Another week flies by as the clocks go forward and it might just start to feel like Spring. Something to listen to in the lighter evenings. Enjoy!

A reminder to new readers that Spotify plays from this box in the annoying ‘Preview’ mode with short excerpts of each track. Please click the icon in top right corner to open the full playlist in a separate Spotify window.

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Man Out Of Time – Elvis Costello and the Attractions (1982)

It will be a surprise to some that it has taken me until the fifth blog to include a track by Elvis Costello. And it would be a surprise to EC, who is a big Liverpool FC supporter, that the reason is down to the retirement last week of former Arsenal player Mesut Ozil. I was having a text discussion with my Gunners fan son about a brilliant Barney Ronay column in the Saturday Guardian about the mercurial enigma of Ozil. Unprompted by me, at one point my son described the German as “truly a man out of time”. I have leapt at the chance of including one of my favourite songs from an artist who I have seen live dozens of times since a gig in May 1978 in Satellite City, the nightclub on the roof of the Glasgow Apollo. The centrepiece to the critically acclaimed Imperial Bedroom album (his seventh in five years), the track was released as a single to modest sales. Radio airplay would have been hampered by Costello persuading producer Geoff Emerick (who had engineered Sgt Pepper) to bookend the track with a scream-laden intro/outro taken from a high tempo demo version of the song. Fortunately, this approach was abandoned for the more measured, lush arrangement which was voted NME’s 10th best track of 1982. Based around Steve Nieve’s swirling Wurlitzer organ and glorious piano counterpoints, Costello winds back his vocal performance to let the lyric shine. It’s ostensibly a dark narrative about a cabinet minister hiding out from a sex scandal amid political intrigue. Among many great lines is: “Somebody’s creeping in the kitchen, there’s a reputation to be made, whose nerves are always on a knife-edge, who’s up late polishing the blade.” Letter of resignation incoming…

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Chain of Fools – Aretha Franklin (1967)

So Saturday would have been soul legend and civil rights activist Aretha Franklin’s 81st birthday. As one of the world’s biggest recording artists with around 75 million units shifted, I thought she was overdue a place in this blog. The …erm… daughter of a preacher man, she was born in Memphis and, like many soul artists, grew up singing in the gospel choir. She was a standout performer and, after a move to Detroit, her father began managing her singing career which brought her into contact with the likes of Mavis Staples, Sam Cooke and Dr Martin Luther King. Signed by Columbia in 1960 aged 18 (after her father turned down Berry Gordy at Motown) she began building her reputation as a powerful performer. But her career really took off when she moved to Atlantic Records at the end of 1966 to work with legendary producer Jerry Wexler. The next two years saw her have a dozen hit singles under his guidance, win the first two of eight consecutive female R&B vocal performance Grammys and appear on the cover of Time magazine. This single was the opening track on her acclaimed Lady Soul album. It features two of her sisters on the those wonderfully thick backing vocal harmonies along with a great tremolo guitar part by session musician Joe South. Although written by Don Covay it might as well have been written by Aretha. Its tale of a woman who realizes she is one of many girls in her partner’s “chain” and reflected the ongoing breakdown of her marriage to her abusive manager Ted White. Aretha’s voice was synonymous with the civil rights movement at the time and her cover of Otis Redding’s Respect became a movement anthem. Having memorably sung at the 1968 funeral of her old acquaintance Dr King, it seems appropriate that many years later Barack Obama would write “American history wells up when Aretha sings.”

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Miss The Girl – The Creatures (1983)

The announcement last month that Siouxsie Sioux was coming out of ‘retirement’ and returning to the stage this summer was interesting, but probably driven by streaming platforms significantly reducing her royalties from record sales. Ironically, on Monday, the algorithm used by the most miserly of these platforms to create my ‘Spotify Discover Weekly’ playlist threw me this track by The Creatures, the side-project band Siouxsie formed with Budgie from the Banshees back in 1983. Siouxsie was part of the ‘Bromley Contingent’ around the Sex Pistols in the late 70s and was on screen with the band during the infamous Bill Grundy TV interview in Nov 76. She went on to form Siouxsie and the Banshees with bass player Steve Severin the following year, recruiting unorthodox guitarist John McKay prior to recording their first LP The Scream in 1978. This was an LP I played to death and it is McKay’s squalling metallic guitar and Siouxsie’s dramatic vocal that defined their early sound. With their second record Join Hands released, I turned up at the Apollo to see them in September 1979 only to find the doors locked as McKay and drummer Kenny Morris had walked out of the band after an argument the night before in Aberdeen – I was gutted! Magazine guitarist John McGeogh then joined along with Budgie on drums and they went on to great success over the next few years. The Creatures’ unique sound was created by accident while rehearsing a Banshees tune when Siouxsie sung solo over the drum patterns produced by her (by then) partner Budgie. This track was the lead single for their first LP as a duo Feast and its distinctive marimba and percussion sound supports a vocal inspired the controversial 1973 JG Ballard book Crash, made into a film by David Cronenburg. In a final (playground?) twist, this Monday’s Spotify playlist also included the debut single by Glasgow’s very own Altered Images. Apparently, the band were all members of the official Banshees fanclub as one listen to Dead Pop Stars will confirm!

