Pixies - Hey (live in London 1988)

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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.

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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.

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