- These are the Ghosts – The Bees
- Stagger Lee – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
- You Don’t Miss Your Water – The Byrds
- It’s All in My Mind – Teenage Fanclub
- What Goes On – The Velvet Underground
- Her Name is Melody – Adrian Pride
- Come See About Me – The Supremes
- Animal Farm – The Kinks
- I Can’t Be Me – Eddie Hinton
- Guilty – Barbra Streisand
- Enough Said – Devo
- Red Sails – David Bowie
- Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed – Silver Jews
- The Lower the Sun – Tom Vek
- Outlines – Clor
- When You Get Home – The Research
- Andy’s Chest – Lou Reed
- Time Will Show the Wiser – Fairport Convention
- Baby Please Don’t Go – The Amboy Dukes
- Sway – The Rolling Stones
- Draw a Smile Upon an Egg – Comet Gain
- The Partisan – Leonard Cohen
'These
are the Ghosts' introduces the album Free the Bees, and so it
does Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed,
a ploy that will be recognisable to anyone familiar with my compilations. You
can take it from this that I acquired Free
the Bees in 2005, not 2006. This does not always follow but applies in this
instance; in 2005 the song narrowly missed the cut.
The way The Bees presented
themselves disappointed me. As a band, they were more overtly influenced by the
1960s than many of their contemporaries, wrote better tunes than many of their
contemporaries. There was an opportunity begging. Instead they elected to collectively dress
like Badly Drawn Boy, as a bevy of hard-drinking skaters. Not important, just a
shame, and it didn’t stop me from playing Free
the Bees relentlessly
for a period of time.
Copenhagen with No Eyes and her husband.
It’s a bit in late in the day to be coining new nicknames but her husband probably deserves a sobriquet of his own. After all, he did introduce me to Boozoo
Bajou’s 'Night Over Manaus', which appears
on 2000’s compilation The Ladies of
Varades, as well as 'Happiness' by
Teenage Fanclub, which I included on the following year’s The Boys of Summer, and he came on both the associated holidays – at which he would mysteriously disappear
and then re-appear, earning him the epithet ‘Teleport Man’.
Copenhagen with No Eyes and
Teleport Man. Teleport Man has been shouted at for taking photographs in Freetown
Christiania by one of its free-spirited natives. It is February, so fairly cold,
and we’ve been out for much of the day. Everything points towards stopping
somewhere for a drink. The Eiffel Bar is nearby, a locals’ sort of place, dank
but possessing character. There’s country rock playing in the background but my
attempt to extract from the landlord the artist responsible leads nowhere.
Two
days later and it’s just me and my partner. We would like a cup of coffee
and find a café on Larsbjørnsstræde.
Music is playing. I'm fairly sure it's Nick Cave but I don't know which record - something about a guy called Stagger Lee. The proprietor speaks English. It is Nick Cave (with the Bad Seeds) and the album playing is called Murder
Ballads.
It’s March. We’ve hired a
cottage near Abergwesyn in Wales to belatedly celebrate the 30th birthday of the friend who dropped in Debenhams. It snowed on
the drive in and it’s more than a foot deep in places. The lad who once lent me The Sound of the Suburbs (the same who
would beat me at snooker) is here. Turns out he’s a big fan of Murder Ballads. He takes me to his car so
we can listen to 'Stagger Lee' on his
new car-stereo, at volume, late at night in the privacy afforded by Abergwesyn
Valley.
It was the 1994 record Let Love In that first aroused my
interest in Nick Cave but it was Murder
Ballads that stepped it up. It’s literally an album of ballads concerning
murder, and it betrays a humour in Cave’s work that had until now escaped me.
Wales
Having enjoyed the first two Flying
Burrito Brothers – The Gilded Palace of
Sin and Burrito Deluxe – I got
around to buying Sweetheart of the Rodeo. I covered a bit of the back-story in my liner notes
to Aka ‘Devil in Disguise’. I wrote thusly: '1968 was a
period of transition for The Byrds. Having removed David Crosby from the fold, they
were struggling to perform The Notorious
Byrd Brothers in a live setting to a satisfactory standard. Enter Gram
Parsons, initially on keys and then guitar. Gram had already cultivated a
country-rock sound with his group The International Submarine Band, so it was a
willing combination. By August, The Byrds had recorded and released their next
album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo,
regarded by some as the first pure country-rock record.' I also remarked that Sweetheart of the Rodeo consists mostly
of covers. 'You Don’t Miss Your Water' was a soul record released on
Stax, written and recorded by William Bell. It also appeared as the final track
on Otis Redding’s Otis Blue, so it has good pedigree and the Byrds do a
fine job on it.
