts them straight.

Alvin is walking down the street in his leathers when he sees kids crossing the road without looking first. Grabbing them by the scruff of the neck he bellows 'you must be out of your tiny minds!'.

I remember it struck me as incongruous at the time. He was pretty sinister to us under-10s, frankly if he'd appeared next to me on the street I'd have bolted into the road to get away from him. He certainly seemed an awful lot more threatening than a beige Allegro.

Tufty the road safety squirrel was a much better idea; equally authoritative but not half as scary.

Still, for Alvin it wasn't just an advert it was a way of life, and he penned this song himself. Throwaway dirty glam guitar and ludicrous lyrics about road safety. Focus on the words and try not to laugh, see how far you get.

Network, the same cool folks who are issuing The Sweeney on DVD, have released Charley Live, a compilation video of loads of those hilarious 70s Public Information Films, including Alvin's 'you must be out of your tiny minds!'. The DVD version amalgamates it with 'Charley Says', a collection of animated PIFs.

Aside of the celebrity-fronted ones, this stuff is really creepy. They start with some innocent scene - kids playing, someone getting in their car - but with the ominous certainy that within 30 seconds something very horrible and probably fatal will have happened. Then when you watch the Charley Says compilation you get one after another with a chilling cumulative effect. Imagine if David Lynch directed 30-second episodes of Man About the House, Grange Hill and The Sweeney rolled into one.
It's really far out when you're bonced, the maddest weirdest stuff you'll see all year.

Be Smart, Be Safe - always use the Green Cross Code.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Georgie Fame - Sitting In The Park

2005-04-25T02:07:00.000+01:00

Columbia
DB8096
1966

I've just spent a long afternoon and evening on my allotment which is in the middle of Hyde Park in Leeds. The houses round here are largely back to back terraces, and the houses that do have a garden generally don't do much with it; either concreted for car space or the classic rented accommodation mix of matresses, nettles and bottles. So, come a sunny day like today, everyone uses the park as one big communal garden, and it's a fab vibe, rammed with folks arsing about.

No surprise then that Sitting In The Park has been going round my head all day. It was written and orginally released by Billy Stewart on Chess records in 1965, the same year as his utterly gorgeous soul slowie I Do Love You. Both of those records push the same blissy buttons of reverie in me as Bloodstone's Natural High and a fistful of Chi-Lites and Delfonics classics.

Really, if you want a big favour out of me or need to tell me that you've accidentally burnt my flat down, just play me I Do Love You and Natural High first and I'm sure I'll be fine about it.

Despite Billy's wonderful work on Sitting In The Park, I'm giving you Georgie Fame's cover from the following year. Where Billy gave it a vocal backing, Fame went for brass with a great trebly Caribbean tone, augmented by floaty flute which perfectly counterpoints his low jazzy voice.

Balmy, languid, like dandelion seeds blowing past on a hot breeze, sparkling like sunlight on rippling water, this record has a perfect beautiful drifty summer feeling underpinned with just a pinch of melancholy.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

The Ska-Dows - Apache

2005-04-19T20:22:00.000+01:00

Cheapskate Records
CHEAP1
1980

It's almost paradoxical how the stronger defined a movement is, the more cover versions it can do.

Punk was such a shocking break from all other musics, yet it was chock full of covers of non-punk tracks. The Stranglers doing Walk On By, The Jam doing Sweet Soul Music, and The Dickies doing Paranoid, Banana Splits, Sound of Silence and, well, most of their output.

Bowie, the great pioneer, has put a cover version on most of his albums, from Nina Simone's Wild Is The Wind, through the Beach Boys' God Only Knows to Morrissey's I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday.

The late 70s ska revival stayed on home turf a bit more, with the covers generally being ska, reggae and rocksteady tracks from ten or fifteen years earlier.

But then there was this, a low budget single from London, a ska version of the Shadows classic Apache. The dark tense twangy guiar line lends itself readily to ska (think The Specials' Rat Race), and doing a reggae breakdown bridge is inspired.

The cover is a work of comic genius, Hank Marvin tied to a stratocaster totem pole.

I know nothing about the band. Were they, as the name suggests and as would be just soooo great, an exclusively Shadows-covering ska band?

With that catalogue number I'm not sure if they or anyone else ever released anything on the label. That said, there was a weird single I used to have, a song called I Like Bluebeat done by a different band on each side (Cairo and The Outline). I'm not sure, but that might've been on Cheapskate as well. Same sort of music, same era, not unlikely, but it was so long ago that my mind can no longer dredge the precise detail.

