LINER NOTES: THE STATE I AM IN [2009-10]

1.     In the Mirror – Field Music

2.     The State I am In – Belle and Sebastian

3.     Inimigo – Mercenarias

4.     Rock Europeu – Fellini

5.     Ilha Urbana - Muzak

6.     Sin in My Heart – Siouxsie and the Banshees

7.     Wax and Wane – Cocteau Twins

8.     Poptones [Peel Session] – Public Image Ltd.

9.     Jack Kerouac – Gang 90

10.   Leave Me Alone – New Order

11.   Vitamin C – Can

12.   Antenna – Sonic Youth

13.   51st Anniversary – The Jimi Hendrix Experience

14.   Harvest Moon – Neil Young

15.   Effortlessly – Field Music

16.   Constellations – Darwin Deez

17.   Chemistry – Semisonic

18.   Intentions – The Whitest Boy Alive

19.   Ivy & Gold – Bombay Bicycle Club

20.   Many of Horror – Biffy Clyro

21.   Whitechapel – The Vaselines

22.   Down from Dover – Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood

23.   There’s a Ghost in My House – R. Dean Taylor

It was around this period that I came to realise that a spade was no longer called a spade but more likely referred to as a soil redistribution enabler. I knew this because I was now working as a freelance transcript writer/audio typist, which involved the production and delivery of customised transcripts, presentations and summary documents for a broad range of clients. I was assigned jobs at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Inland Revenue, Ofcom, what was then known as the Competition Commission, Social Services, Stringfellows (staff disciplinary hearings), the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC), various banks and private investment firms. It was interesting work but badly paid and quite full-on, although for someone adverse to stress I cope quite well when put under it. I could handle the short notice and tight deadlines, but certain jobs – normally the financially orientated ones – brought me into contact with the sort who use the verb ‘disconnect’ as a noun to describe nothing more technical than a difference of opinion, which wasn't ideal. More to the point, when you’re being paid by the minute to transcribe the unintelligible rantings of a banker who’s been told they aren’t getting paid their yearly bonus – a dividend that would often amount to more than double my yearly salary – it can do things to your morale.

Some people see no harm in the branding of language, of jargon, discussing top-down strategies, taking helicopter views, of obfuscation. It saves them the trouble of having to construct sentences that actually mean anything, or communicate something approaching an actual idea. I doubt these are the sort of people who listen to Field Music. If that sounds tenuous then consider that Duffy won Best British Album of the Year at the 2009 Brit Awards, Florence and The Machine the same in 2010, Lily Allen was given an Ivor Novello Award, and Robbie Williams was honoured for his ‘outstanding contribution to music’.

'In the Mirror' derives from Field Music’s third album, unofficially known as Measure, released early in 2010. A slow burner, it begins with a portentous prelude played out on the guitar: then drums, piano, guitar again, this time playing a more measured riff, followed by bass, vocals, harmonies. Was this the moment Field Music’s reviews began alluding to Steely Dan? It has something of that about it.

Push Barman to Open Old Wounds is a two-disc compilation by Belle and Sebastian that gathers together their early EPs and singles. As far as I’m concerned you can do away with disc two: the first four tracks are alright, but if that’s what you’re after you may as well buy the original EP, This Is Just a Modern Rock Song. As for 'The State I Am In', it’s taken from Belle and Sebastian’s first EP, Dog on Wheels, part of a trio released over the course of 2007. I had Lazy Line Painter Jane and 3.. 6.. 9 Seconds of Light but not Dog on Wheels, and so 'The State I Am' In was absent from my collection. It’s a great tune and a reminder of a time when Belle and Sebastian stood outside of the mainstream.

I assume that my Cornish friend wanted his CD back. Why else would I have included 'Inimigo' by Mercenarias, 'Rock Europeu' by Fellini and 'Ilha Urbana' by Muzak. The disc in question is The Sexual Life of the Savages, a compendium of São Paulo post-punk I’d borrowed a year earlier. These three tracks are distinct enough: 'Inimigo' echoes The Slits, 'Rock Europeu' brings to mind The Stranglers, while 'Ilha Urbana' sounds like Magazine jamming with Joy Division, but all sung in Portuguese. I’ve tried to mitigate this disparity by following up with something in the same vein, but sung in English.