I’m fairly sure it was me who used to play Bandwagonesque by
Teenage Fanclub back in the day, but my Cornish friend seems to have taken over
the mantle. After enjoying Four Thousand Seven
Hundred And Sixty-Six Seconds - A Short Cut To Teenage Fanclub in 2003, in 2005 he bought their new album, Man-Made,
and in 2006 he let me borrow it. I normally prefer Raymond McGinley’s songs but 'It’s All in My Mind' is one of Norman Blake’s.
Back in Copenhagen, looking for somewhere to eat. It’s one of those
evenings where you’re unsure of your appetite. After a few beers, proceeded by
too much walking, we decide to take a chance on a place called Bang &
Jensen. The gamble pays off: the food is good, the interior décor pleasing to
the eye, the prices reasonable for a city with Copenhagen’s reputation,
and they’re playing The Best of The Velvet Underground: Words and Music of
Lou Reed. I know this
because the CD case is propped up in front of the CD player. I am unfamiliar with tracks 9 and 10 – 'What Goes On' and 'Beginning to See the Light' – but they strike me as very much worth having. Within four days of my return to London, I will have bought both Murder Ballads by Nick
Cave & the Bad Seeds and The Velvet
Underground by The Velvet Underground.
My regard for the 1960s, and for
psychedelic garage rock in particular, had persisted. I procured Nuggets:
Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-68 prior to buying My Mind Goes
High: Psychedelic Pop Nuggets from the WEA Vaults, but it’s the
latter that makes the first appearance on this playlist in the form of Adrian
Pride. 'Her Name is Melody' alone justifies
the purchase: a psychedelic raga with an exquisite vocal, it deserves to be more well known.
I’d
probably watched Catholic Boys again,
because I’d resolved to include 'Come See
About Me' by The Supremes on my next compilation. I was able to do so after
finding 20 Golden Greats, credited to Diana Ross & The Supremes, among the detritus of my
parents’ record collection. 'Come See
About Me' originally appeared on The Supremes’ LP Where Did Our Love Go, released 1964. Catholic Boys (aka Heaven
Help Us) is set in Brooklyn, circa 1965. 'Come See About Me' serves as the backdrop to a scene where Mary
Stuart Masterson’s soda shop is raided by the ‘brothers’ who teach across the
road at St. Basils. Andrew McCarthy hangs back to help her clean up the mess,
and romance ensues.
If
I’d converted to MiniDisc a few years earlier than I eventually did, it’s possible that 'Death of a Clown' by the
Kinks would have ended up on one of my compendiums. A borrowed greatest hits
collection was knocking around our flat in Brentford for a while, but, as is typical
of so many self-serving anthologies, it lacked the necessary context to sustain
my interest. By the time I’d got back into the habit of making annual
compilations the opportunity had passed. It took an advert for digital imaging
products for me to think about the Kinks, featuring the song 'Picture Book'. I’d neither heard it nor
heard of it, but the album it heralded from was available from my local high-street record store for a
mere six pounds. Most Kinks’ greatest hit compendiums completely sidestep The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation
Society – unless you count 'Days',
which never appeared on the original record but gets tacked on
whenever the album’s reissued – but I can identify at least five tunes from it
that are up there among the group’s best. When it came to selecting material
for my annual playlist, I found it almost impossible to choose between two of
them: 'Animal Farm' and 'Starstruck'. Consider these interchangeable.
No Eyes and Teleport Man were
living in Brighton and Hove. In 2005 my lady friend and I visited four times. I
don’t know on which stay it was, but I identified a tune on a compilation they
owned called Country Got Soul Volume Two as worth having: 'I Can’t be Me' by Eddie Hinton. Primarily
a session musician, Eddie Hinton played on the records of Wilson Pickett, Percy
Sledge, Otis Redding, but could also sing a bit himself (deliberate
understatement). Muscle Shoals progenitor Jerry Wexler described Hinton as, 'a white boy who truly sang and played in
the spirit of the great black soul artists he venerated.'