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Love Hangover – The Associates (1982)

Another of those “would have been” birthdays arrived on Monday but it seems somehow inappropriate to think of Billy McKenzie being 66 when he so sadly took his own life in 1997, aged just 39 years old. A complex maverick with a famous love for whippets, he suffered from depression and the death of his mother from cancer in 1996 is thought to be the background to his suicide. This was a dark and tragic end for an individual who had the voice of an angel and lit up any song he performed. Born in Dundee, he had travelled to New Zealand and America before he was 18. However, he returned to Dundee to form a band with Alan Rankine that became The Associates in 1979. They released an unsanctioned cover of Bowie’s Boys Keep Swinging as a single shortly after he had released it, flouting the copyright as a way to get noticed. This got them a record deal and a 1981 LP (The Affectionate Punch) which was followed by series of more experimental synth-driven singles such as the great Tell Me Easter’s On Friday, all featuring the thing of wonder that was McKenzie’s voice. As 1982 evolved into the year of glamourous snyth-pop, the band hitched a ride on the wagon and had two big hit singles in Party Fears Two and Club Country. Their third single that year was released as a double A side with their own 18 Carat Love Affair paired with this amazing cover of Diana Ross’s global hit from 1976. Seen as the record which reinvented her as a disco diva, Billy grabs the song literally by the throat, ignoring Diana’s sultry ballad section at the start. His singing is just fantastic, out-diva-ing her with his huge swooping falsetto while Rankine’s synth patterns hammer along in the background. My other favourite example of Billy’s singing is another Bowie cover, this time his version of The Secret Life Of Arabia which he recorded for the Human League spin-off British Electric Foundation on Music of Quality and Distinction Vol 1.

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54-46 That’s My Number – Toots & The Maytals (1973)

Up until Tuesday I must admit to being unaware of the Polar Music Prize. Turns out it is an international music prize celebrating the power and importance of music, created in Sweden by Stig Anderson, manager of ABBA. It has an impressively eclectic list of laureates going back to 1992 and this year’s winners were West African singer songwriter Angélique Kidjo, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records. Formed in Jamaica back in 1959, Island became one of the UK’s great independent labels, responsible for records by a huge range of artists from U2 to Grace Jones, John Martyn to Ariane Grande, Sparks to PJ Harvey and many more. But Blackwell is best known for his love of Jamaican music and his promotion of ska and reggae artists from the 60s and 70s, which eventually led to global superstardom for Bob Marley. The one downside to this was that many great Jamaican artists got overshadowed, none more so than the wonderful Toots Hibbert. Another reggae pioneer like Marley, Toots had a more soulful voice. Blackwell met him in 1968 and signed him to Island in 1971 where he made a number of memorable recordings with his band the Maytals. This track is probably his most famous and tells of his time in jail having been framed (Toots claims) on a ganja smoking charge by jealous competitors after he won a national song contest. It heavily borrows the rhythm track from Train to Skaville by The Ethiopians which later would be covered by 2-Tone band The Selecter. Toots had his cover version admirers too, with The Clash recording Pressure Drop and The Specials and Amy Winehouse covering Monkey Man. Amy’s version was used at the end of the film Run Fatboy Run whose soundtrack also included Toots’ 54-46, which is where we came in!

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Sign O’ The Times – Prince (1987)

The passing of Paul O’Grady this week reminded me of how brilliantly funny his Lily Savage character was. The most quoted story in the media was about Lily being on stage in 1980s in a gay bar when the cops raided it while wearing rubber gloves – “oh look, they’ve come to help us do the washing up!”. Although dramas such as It’s A Sin have illustrated this period well, it still seems incredible to think of the fear and ignorance surrounding AIDS at this time. On this day in 1987, Prince Nelson Rogers released what many critics consider to be his masterpiece album, Sign O’ The Times. He had just disbanded his Revolution backing band and was moving on to the next stage of his career, feverishly writing and recording nearly every day. His ninth album is a monster of styles covering funk, soul, jazz, rock and everything in between. One critic described listening to it as like “walking through the rooms of a house inside of Prince’s dream.” The complex instrumentation is typical of the man and features extensive use of his favoured LIN drum machine and a Fairlight CMI synth. The atypically sparse and downbeat title track provides a state of the nation social commentary on life for some in the late 80s and references the AIDS epidemic with the memorable opening line about a skinny man dying of “a big disease with a little name”. It was released as a single in advance of the double LP and reached the top 10 on either side of the Atlantic. I later saw him play one of the gigs of my life at Celtic Park in 1992 but strangely he only toured this album in Europe. There is a concert video where this track gets a trademark Prince guitar part layered on to it. And talking of his guitar playing, if you’ve not seen the wee fella’s performance with the all-star band as George Harrison was posthumously inducted into the rock’n’roll Hall of Fame, then put that right immediately here. You have to wait for it but, when he steps forward, watch Harrison’s son Dhani on the acoustic guitar smile. Prince’s solo is flashy and completely over the top, but as apparently effortless shredding goes, it’s the best.

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Last Word

A quick last word to say I am slowly trying to spread the WeekInSound gospel out beyond those of you that I have targeted as people who would potentially enjoy reading this nonsense. If you are aware of any friend, relation, work colleague, neighbour or cell-mate that enjoys their music, then please feel free to foist the http://www.weekinsound.com link on them.

The Master Playlist has been updated at the link below. Please keep the blog comments coming – I have now worked out how to like and reply to them!

WeekInSoundMaster

AR