It’s now four months since I started scribbling this blog and its become part of my weekly routine. I hope it has become part of yours. Enjoy!
The Headmaster Ritual – The Smiths (1985)
As last week’s edition of this blog was being finished, the news broke of the death from pancreatic cancer of Andy Rourke at the too young age of 59. Over the last seven days, there have been many words written about the man who the Smith’s records credited with “the bass guitar” – so here are a few more from me. In the painful legal aftermath of the band breakup, Morrissey’s narrative was that the band was only his songwriting partnership with Johnny Marr and the rhythm section was a bolt on that anyone could have done. Like many of his latter day utterances this wasn’t true. Rourke was a highly talented bass player brought into the group by his boyhood friend Marr to provide the melodic, fluid style of playing which would provide balance to the single guitar of Marr, particularly when playing live. When issues with his chemical dependency resulted in Rourke briefly being dismissed from the band, session musicians struggled to replicate his work, resulting in his rapid return. There are lots of examples of how he used to wind his bass-lines around the trademark arpeggios of Marr’s guitar, like era-defining debut single This Charming Man. The track I’ve seen most referenced in the last week is the funky slap bass line which illuminated the wonderfully titled Barbarism Begins At Home on the band’s second LP Meat is Murder. Despite its great bass driven ending, I believe the opening track of the same LP is a better example of his bass playing meshing with the guitar and it commences this week’s playlist. Listen to the fifty second intro before Morrissey’s vocal declares “Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools”. You will hear the two instruments brilliantly intertwined, with Rourke’s bass runs rising to the top of the mix as they rise in octave. If that doesn’t prove to Morrissey and his lawyers how critical Rourke was to their sound, I don’t know what does. It has always seemed so unfair to me that Rourke settled his royalty claim early for a modest lump sum while drummer Joyce held on to get a more lucrative percentage deal. Sometimes the good guys don’t win.
My Jamaican Guy – Grace Jones (1982)
I noticed it was Grace Jones’ 75th birthday this week and she is doing some festival dates in the UK and Europe to mark her three quarter century. Last year she curated the 27th Meltdown Festival at the Southbank Centre in London, following in the footsteps of some notable artists in this role like David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Nick Cave and Patti Smith. It started me thinking of all the great singles she released in the early 80s. It was a time when I was trying my young hand at some very amateurish DJ-ing and her records were always made to be played loud in a dark room. So they fitted my purposes perfectly and I bought many of them. I first became aware of her through her 1980 album Warm Leatherette which featured a number of her trademark re-interpretations of other people’s songs. Notably, the strange title track which was another song (like The Creatures on WIS 31 March) inspired by the controversial 1973 JG Ballard book Crash and originally recorded by The Normal. Others included the early hit Private Life (The Pretenders) and a great take on The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game by Smokey Robinson. The record was produced by Island’s Chris Blackwell (also featured in WIS 31 March!) and featured reggae royalty Sly & Robbie as the rhythm section. This was a winning formula that Jones was to repeat for her next few albums. For the playlist this week, I’ve taken the opening track from her great 1982 LP Living My Life, recorded at Compass Point in Nassau. Written by Jones herself, the track epitomises that reggae/dub/dance vibe she carried off with such style. It was a club hit and scraped into the top 75 of the UK singles chart – Jones only really had UK chart success when several tracks were re-released in 1985 following the success of Slave To The Rhythm. But by 1982 her famous androgynous look was in full flow and the iconic covers of both the LP and this single were created by her then-partner artist Jean-Paul Goude. Using her head cut out from the original photograph in a way that gives her head and face an angular shape was what set her image for the rest of her career.