I’d all but exhausted
my parents’ record collection by this point. I made a final pass anyway and
annexed their copy of 'Guilty' by
Barbra Streisand, featuring Barry Gibb. I don’t buy into the concept of guilty
pleasure (no pun intended) but this is the sort of thing people are alluding
to when they make a claim for it. There’s nothing to be remotely embarrassed
about. Even if there was, why not just concede to having philistine taste and
be done with it? But 'Guilty' is not
that. It is a flawless pop song, as good as anything contrived by the genre’s
archetypes: The Beatles, Beach Boys, Rolling Stones. Time signatures are
constantly changing, from 5/4 to 4/4 and back to 5/4 during the verse, and
alternating between 3/4 and 4/4 in the midst of the chorus. There are some
ingenious chord changes too. My favourite is the shift from Dm to Ebmaj7
and the way Barry Gibb vocally segues into it:
Dm
Am Dm
You got a reason for livin'
Ebmaj7
You bat-tle on_with the love you're building on.
There’s
nothing wilful about these unexpected deviations – the song’s mode is strophic:
introduction, verse, bridge, chorus, instrumental breakout, verse,
bridge, chorus, refrain, fade – and each deflection serves to move the song
towards its resolution (there aren’t the episodic digressions of, say, 'Good Vibrations' by the Beach Boys). But
it’s hard to call. Almost every line leads where you’d least expect it to, an
exercise in suspense, patient with itself.
Secondhand vinyl
can be surprisingly inexpensive. Rare pressings in mint condition, of the sort secondhand
dealerships like to hang on their walls, might set you back a bit, but for
anything else I wouldn’t expect to pay more than a cockle. Most of my David
Bowie records cost around this, their popularity at the time of their release
ensuring that supply continues to exceed demand. I think I paid the same for New
Traditionalists by Devo, whereas Duty Now for the Future cost me a paltry £3. New Traditionalists
is the better album and very underrated. 'Through Being Cool', 'Soft Things', 'The Super Thing', 'Beautiful World', 'Enough Said'… there’s
barely a bad song on there.
David Bowie had championed Devo in their
earlier years, to the extent that he co-produced their first album alongside
Brian Eno (although by all accounts it wasn’t the most satisfying of partnerships).
Might it have been this that directed me back towards David Bowie?
More likely it was my trip to Berlin in October 2004, although before
completing Bowie’s so-called ‘Berlin Trilogy’ with Lodger I first bought
Station to Station, the album he recorded in Los Angeles before
absconding to Europe. Station to Station is clearly the better album but its songs possess an epic quality that would have felt out of place on this compilation. That being said, Lodger
could be Bowie’s most underrated work. To complement the nature of the previous
track – Devo’s 'Enough Said' – I wanted to follow up with something urgent
and was torn between 'Red Sails' and 'Look Back in Anger'. Bowie’s
slightly more tempered vocal on 'Red Sails' swung it.
I purchased the LP Tanglewood Numbers
by Silver Jews almost on the strength of its front cover. That’s not quite true.
I knew a little about them – the fact that it was David Berman’s band but that
Stephen Malkmus and Robert Nastanovich of Pavement often lent their services. Apart from providing my
compilation with its title, I take great pleasure from the lyrics to 'Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed'.
My Cornish friend had already introduced me to Tom Vek the previous summer, and by the end of the year I owned a vinyl pressing of We Have Sound. This album hinted at a change in the
musical landscape, relief from the dross that had pervaded throughout 2005: Bloc
Party, Arctic Monkeys, Kaiser Chiefs, Razorlight, Franz Ferdinand, The
Futureheads, Bambyshambles – the fag-end of the garage rock revival. A new
sound was emerging that incorporated synthesisers and would come to be known
roughly as electro-pop. Whether Tom Vek fell exclusively within this genre is
moot: he was making an interesting noise that incorporated abrasive guitars,
keyboards, and drawled vocals, recorded in his parents’ garage.
Clor’s record was cut from if not the same cloth as Tom Vek’s
then certainly a fabric exhibiting similar properties, perhaps of a more
melodic denier. I first encountered them on MTV around the house of The
Wilkinsons in Acton, and we then went to see them supporting Stephen Malkmus at
the Koko in Camden. Clor split up not long after, which was a great shame.