Swift, uplifting, daft, and brilliant. This record could be installed in hospitals for medical use; if it doesn't make the listener grin broadly and want to dance then they can be pronounced clinically dead.

[MP3 deleted to make way for newer ones. Sorry!]

impLOG - Holland Tunnel Dive

2005-04-14T12:09:00.000+01:00

In-Fidelity Records
12 inch JMB-231
1980

I can know almost nothing about where this record came from, and I find that to be part of its allure. I'll tell you what I do know.

I was living in Southport in the mid 80s and knew an effervescent scouser called Steve The Busker. He, like me, was a keen jumble sale and charity shop trawler with a particular penchant for records. He was the only person apart from me and my brother who loved disco at the time. More than that, we were the only people who saw disco as a form of soul music. Everyone else saw it as pathetic cheesy nonsense. A big part of that is because it belonged to a time that had become unfashionable, a time of flares and wide lapels.

The 80s was a time when individuality was breaking out. Sure, part of it was the selfish Thatcherite vision, but a positive part of it was the shedding of uniformity. Before the 80s there was a compulsory element to trends. To wear flares in the early 80s was to be a laughable buffoon. Flares were, in and of themselves, seen as comical. In the mid 70s, the same was true about drainpipe trousers.

But the 80s made great strides (couldn't resist the pun, sorry) for the freedom to carve out your own style and path and not be seen as just stupid and square. There are deeper implications of this in the freedom it granted to be different in other ways, to shed other kinds of conformity without being utterly ostracised.

This shift, which has continued apace to this day, obviously has many causes. But I reckon a key one is the ageing population. In the 60s and 70s we were overrun with under-20s so consequently there was a great cult of youth, things that were old were thought to be bad simply for being old. As the young are less of the population, so their vision holds less popular sway.

Also, as the last two or three generations have enjoyed a similar lifestyle they can relate to each other well and so appreciate each other's styles and creative expression. But in the mid-late 20th century, two or three generations back had been the World Wars, the Great Depression and suchlike; no wonder they couldn't really communicate with kids in the 70s and there were inevitable canyonesque generation gaps.

Anyway, so, there we were in the 80s, me and Steve The Busker listening to disco. He'd put me on to numerous records I'd never have found otherwise. Natural High by Bloodstone, which is quite simply the most beautiful record ever made. A gorgeous soft 70s soul slowie, listening to it is like sliding into a warm bath of chocolate duvets.

Actually, that's quite an unsavoury image if you think about it too long, but you get where I'm coming from. Like the Delfonics only much more so. These days you can find Natural High on the Jackie Brown soundtrack.

And Steve The Busker also put me on to some fucking weird shit. Top of that list would be Holland Tunnel Dive. A relentless cold electronic beat, a sharding tannoy vocal listing things that have died or run out or ceased in some other way... no bridges to burn, nothing to learn, no soul, no love, no dinner tonight, no woman, no cry, no respect, no equal rights, no garden to hoe, no seeds to sow, no food in the fridge, no TV shows, no emotion, no devotion, no trips to the ocean...

And then ending each verse - if you can call the segments that - with 'leaving for the other side, going to take a Holland Tunnel Dive' and a noise that literally sounds like a hoover kicking in, overpowering all other sound on the record. This was even weirder before I knew what Holland Tunnel was.

And on it goes. Until, once you've thoroughly entranced by the bleak metronomic quality punctuated by turbo vacuum cleaner, straight out of left field comes an absurdly chirpy bright bouncy sax break.

This was a favourite record to listen when I was first into smoking dope, it really stretches your head and makes you get your money's worth out of your drugs. One time the sax break caused a caned friend to have his mental scales tip and he ran out of the room with his hands on his ears shouting 'no trumpets! no trumpets!'.

Music reflects its environment. Runrig are the most tedious band on earth if you listen to them in London, like Big Country on mogadon. But trust me, if you're living on a Scottish island, Runrig sound fuckin great.

In the same way, Holland Tunnel Dive is a very NYC record, from the only place that could give you John Zorn, Sonic Youth and other things that sound like filing cabinets full of powertools being dropped down stairwells.

So who were impLOG? I've no idea. The label, In-Fidelity, is one I've never heard of before, its address is just a box number at Grand Central Station. I love that, it makes it feel a lot more exotic.

[MP3 deleted to make way for newer ones. Sorry!]

Blondie - Sunday Girl (French version)

2005-04-09T10:50:00.000+01:00

Chrysalis Records
12 inch CHS12-2320
1979

People often rerecorded their songs in other languages in order to appeal to different markets. The Beatles redid She Loves You in German ('Sie lieb dich, ja ja ja'). Abba did so many in Spanish that there's a whole album of it.