I think it was the Roz Childs who played me Siouxsie and the Banshees – 'Happy House', 'Israel', 'Spellbound'. I’m guessing she had The Best of Siouxsie and the Banshees. It was one of those moments when you realise you like an artist without really knowing much about them or the names of their songs or whether there’s a particular record you’re meant to own. I don’t know why I took a chance on the album Juju but I’m glad I did. 'Sin in my Heart' is the standout track. The tempo slowly increases throughout the duration the song, Siouxsie Sioux plays a simple guitar part, which is the tune’s signature, freeing up John McGeoch to add Adrian Belew-style licks over the top.

I decided to revisit a Cocteau Twins’ record I’d flirted with in my youth. The album was Garlands, and the tracks I remembered liking were 'Wax and Wane', 'Blind Dumb Deaf' and 'Shallow Then Halo'. I suppose we have YouTube to thanks for all this retrospective knowledge. I certainly wasn’t going to buy a copy of Garlands to find out – not now, in my financially stretched state – and ended up downloading 'Wax and Wane' after concluding that it was probably my favourite of the three tunes that were the favourite of the eight on the original record.

Post-punk… it was something that I hadn’t really given much thought. Wasn’t it just another word for new wave? No, new wave was poppier and took itself less seriously. Blondie were new wave. The Ramones, Talking Heads and Devo were kind of new wave. In the UK, maybe Buzccocks and The Undertones. You could dance to new wave. You might be able to dance to post-punk too, but there was something about it that felt too earnest or preoccupied with the avantgarde. [Incidentally, I once transcribed an event for the PRS where Feargal Sharkey, formerly of The Undertones, was one of the speakers. Would you believe he opened his discourse on copyright by quoting the first four lines of 'Teenage Kicks?' To be fair, Feargal didn’t write the song, John O’Neill did, but who in attendance knew?]

I can’t remember where I first heard 'Poptones' by Public Image Ltd. It took a while for Keith Levene’s repetitious groove and Jah Wobble’s undulating bass to persuade me that the song would be worth putting up with Lydon’s howl for, which might be why I don’t recall its origins. On listening more closely to the lyrics – again, more than likely on YouTube, possibly the Old Grey Whistle – I was quite taken aback.

Drive to the forest in a Japanese car,

The smell of rubber on country tar.

And hindsight does me no good,

I'm standing naked in this back of the woods.

The cassette played pop tones.

It’s a song concerning abduction and sexual assault, told from the perspective of the victim, inspired by a news' article Lydon had come across in a national newspaper. A girl was bundled into the back of a car and driven out to the woods, violated, and left for dead. All the while the perpetrators played the same tune over and over on the car's cassette player, providing a monotonous and surreal backdrop to the girl’s savage ordeal.

'Jack Kerouac' by Gang 90 is another track taken from The Sexual Life of the Savages, but not quite as 'punk' as the three that featured earlier, so I pushed it back. 'Leave Me Alone' is taken from New Order's second album, Power, Corruption & Lies, and has little in common with the post-punk of Joy Division.

Athens

When I entered into the transcription business, the company I worked for would send me to places like Deutsche Bank in Liverpool Street or Citibank in Canary Wharf, to transcribe redundancy meetings and disciplinary investigations. Occasionally I might be assigned something a little more glamorous: a round table seminar at the Home Office, hosted by the then Secretary of State for International Development, Douglas Alexander; a Barclays’ AGM, chaired by Andrew Neil; a symposium at the Financial Times.

I used to like freelancing at the Competition Commission on Southampton Row in Holborn until some old boy gave me a telling off for being late back from lunch. The buffoon had read the clock wrong, and I received a panicked phone call from my employer asking where I’d got to – what a waste of a cup of coffee. Companies wishing to effect takeovers would plead their case to a panel of adjudicators, very often chaired by someone with the word ‘sir’ before his name. These guys would barely look me in the eye; as a transcriber, I must have been beneath them. I asked to be assigned jobs at the Health and Care Professions Council instead, where you could help yourself to sandwiches and the red-faced legal assessors were more than happy to talk with you, and would meet your eye.

But the Competition Commission was very well placed, and if I felt I had the time I would make a detour through Covent Garden or Soho, maybe to browse through records I could ill afford, or to look for second hand clothes. This could be how I came across 'Vitamin C' by Can, although I can’t be sure. Can had been on my radar for a while, due to their supposed influence on groups like Stereolab and The Fall. I couldn’t really see it. Perhaps I needed to listen to an album other than Ege Bamyasi, which I procured from the Richmond Library.

I don’t think this was how I came by 'Antenna' by Sonic Youth – that was more likely from The Wilkinsons. I’ll concede to enjoying Sonic Youth’s more tuneful elements, and 'Antenna' is no exception. The stuff that sounds like the free-form breakout in Pink Floyd’s 'Interstellar Overdrive' I don't like so much.

