Rolling Stones - Exile On Main Street flexi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!]