But some artists have done it for reasons other than marketing. In order to make some point about the universality of the message, Culture Club recorded their monstrously absurd War Song in English, Spanish, French, Japanese and others. It was still shit in all of them, mind.

And then there's a third category. The ones who rerecorded the vocal in another language for no apparent reason whatsoever.

Silky-smooth 70s midnight soul merchants The Moments did Look At Me (I'm In Love) in French as the B-side of the English version, rather than to sell in anywhere French-speaking. The Teardrop Explodes did Treason in French in a similarly gratuitous manner. And Blondie did Sunday Girl in French, then tucked it away on the 12" of the single.

It's a weird effect, a song you know really well, the proper original backing and the right voice, but the words all different. It's kind of like seeing your mum if she'd just had a nosejob, or a mate who's just had their dreads cut off. It gooses me every time.

[MP3 deleted to make way for newer ones. Sorry!]

Lord Rockingham's XI - Hoots Mon

2005-04-03T16:16:00.000+01:00

Decca Records
45-F 11059
1958

A piece of novelty fluff from the late 50s, this track nonetheless has a serrated lunatic energy and punch that makes it well worth a listen.

A romping primal rock n roll instrumental with daft breaks of spoken Scots, it's one of the few genuinely great and raucous British rock n roll records. That distortion on the intro isn't me badly encoding, the thing was deliberately released that way.

It kicks deep and hard and yet retains a strong sense of daftness throughout, making it a great dancefloor record. I've DJed this one at 3am during an all-nighter and had people go fuckin nuts.

Lord Rockingham's XI - and what a fantastic name for a band that is - were the house band on Oh Boy!, the late 50s ITV rough and ready competitor to the more staid Six Five Special on the BBC. At the time, these were the only TV outlets for any kind of rock n roll or pop music, and so the significance is not to be underestimated.

In point of fact, the XI's leader was the unennobled Harry Robinson, and there were actually 13 of them. They only released three singles, only two were hits, and only this one was a big seller (500,000 copies sold in the UK, number one for three weeks).

In the kind of thing that always seems more unsporting for novelty records than for more serious work, Oh Boy!'s creator Jack Good fought a legal battle with Harry Robinson for the Lord Rockingham name, culminating in a weird splitting of the rights.

There are one or two little biogs for the band online, and most end with the Rockingham thing. But there's an extra weird twist.

Ten years later - not long after an unsuccessful comeback attempt for Lord Rockingham's XI - Robinson was working as an arranger. In total contrast to the established structure and comedic overtones of Hoots Mon, he did the astonishingly beautiful strings on River Man by Nick Drake on the Five Leaves Left album.

As I've said elsewhere, Nick Drake is as good as music can possibly get. And River Man's arrangement is perfect, being like Drake's work itself, strangely ethereal, timeless, lilting, melancholic, balmy, intimate and otherworldly. A truly remarkable piece of work and as far removed from this rocking stomper as pop music could get whilst still being really good.

[MP3 removed to free up server space for new posts. Sorry!]

Intaferon - Steamhammer Sam

2005-03-30T09:58:00.000+01:00

Chrysalis Records
7 inch CHS2750
1983

(I've included the back of the cover so you get a decent picture of the band)

Having picked up a fair bit of airplay for the debut Get Out Of London but sold sod all copies, the commercially smart thing to do would be to put out another record with the same energy and sound, but different hooks.

But not Intaferon. They went back into the studio and recorded Steamhammer Sam.

They kept the principle of their first single - to merge disparate threads of musical styles into something intriguing, catchy and contemporarily relevant - but stylistically it's another world.

Where Get Out Of London's lyrics were a ratatat of paranoid imagery, Steamhammer Sam is a straightforward narrative story.

It was 1983, Thatcher's talons were tearing deep into the social fabric of the UK, and mass unemployment was a prime symptom. Steamhammer Sam was a topical story of a man who'd worked his whole life in heavy industry, got made redundant and became hopeless, directionless and alcoholic, ending his days alone in prison. Cheery surefire radio-friendly hit there.

Musically, the electropunk drive of Get Out Of London is nowhere to be seen, as Steamhammer Sam is driven by a piano-based sort of rhythm that could be termed The Madness Two-Step, the kind of thing that provides tha basis for tracks like The Size Of A Cow by The Wonder Stuff, or Grimly Fiendish by The Damned.