Somebody (Somewhere) Needs You – Ike & Tina Turner (1965)
So Tina Turner became the second high profile music industry death this week. I raised an eyebrow at the media coverage given to Andy Rourke but it was nothing compared to how the BBC covered Tina’s passing. With the news breaking on Wednesday evening, they led the 10 o’clock bulletin with the story, looping in some “entertainment correspondent” to do a reverential piece to camera in the studio about Turner’s career and legacy. Now I don’t deny her amazing career is newsworthy but top billing on the UK national news over the deaths of two Cardiff teenagers and a lower than expected drop in the UK inflation rate seems kind of odd to me. Maybe the editors are people of a certain age who bought her records and saw her perform in her much mythologised 80s comeback. I must admit that this part of her career left me cold – it was all a bit too glossy and bombastic for my tastes. I know she was an incredible performer who overcame serious adversity in her life but a dip back into her work in the 60s shows her real strengths. I understand how the years she spent working and living with Ike are fraught with the abusive back story and I don’t want to brush over what a horrible man he was. But when they recorded together they produced some amazing soul and blues records where Tina’s youthful energy jumps out the speakers at you. Within a couple of hours of her death being announced, the man who never sleeps @Birmingham81 had curated a 30 song compilation on Spotify called of The Soul Of Tina and posted it on Twitter. From this list, I’ve selected this northern soul classic which was released as a single in 1965 on Loma Records and is extremely sought after on the scene to this day. It swings along with gospel overtones from a lovely dragging handclap beat with Tina’s powerful voice right in the middle of the mix. To be honest, I could have chosen any of the other 29 tunes on the Spotify playlist which is an absolute belter of a listen.
A Shot In The Arm – Wilco (1999)
What’s that sound? It’s the fanboy klaxon! At long last, four months into this blog, a Wilco track finally gets playlisted. My friend Iain noted their absence to me a few weeks ago and I told him I was biding my time. So now we are 72 songs in from the start, it seems long enough to get them lined up. While getting on a bit brings you more time to do things like this blog, it also brings with it a series of aches and pains as the aging process winds up. On Thursday I got a steroid injection to relieve the pain of ‘trigger finger’ in my left index finger – this is a condition that affects the tendon causing it to swell and inflame making it difficult to bend. Although in my hand not my arm, I am unashamedly using this as the very tenuous link to this song by Wilco from their third LP Summerteeth – I know, its a real stretch. This is one of very few records I bought based solely on a rave review I had read, in this case the sadly now defunct The Word magazine. I was entering my 40th year when I was starting think that having “a favourite band” was something grown up people didn’t do. They have remained my favorite band ever since. I am not sure I can fully explain why but it’s probably their overwhelming musicality and the fact they are brilliant live. Summerteeth marks the point where Wilco start to transition from a great alt-country rock band into the masterful sonic experimentalists that gave the world the critically acclaimed Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and the Grammy award winning A Ghost is Born in the early 2000s. This track about change and relationship breakdown opens with the killer line: “The ashtray says you were up all night” sung over a flowing piano figure with a great bassline and percussion. But slowly the string synths swirl in and build during the “shot in the arm” refrain and then really kick in on the step up to the “something in my veins bloodier than blood” section. The synths then drop back but return again in a swirling distorted finale as writer and Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy exclaims to his departing lover: “What you once were isn’t what you want to be any more”. The band didn’t like it when some reviewers drew comparisons with Radiohead but you can see why. If you liked this song, take a look at the live version from their 2010 tour movie Ashes of American Flags – it is a much more amped version and goes completely nuts at the end, aided by avant-garde guitarist Nels Cline who wasn’t in the band for the original recording. And check out Jeff Tweedy’s Nudie suit homage to Gram Parsons!