The Research released their debut, Breaking Up, in early 2006, managed a second album in late 2008 and
then went the same way as Clor. Their electro-pop was looser and more shambolic
than Tom Vek’s or Clor’s. Lead singer Russell 'The Disaster' Searle would
hammer away at a keyboard while bassist Georgia Lashbrook churned out Wedding Present-esque
grooves. My Cornish friend took me to see them play at Bush Hall in Shepherd’s
Bush for my 31st birthday, so I guess I was engaging with the
contemporary music scene to some degree.
Come April I was abroad again, this
time in Budapest. On our last day there, killing time before the flight home, my
lady friend and I went for coffee in a cafe called Katapult Kavazo. What should
be playing but Transformer by Lou
Reed. I've never really liked the song 'Walk
on the Wild Side', and can’t abide 'Perfect
Day', so it was never an album I'd ever bothered with. But I hadn’t ever
heard 'Vicious' or 'Andy’s Chest' or 'Hangin’
Around' or 'I’m So Free', so it was
well worth a fiver to add the CD to my burgeoning collection.
I have no idea what inspired me to buy the first Fairport Convention
album. If I was expecting something along the lines of The Wicker Man soundtrack
then I was to be disappointed; folk rock, as I have touched on before, is very
different to country rock. At the time Fairport Convention’s debut was written,
however, folk-rock was more ‘rock’ than it was ‘folk’, taking its lead from Bob
Dylan, The Byrds and Jefferson Airplane, as 'Time
Will Show the Wiser' amply demonstrates.
Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First
Psychedelic Era, 1965-68 was
released in 1972 and has been reissued on numerous occasions since. This
assemblage of music has been offered up as the antecedent of punk (although, as
I’ve already discussed, it was jazz that instituted the manner by which punk
was recorded). Dubious proto-punk credentials aside, it’s the perfect place to
start for anybody interested in exploring the genre. The Amboy Dukes’ cover of 'Baby,
Please Don’t Go' is a marked highlight, and at over double the length far
better value than Them’s version.
What made me hark back to
Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones and include 'Sway' on my 2005
compilation? I couldn’t say, but 'Sway' is assuredly one of my favourite
Stones’ tunes, so there’s no harm in it being here. It might also be Mick
Taylor's finest moment as a Rolling Stone, and he deserves the credit for it. The Comet Gain track is off of City Fallen Leaves, the first record they had released since I saw then play in 2005, and it would be some time before they put out another.
In the summer of 2005, the Former Cohabitant from Brighton was house-sitting for his
parents and invited me and the friend who foundered in Debenhams to pay him a
visit. I came early, and we made arrangements to hook up with our Cornish
friend later that evening for a spirited pub crawl around Brighton’s Lanes. Back
at the house, the former cohabitant had a few things he wanted to show me (footage
from our trip to the States; works in progress), and while doing so played whatever
had been last listened to on the CD player.
Once when my mother heard me listening to them, she proffered that the
Tindersticks sounded like Leonard Cohen. They don’t, but at some point Leonard started singing in a tone vaguely approximating that of Stuart Staples
(during the 1980s, on Various Positions?). What I was hearing now did
not sound remotely like the voice of Stuart Staples. It was the song 'Who by
Fire', taken from Cohen’s fourth album, 1974’s New Skin for the Old
Ceremony. I read somewhere that Ian McCulloch thought that Greatest Hits
was Cohen’s best record, so I took him at his word and bought a copy from a
second-hand record store, I don’t recall which.
On the inner sleeve there are liner notes recounting the back story to
every song. For example, of 'Famous Blue Raincoat' Leonard Cohen has this
to say:
I had a good
raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959. Elizabeth thought I looked
like a spider in it. That was probably why she wouldn’t go to Greece with me. It
hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the
frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. Things were clear. I knew
how to dress in those days. It was stolen from Marianne’s loft in New York
sometime during the early seventies. I wasn’t wearing it very much toward the
end.
Taking an opportunity to invite the chap who got me
into Sarah Records back to my flat, I played the record and directed his
attention to this specific annotation. He understood. 'The Partisan' is a cover of an homage to the French Resistance in World War II, written by the French journalist Emmanuel d'Astier de La
Vigerie.
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