'51st Anniversary' by Jimi Hendrix was certainly a London discovery, in one of the bookshops on Charing Cross Road (not Foyles, possibly Borders). '51st Anniversary' was the B-side to 'Purple Haze' and only appears on the CD re-issue of the album Are You Experienced as a bonus track. I’ve never owned any Jimi Hendrix, but during my first year at university the guy who used to room next to me played him a lot. '51st Anniversary' possess a groovier melody than a lot of Hendrix’s work, freed from the psychedelic diversions that normally predominate.

'Harvest Moon' was almost certainly a Wilkinson intervention, played in a car on the way to Pen Y Fan, Wales. 'Harvest Moon', and the album of the same name, was recorded in 1992 as a kind of sequel to Neil Young’s Harvest recorded 20 years prior, to the extent that many of the same musicians appear on both and it was recorded on analogue devices to create the same sort of sound.

One of things I like about Field Music is that they don’t dress much differently now to how they did when I first became aware of them in 2004. They obviously don’t care for the vagaries of fashion, which is the best way to be, and don’t really do primary colours; instead, navy blue, grey, olive drab, black, white. A shirt may be accompanied by a suit jacket, a T-shirt with a cardigan. Press shots rarely reveal their feet, but they must surely wear sensible shoes. Haircuts are sensible and don't appear to change much.

My job required a level of smartness. This didn’t bother me for I had enough shirts to be getting on with, wasn’t much into trainers anyway, and my hair was getting progressively shorter. On my days off, I’d walk to Richmond and look in Gap and Limited Offer for cheap clobber that could double up as workwear. ‘Limited Offer’ isn’t really called that: most people know it as Uniqlo. If you pay full price for anything in Gap or Uniqlo then you’re a mug. The French have laws against this sort of thing, but in the UK life is one perpetual sale, and because everyone loves a bargain we‘re constantly buying things we don’t need. The shops know this and budget accordingly. They know that summer jacket isn’t worth £60, but if they pretend to us it is then we’ll snap it up it when they cut the price in half, sometimes after only a matter of weeks.

Despite the cynical marketing ploys and the mediocre merchandise, I did used to like gliding around the aisles of Limited Offer. I don’t so much now but the branch they had in Richmond felt industrial, like a low-rent version of Muji. They would also play good music. I’d listen carefully and try and identify what might be a song’s title, or a phrase distinctive enough that it might bear results if I typed it into a search engine proceeded with the word ‘lyrics’ – the same as if I heard a song playing in Beyond Retro in Soho or Borders on Charing Cross Road.

I have Uniqlo’s music policy to thank for 'Constellations' by Darwin Deez and 'Intentions' by The Whitest Boy Alive. They occupy the same ground, a buoyant sort of easy-listening indie with congenial vocals, conducive to shopping for rudimentary clothes in muted shades. I decided to separate these two tracks with 'Chemistry' by Semisonic. Although it dates back to 2001, it makes the same sort of impression. It’s not my intention to make any of these songs sound unhip by association. If anything, somebody at Uniqlo was doing a good job.

It’s by no means improbable, but I did not discover either 'Ivy & Gold' by Bombay Bicycle Club or 'Many of Horror' by Biffy Clyro while shopping in Uniqlo or Gap. It was probably from the radio that I was drawing much of my inspiration, in the car on the way to and from shopping for food and other things. My partner mocked me for liking 'Many of Horror' – Biffy Clyro was what moody teenage boys listened too, she said. I knew nothing of them so couldn’t really say anything other than I thought it was good tune.

Conversely, my partner liked Bombay Bicycle Club. I wasn’t aware of this at the time but it turned out that their latest material represented something of a departure. Their first album comprised of standard indie fare in the vein of, say, The Mystery Jets or Vampire Weekend. In 2010, they released Flaws, which appeared to be inspired by the burgeoning indie folk scene and groups like Fleet Foxes, Great Lake Swimmers, Beirut. Not that this would have made much difference to me either, because the flip side of all of that was Mumford & Sons, and I had no time for Mumford & Sons. And for the first 53 seconds, I didn’t have much time for 'Ivy & Gold'. Then the chorus arrives, shifting abruptly, and only momentarily, from G to D minor. Normal service resumes and then there it is again, that brief shift to D minor, before the verse carries on as if nothing had ever happened.