Get Back (Rooftop Performance) – The Beatles with Billy Preston (1969)
This week in 1969, The Beatles’ single Get Back was coming to the end of its six week run at the top of the UK charts just as it went to the top of the US charts where it also stayed for six weeks. It was the only Beatles release ever to include another artist on the label, where the great organ player Billy Preston was added at the band’s insistence. There are millions of words written by great music scholars about the how the planned Get Back LP was overtaken by Abbey Road and became Let It Be, how Phil Spector screwed it up and how the Beatles ceased to be in the middle of it all. So this humble blog is not going to try to compete other than to take a look at the song Get Back from the “rooftop performance” point of view. I was too young when the Beatles existed to be a fan and never really had the inclination to be a student of them in their immediate aftermath, really only knowing the tunes on the Red (62-66) and Blue (67-70) compilation records released in 1973. However, in later life I started to dig a bit deeper into the albums and started to ‘get’ why they were such a big deal. Which is why I spent 8 hours of my life during the lockdown Christmas of 2021 binge watching Peter Jackson’s incredible TV series where he employed some dark digital magic to clean up the audio and visuals from the Let It Be movie footage filmed in 1969. Unlike the shorter movie, Jackson’s longer more considered edit showed the four of them working together and, despite some band politics huffs, still being the mates they were when they started out. Most stunning of all was the footage of the impromptu rooftop concert at lunchtime on 30 January 1969 at the Apple Corps building in Saville Row. Somehow roadmanger Mal Evans threw together the scaffolding stage, got their equipment up there and cabled it down to the basement for producer Glyn Johns and engineer Alan Parsons to capture it on two 8 track recorders. They did three takes of Get Back that day along with two each of Don’t Let Me Down and I’ve Got A Feeling. They also rattled through One After 909 (written by Lennon and McCartney back in the late 50s!) and performed the wonderfully obtuse Dig A Pony with a roadie holding the lyric sheet for Lennon to read. As you will hear on the playlist and can see on this official clip of the video from Disney+, the performances look and sound fantastic. On Get Back, Lennon’s solo, McCartney’s vocal and Billy Preston’s intuitive playing on the Fender Rhodes just ring out into the grey London sky. Iconic.
Gustavo – Mark Kozelek & Jimmy LaValle (2013)
I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the last few weeks that we’ve been having some building work done on the house. As of today we are virtually complete bar some final decoration works to be tidied up. It has been every bit the frenzy of dust and noise that I fully expected it to be but, despite the inevitable hiccups that this kind of work brings, the team involved have done a great job. They have tolerated me hovering over their shoulders, constantly asking questions and have been flexible in their approach to get the right outcomes for us. This final tune on the playlist tells the story of another building project somewhere in the south of the USA near the Mexican border. I heard this song on a music magazine cover-mount CD and it stopped me dead in my tracks. The sparse electronic music, the unusual melancholic voice and the strangely engaging story had me hooked. Like a little movie in a song, Kozelek paints this amazing storyboard of becoming friends with the illegal immigrant worker who he got to do up his run-down house. And then Gustavo gets busted and deported but calls “from a Tijuana payphone” seeking financial help to get back to the US. And after he refuses and hangs up, he is haunted by Gustavo as he battles to complete the job as his life drifts on. It’s a weird premise for a song, but trust me, it’s great. I had seen a band called Sun Kil Moon mentioned in the music press but never heard their music and it turns out Mark Kozelek is the primary member with a voice as distinctive as his stream of consciousness style of writing. I bought the album Perils From The Sea which he did with electronic music specialist Jimmy LaValle and listening to this and some of his other work confirms he is very much an acquired taste “niche artist”. However, I see Phoebe Bridgers from boygenius (WIS 28 April) has covered You Missed My Heart from this LP. I am aware this quirky track might well have many of you reaching for the ‘hide’ button on the playlist but I feel a couple of listens to this hauntingly beautiful song will be worth it!
Last Word
I mentioned last week that there seems to be some glitch with the ‘like’ and ‘comment’ button on the blog posts. Sadly, it would appear that there is no way round setting up a WordPress account to use these buttons. However, I am assured that all you need to do is go to http://www.wordpress.com and click the button that says “Get Started” in the top right corner. You’ll need to add your email address, choose a username, and create a password. It suggests it is going to send you an email to confirm your account but it often doesn’t bother. However, this doesn’t seem to stop you being able to like or comment on a post. It sounds a pain but its not really any worse that buying something online!
The Master Playlist continues its onward march to be the longest and coolest playlist on the planet – in my humble opinion, of course. Give it a shuffle soon – you know it makes sense…
AR
Week In Sound 
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