There are snatches of Glam Rock guitar (as I've said elsewhere, by 'Glam Rock' I mean the 70s stuff, not 80s poodle-metal), but the peculiarity really kicks in with the addition of a full colliery style brass band, and towards the end a choir of children do a sprightly singalong chorus, in stark contrast to the mood of the lyric.

As if to underline the bizarrity, the B-side is The Continuing Story of Steamhammer Sam, an instrumental version played entirely by that brass band.

The 7 inch came shrinkwrapped with a free 3-track cassette and sticker. I still have the sticker, but the cassette disappeared years ago and I can't even remember what was on it. It must've contained something not on the Get Out Of London and Steamhammer Sam singles, though.

As with its predecsssor, the single sold next to nothing, and after the subsequent Baby Pain they were never heard of again.

[downloads removed due to needing the server space for new postings]

Intaferon - Get Out Of London

2005-03-29T00:00:00.000+01:00

Chrysalis Records
7 inch CHS2715, 12 inch CHS122715
1983

Well it seems the obvious place to start. As the Lost Bands Of The New Wave Era post about Intaferon's Baby Pain was my nudge to start this blog, let's get going with those other two singles. First up is the debut, Get Out Of London

I remember this coming on the radio and finding it thoroughly arresting. We were just out of New Romantics time, and this had all that dark brooding tone from that, but with a bristling propulsive power that hadn't been on the airwaves for years. The lyrics are a frantic and volatile, if somewhat oblique, breathless rant. I've stuck them on the MP3 for those of you who use players that can read all the extra info.

The cover is cool too - the dynamism of the track complemented by the black and red lettering, the urgency of making the title all one word in capitals, and the desperate lunge of the picture.

Although the more cynical among us could point out that even if they managed to grab hands, the guy at the back is going to get dragged along the road. Also, a Routemaster bus isn't the prime method for getting out of London, more like for getting around it.

Intaferon were a duo - Simon Fellowes and Simon Gillham - named after a cancer treatment drug. They were produced by Martin Rushent, at that time a Very Big Name. He'd produced all those early Buzzcocks classics, but then went all electronic and produced the Human League's Dare album (the one with Don't You Want Me and all those on).

You can see both elements combining on Get Out Of London, romping synth basslines and strident guitars melding together brilliantly.

Rushent was also a pioneer of the 1980s style 12 inch remix. Most of these were total rubbish; just half the song, then a drum machine and bassline noodling on for a couple of minutes, then the other half of the song. Complete waste of time and vinyl, a cynical marketing ploy.

Over on my Strawberry Switchblade site there's a hilarious discussion of such mixes. The band, both their managers and both their producers all deny responsibility for them. One manager, Bill Drummond, explains

At that time the whole idea of a remixer as being somebody special and somebody you pay a whack of money to go and do it, and this is an actual job, it just didn't exist in those days. You made a record and, as you said, you had to have a twelve inch and so you'd just sit around and think, 'OK, we'll double the length of that drumbeat, double the length of that,' and you'd got a twelve inch. It's like asking me who made the cup of tea.

Rushent's remix is a lot more busy and worthy than the overwhelming majority of 80s 12 inches, and keeps the kinetic fizz of the 7 inch mix, though it does still sound a tad dated nowadays. That heavy use of Paul Hardcastle style sampler stutter hasn't really sounded much good since, well, Paul Hardcastle.

Check back in a few days for the follow-up single, Steamhammer Sam.

[downloads removed due to needing the server space for new postings]

lend me your ears and I'll encode you a song

2005-03-28T16:29:00.000+01:00

I've been really liking several MP3 blogs. They've made me relisten to tracks I've not heard in years, given me background info on bands and songs I'd never known any details about, and put music my way that I'd otherwise never have found.

Seven Inches of Joy was uncanny for digging out records I'd bought in my early teens. Surely we were the only two people who had singles by Cindy & The Saffrons or, appropriately enough, by Two People.

So I was dismayed to see Seven Inches of Joy's recent closure. Around the same time, I stumbled across Lost Bands Of The New Wave Era posting Baby Pain by Intaferon. They had no solid info about other Intaferon records. I, however, have both of their other singles.

This all combined to make me think fuck it, I'll do a MP3 blog meself. I've enough lost gems and oddities that warrant a small airing, usually with some bit of info or considered opinion to go with it.

It's going to be a right old mix. There'll be punk and pop and soul and weirdness. There'll be greatness and there'll unintentional comedy. There'll be peculiar cover versions and one-hit (or no-hit) wonders. It will range from the 1950s to the 1990s with, I suspect, a bias towards 1980ish-1992ish, my prime record buying years.

I'll add summat new once or twice a week. That's the plan, anyway.