Sofia

The Vaselines are an alternative rock band from Glasgow, once beloved by Kurt Cobain. They had only ever released one album, but in 2010 they reformed and put out another. Guess what: I came across it in a record shop in central London, propped up on the counter behind a sign saying ‘Now Playing’. 'I Hate The 80's caught my ear, but I hung around long enough to hear 'Whitechapel', which is reminiscent of their song 'Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam', which Kurt Cobain performed in tribute for the album MTV Unplugged in New York.

I doubt very much it was the same day, but I discovered 'Down from Dover' playing in Beyond Retro in Soho. It’s a Dolly Parton number, but the version playing was by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood. The song tells the sad story of a girl that gets knocked up by a guy from Dover who promises to return for the birth of their child. He doesn’t, and the baby’s stillborn anyhow, almost as is if, ‘she knew she'd never have a father's arms to hold her.’ Lee Hazlewood’s baritone seems especially deep, and Sinatra’s voice trembles with emotion. It’s incredible.

'Down from Dover' featured on the 1972 album Nancy & Lee Again and allows me to reach further back in time and finish off with the Motown soul of 'There’s a Ghost in My House' by R. Dean Taylor. I knew the song by way of The Fall and their version of it. Like many of these odds-and-sods, I downloaded it from iTunes.

In 2009, I managed a trip to Athens with my partner. In early 2010, we ventured to Sofia (a very cheap holiday). Later that year, I secured future employment working for a small engineering firm in Brentford. It provided the time, and afforded me the money, to attend a friend's wedding in Thailand in August, before starting employment in October. It snowed heavily for the first time in years. My brother got married (the one who recorded Orbital for me, not the Beastie Boys). A Fullers' pub crawl, trip to Brighton, camping in Wales. What does The State I Am In remind me of? Shopping.

[Listen to here.]

LINER NOTES: HARMONY IN MY HEAD [2007-08]

1.     No Pussy Blues – Grinderman

2.     Big in Japan – Tom Waits

3.     The Decision – The Young Knives

4.     Evergreen – The Brian Jonestown Massacre

5.     What Have I Said Now? – The Wedding Present

6.     Wings – The Fall

7.     House of Cards – Radiohead

8.     The Rip – Portishead

9.     Sugar Mountain – Neil Young

10.   Brides of Jesus – Little Feat

11.   The Pink Room – Angelo Badalamenti / David Lynch

12.   Pânico – Mercenarios

13.   Give It Lose It Take It – Field Music

14.   Bennie and the Jets – Elton John

15.   Contact – Bridget Bardot

16.   Lucky Number – Lene Lovich

17.   Harmony in my Head – Buzzcocks

18.   On My Radio – The Selector

19.   Gangsters – The Specials

20.   Pull Up to the Bumper – Grace Jones

21.   Let’s Dance – David Bowie

Bonus Tracks:

22.   L.E.S. Artistes – Santigold

23.   Black Magic – Jarvis Cocker

24.   Prodigal Son – The Rolling Stones

25.   Bird of Beauty – Stevie Wonder

26.   Cracked Actor – David Bowie

27.   Wordy Rappinghood – Tom Tom Club

28.   The Hungry Saw – Tindersticks

In his book A New Time for Mexico, Carlos Fuentes affirms that, 'Religious temperament without religious conviction has branded some of the greatest works of the twentieth century.' He offers up Luis Buñuel, Albert Camus, Ingmar Bergman and Graham Greene as examples of artistes who have attempted to make sense of suffering in the absence of Christ, to comprehend that which might be deemed sacred when divested of doctrine. Theism is antediluvian – predates the profits – and contemporary morality is derived, consciously or otherwise, from scripture, vouchsafed by the supernatural. In other words, you can’t get shot of God all that easily.

Fuentes might also have cited Nick Cave, who is not a man of proclaimed faith but nonetheless likes to make reference to Judeo-Christian subjects in his work. But not so with Grinderman. The album Grinderman is the sound of midlife crisis conveyed with such humour that you probably shouldn’t assume that the midlife crisis in question is necessarily Cave’s – or if it is then viewed from a distance. According to Cave, the song 'No Pussy Blues' was inspired by the negative reactions his Zapata moustache received. Cookie dusters are divisive at the best of times, so the result in and of itself is no firm indicator of middle aged angst, but the fact that Nicholas grew such a thing in his late 40s/early 50s maybe is.

I hadn’t made the connection when I put this compilation together – both tracks were provided by the lad who lent me The Sound of the Suburbs, so I might have expected to – but Tom Waits was also 50 years’ old when he recorded 'Big in Japan' and also appears to be railing against his advancing years. Whereas Cave just isn’t getting any, Waits can at least console himself with the fact that he’s doing business in Asia. Despite Tom’s gruff incantations that form the spine of the song, 'Big In Japan' is a far more buoyant tune than 'No Pussy Blues' but still rough enough to perpetuate a sense of anxiety.

'The Decision' by The Young Knives ensues, a continuation of the millennial post-punk revival, which was by now on the slide. Credit to them that their album Voices of Animals and Men was nominated for the 2007 Mercury Prize in the face of this. 'The Decision' contains the lines, 'I'm your monarch, your supreme monarch. That decision was mine,' which I take to be a comment on the illusory nature of monarchy: as if to say, 'I am the Queen's subject, but might I not make the same claim for myself: that actually the Queen is in fact my subject.'

Have you seen the documentary Dig!? If you haven’t, and if you like music, which you doubtlessly do if you’re reading this, then I recommend you watch it. Its subject is the trials and tribulations of bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols from the mid ‘90s through to the early 2000s. I was done with The Dandy Warhols but had heard nothing by The Brian Jonestown Massacre, so I bought the double compilation album Tepid Peppermint Wonderland: A Retrospective which gathers together 38 tracks spanning a period of nine years. The Brian Jonestown’ sound is various but can be categorised roughly into three parts: melodic folk rock numbers, like 'Servo', 'Prozac v Heroin', 'Nevertheless'; tripped out psychedelia of the kind you hear on 'Anemone' or 'Whoever You Are'; and, especially early on, a kind of lo-fi take on shoegaze. 'Evergreen' is from the band’s first album, Methodrone, and sounds like Slowdive jamming with Yo La Tengo. The common thread running through their work is lead singer and multi-instrumentalist Anton Newcombe, who comes across as a sort of malevolent genius and wears his heart and influences on his sleeve. His obsession with the 1960s is not parodic; making use of 12 string guitars, tablas and sitars does not exempt ingenuity. 'The Beatles were for sale. I give it away,' Newcombe tells us 20 minutes into Dig!. You can be cynical towards that, but it’s not the sentiment of someone interested in pastiche.

I used to listen to a taped copy of The Wedding Present's Bizarro during my second year at university. I’d got rid of all my old cassettes by now and didn’t have anything to play them on anyway. Cue Bizarro, completely remastered and repackaged with seven bonus tracks and extensive sleevenotes, on compact disc. This time around it was the tune 'What Have I said Now?' that stood out – specifically the moment when, after chugging along in F (with transient forays into A#, A and C), it crashes into E after the second verse.

Cologne

It took a while to compile this compilation. The reasons might be: my continued indifference to current music; a temperamental MiniDisc player and my decision to switch over to MP3; the difficulty of converting vinyl to the MP3 format; training for the Fuller's Thames Towpath Ten (mile) run; vacations to Cologne, Istanbul, Lisbon and New York; handing in my notice in July 2008; a five week sojourn in Southeast Asia and the period of unemployment that followed; apathy. I’d also taken to making ‘best of ‘ playlists of individual artists: Best of… Stereolab, Best of… Talking Heads, Best of… The Fall, and so forth. Putting together the best of The Fall was especially rewarding for I had added the records Perverted by Language and Grotesque (After the Gramme) to my collection, as well as acquiring digital copies of The Wonderful and Frightening World of…, The Frenz Experiment, Extricate, Code: Selfish and Shift-Work to supplement what I already possessed on vinyl. Such was the weight of material that I felt it necessary to divide my anthology into two parts. (The only other artist that has bid the same approach of me is David Bowie.) I took five tracks from the album Perverted by Language alone, although two of these – 'The Man Whose Head Expanded' and 'Wings' – were singles tacked on the end of the re-issued CD in the form of bonus tracks. For the sake of this compilation, I went with 'Wings', whose tempo and monotonous groove is consistent with the tunes I’ve placed before and after. In this respect, this playlist is more calculated than many of my others, which is the benefit of working with MP3. Although MiniDisc certainly provides for a cut-and-paste approach to recording, with MP3 it's almost compulsory, and so one pays more attention to the order of things. 'House of Cards' by Radiohead does a good job of following on from 'Wings' but works even better as a precursor to 'The Rip' by Portishead. (Footage of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead playing an acoustic version of 'The Rip' appeared on the internet shortly after.)

I received my copy of Decade by Neil Young at the end of 2006, so by rights 'Sugar Mountain' should have kicked off this compendium. It wouldn’t have worked. 'Sugar Mountain' is a lament for lost youth (written when Neil Young had freshly turned 21) and nearly six minutes’ long, and it’s not going to get any party started.

Atheism, as it is currently understood, may one day prove to have been a passing fad, if only because its antithesis – theism – might itself lapse. Such a narrow view of things is problematic, not least because the subject is rooted firmly in semantics. The scientific and the religious – and I refer to the religious in the theological sense rather than the dogmatic, which is merely the realpolitik of organised religion – are interested in the same thing and destined to converge upon ontological grounds. Whether this terrain will be defined as Cartesian or monistic remains to be seen.

Jesus has a firm hold on our collective consciousness and his presence looms large within the realm of contemporary music, through gospel, blues, country, soul, and thus rock and roll. 'You don't want to walk and talk about Jesus, you just want to see his face,' incants Mick Jagger on 'I Just Want to See His Face', and he’s not alone: The Byrds, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Big Star, The Velvet Underground, The Doors, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Manassas, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Felt, Spaceman 3, The Vaselines, Teenage Fanclub, The Verve, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Half Man Half Biscuit… The Nazarene turns up in the most unlikely places.

Not a moment too soon, I discovered Minus Zero/Stand Out Records off Portobello Road. What’s this they’re playing? 

'The Factory, Lowell George’s first band – you know, the guy from Little Feat.' 

I didn’t. After releasing but two singles, Lowell George joined Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention as rhythm guitarist and co-vocalist. His tenure was short lived and after contributing to Hot Rats, Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped my Flesh he left to form his own band, called Little Feat. Not long after clarifying this chronology, I returned to Minus Zero / Stand Out Records and purchased the Little Feat and Dixie Chicken albums, paired together as part of WEA’s slightly weird ‘2 Originals’ series, which repackaged two albums by the same artist in a gatefold format. The music is reminiscent of that I heard playing in the Eiffel Bar in Copenhagen more than a year earlier, although persons I’ve played it too have tentatively asked if it might be the Rolling Stones – songs like 'Strawberry Flats' can give that impression.

The title and the lyrics to 'The Brides of Jesus' suggest the Parable of the Ten Virgins [Gospel of Matthew 25:1-13], yet the reference in the final line to ‘entertaining angels unawares’ is attributable to Hebrews [13:2]. It could be that Lowell is playing one proverb off against the other, saying that the ‘five foolish virgins’ who did not bring surplus oil for their lamps, and were denied entrance to the ‘wedding’ as punishment for being ill-prepared, should have been treated better, for they may have been actual angels. Lowell Gorge died of a heart attack in 1979, and I can find no evidence that he ever expatiated upon the song’s subject.

'The Pink Room' is from the soundtrack to the David Lynch film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. According to the credits, this swampy, instrumental dirge was written by Lynch himself, rather than Angelo Badalamenti who composed the film’s score. I once listened to 'The Pink Room' in a static caravan on a campsite in the New Forest, with The Wilkinsons, the guy who used to own a pager and Roz Childs, surrounded by conifers and pines.

The Sexual Life of the Savages is a compilation of São Paulo post-punk that I requisitioned from my Cornish friend. I must have kept hold of it for a while because it made more of an impact on the anthology I put together over 2009/2010. In the meantime, I recorded 'Pânico' by Mercenárias, which sounds a bit like very early The Fall fronted by The Slits, only sung in Portuguese. I wouldn’t ordinarily have followed on from something like this with anything by Field Music, but 'Give It Lose It Take It' is one of their livelier numbers. 

New Forest

Like a lot of people, I’m not too bothered about New Year’s Eve. Ideally, I’d attend someone’s house party, preferably not mine, but for three years running I spent New Year’s Eve at the Hawley Arms in Camden. It was all down to the girl who used to live with my partner on the Isle of Dogs who’d met the proprietors on a beach in Southeast Asia, kept in touch, and extended a repeated invitation to see in New Year’s at their fashionable establishment. In 2004, rolling into 2005, there had been enough room to spray a celebratory bottle of champagne around without getting in anyone's way. By the time 2007 was imminent, there was barely enough room to raise a glass. I don’t remember much else about that night but I do remember enjoying Elton John’s 'Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting' playing. Mr Wilkinson advised I buy the 1974 album Greatest Hits, which I subsequently did. Rather than go through the laborious process of recording 'Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting' from vinyl onto our laptop, in real time, I picked up a copy of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on CD from a charity shop for a couple of quid, introducing me to the delights of 'Bennie and the Jets' in the process. 'Bennie and the Jets' is a strange song in that it’s made to sound like it was recorded live, which makes me wonder whether it sounds much different when it is played live.

I wandered into Beyond Retro in Soho and found something I hadn’t bargained for: not an item of clothing but a sound. A lot of people would have asked what was playing, but I’m not one for talking to people unnecessarily so instead memorised key components of the song and looked them up on the internet when I got home. I didn’t have much to go on: it was sung in French, sounded like it was more than likely recorded in the 1960s, and exhibited a one-word chorus that exclaimed ‘Contact!’. It was French chanteuse Brigitte Bardot, with a little help from Serge Gainsbourg.

If not French psychedelic pop then what had I expected to find in Beyond Retro? Not sure but it won’t have been jeans, because fashion had finally caught up with itself. That is to say that the slimmer profile appropriated by purveyors of the post-punk and garage rock revival had begun to permeate the mainstream. Enter the Levi’s 504/514, a comparatively slim-fitting jean with a tapered leg offering a welcome alternative to the bootcut 507/517/527. The 504 would probably be considered fairly loose by today’s standards but in the mid-to-late 2000s was about as skinny as you could get. In 2007 I purchased a light blue pair of Levi 504s, which my partner ridiculed, and then a darker pair. In 2008, we flew to New York City and I picked up a black pair of corduroy 514s for a little more than $20, on sale in Urban Outfitters, which worked out at around £12. The 514s were slightly less tapered than the 504s and I had them altered to match.

Slimmer fitting knitwear was also now easier to come by. I’d been merrily buying my jumpers from Marks and Spencer since 2005 – specifically their Collezione range – and I was fine with that, but now I could find things in any high street store I’d be comfortable wearing: Fred Perry, Farah, Uniqlo, even Gap. Peacoats were all the rage too, whereas a few years earlier I’d been sifting through army surplus stock to find them. But it wasn’t as simple as that. Men’s mainstream fashion may finally have been shedding the boyish, post-Britpop baggy-isms that had preoccupied it for the last ten years but in its place was something almost schizophrenic. Whereas American groups such as Arcade Fire, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, and even Kings of Leon, were moving towards a leaner, more rugged sort of look, British groups like Hot Chip, Mystery Jets and Klaxons dressed like an explosion in American Apparel – tight jeans and baggy T-shirts in dayglo colours, with crazy hair. Ultimately, the boots, brogues and beards of our American cousins would win the war, but there was a very confused period in between where some of the worst offences of the 1980s threatened to take hold.

I got wind of 'Lucky Number' by Lene Lovich somehow – in another shop maybe. It was the brevity of the chorus that caught my ear: four dissonant chords sung in rapid succession and the ostinato that comes after. I found a copy of Singles Going Steady by Buzzcocks on CD for £3 – the same album the chap who got me into Sarah Records had lent to me in 1994/95 – and so reacquainted myself with that. The guy who used to own a pager was now playing guitar in a ska/two-tone covers band. Among other things, they’d play 'On My Radio' by The Selector and 'Gangsters' by The Specials, and so I downloaded them (from iTunes). These four songs were all released in the year 1979.

NYC

The laptop I was working from was not my own: it was my partner's and a mere repository for my music which I would then transfer across to my newly acquired MP3 player. The problem with interfacing directly with a mobile device is that you have direct access to everything stored upon it. You don’t even need to make playlists: just ‘play all’ or select ‘shuffle’ and let the hits keep on coming. The shuffle function is particularly pernicious. You find yourself continuously skipping tracks until something shows up worthy of your immediate attention. Furthermore, there’s nothing random about the algorithm that drives the shuffle function. Certain groups will make remarkably frequent appearances, whereas others will be conspicuous by way of their absence.

So I stopped using the shuffle function and set about putting together a compilation. I’d have normally done this with a certain amount of pre-planning, but found it simpler to make it up as I went along: Add to > playlist, notionally entitled ‘2007’, to be renamed at a later date when I felt suitably inspired. I listened to my incomplete playlist as I was compiling it, changing the running order here and there and re-transferring it across to my MP3 player as and when I added new songs. The problem was this mutable approach did not foment the urgency required to finish it. By the time 'Pull up to the Bumper' by Grace Jones and 'Let’s Dance' by David Bowie had been appended to the running order, I’d reached what would under usual circumstances have been my limit – the 80 minutes of time available on a MiniDisc. I had no problem adding to this duration, but where would I draw the line? At what stage would I stop subsuming music gathered in 2008 to a compilation intended to reflect 2007?

As it was, I felt the playlist worked well, so I decided to defer the tracks I had left over until the year after. It was not to be. The recording of vinyl continued to be an issue: the stupid device I had bought necessitated I record in real time and use software to isolate the individual tracks that then had to be saved as individual files of questionable quality. iTunes wasn’t as comprehensive as I’d been led to believe either, so I couldn’t source as much material as I would have liked. It’s conceivable that the reason why I included 'Pull Up to the Bumper' and 'Let’s Dance' is a direct result of this – as filler.

I have identified a number of tracks that might have originally featured on Harmony in my Head in less troubled circumstances, or could have gone towards a playlist for 2008.

American singer Santigold's second single 'L.E.S. Artistes' had been getting airplay, culminating in an appearance on Jools Holland. Her album, Santogold, was voted 2008's 7th best by the NME, while Rolling Stone deemed 'L.E.S. Artistes' to be the second best single. (MGMT and Beyonce topped the magazines' respective polls.)

'Black Magic' is off of Jarvis Cocker’s debut solo album Jarvis, which I have on vinyl. I was disappointed with it, if I'm honest, but the artwork's good and the price of vinyl had yet to go through the roof.

'Prodigal Son' is taken from Beggars Banquet, the record that kicked off the Rolling Stones’ golden age. The guy who used to own a pager brought it to Exmoor with us in 2003, but it had been overshadowed by Their Satanic Majesties Request. This seems odd because I’m now of the opinion that Beggars Banquet is second only to Exile on Main Street in the Rolling Stones’ canon.

In 2008 I bought, in fairly quick succession, the Stevie Wonder albums Music of My Mind and Fulfillingness' First Finale, and was more satisfied with the latter. I recall being enamoured with 'Boogie On Reggae Woman', but nowadays I err towards 'Bird of Beauty'.

In September 2007, I went to see a David Bowie tribute band, at the Grey Horse in Kingston, called The Thin White Duke. The keyboard player resembled the actor Ian Smith, who played Harold Bishop in the Australian soap opera Neighbours. They were actually quite good and their rendition of 'Cracked Actor' motivated me to add Aladdin Sane to my collection.

Back in April 2007, I picked up a vinyl copy of Tom Tom Club by Tom Tom Club on a visit down to Plymouth (from Really Good Records?). It’s a cool record to have and a good album to put on if you have people around. The Tindersticks tune, meanwhile, was another offering from the lad lent me The Sound of the Suburbs, taken from the album of the same name – their best since Curtains and one I don't think they've bettered since.

There were other purchases, most notably records by Black Sheep, Main Source and Public Enemy (all that stuff's already covered in my 'Golden Age of Hip Hop' tetralogy). Maybe that’s why I never got around to creating a separate playlist for 2008. Not because I was unemployed, spent five weeks in Asia or couldn't be bothered, but as a result of rediscovering a taste for the music I listened to in my youth after wandering into a bar in Cologne playing old-school hip hop.

[Listen to here.]

LINER NOTES: SOMETIMES A PONY GETS DEPRESSED [2006]

1. These are the Ghosts – The Bees
2. Stagger Lee – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
3. You Don’t Miss Your Water – The Byrds
4.     It’s All in My Mind – Teenage Fanclub
5. What Goes On – The Velvet Underground
6. Her Name is Melody – Adrian Pride
7. Come See About Me – The Supremes
8. Animal Farm – The Kinks
9. I Can’t Be Me – Eddie Hinton
10. Guilty – Barbra Streisand
11. Enough Said – Devo
12. Red Sails – David Bowie
13. Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed – Silver Jews
14. The Lower the Sun – Tom Vek
15. Outlines – Clor
16. When You Get Home – The Research
17. Andy’s Chest – Lou Reed
18. Time Will Show the Wiser – Fairport Convention
19. Baby Please Don’t Go – The Amboy Dukes
20. Sway – The Rolling Stones
21. Draw a Smile Upon an Egg – Comet Gain
22. 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 lent me The Sound of the Suburbs is with us. 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, 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, and Otis Redding. 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 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 often overlooked. '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 sometimes helped out. 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 and keyboards, 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 first album, Breaking Up, in early 2006, managed a second 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 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. 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 this 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 that Jagger denied him. The Comet Gain track is off of City Fallen Leaves, which I consider to be their best album. It would be some while before they released another.

Budapest

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.

After overhearing them playing in my room, my mother once suggested that the Tindersticks sounded like Leonard Cohen. They don’t, but at some point Leonard started singing in a tone approximating that of Stuart Staples. 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.

[Listen to here.]