Back to basics this week with another events-inspired collection of tunes. All of them seem to pack a bit of punch this week for some reason. Enjoy!
(Get A) Grip (On Yourself) – The Stranglers (1977)
Over the weekend I saw a documentary on tennis in the 1970s and, like many of these programmes, the producers decided to use a soundtrack to match the images. At one point, they decided to run with this track, the Stranglers first single from January 1977, even though most of the footage came from 1975! Maybe they overlooked the chronological discontinuity as the (abbreviated) title had some very tenuous link with tennis and how you hold the racket. I don’t know, but it sounded great coming out the telly so it has landed on this week’s playlist. Coming out of the mid 70s pub rock scene, the band’s aggressive attitude to both writing and playing saw them seen as very much part of the early punk explosion in 1976. What set them apart musically was probably the melodic bass playing of the impossibly cool Jean-Jacques Burnel and the late Dave Greenfield’s rapid arpeggios on the organ which drew parallels with Ray Manzarek of The Doors. This first single crept in to the top 50 but by the end of 1977 they had released two albums and three more singles, all of which went top 10. Their barnstorming first album Rattus Norvergicus was everywhere that spring when I was in fifth year at school, spinning on every party turntable. By 1978, they were starting to expand their musical style and the suspicion that they were much more than a punk band was proven correct, particularly by their extended cover of Dione Warwick’s Walk On By. Their popularity dimmed a bit with records selling less until 1982 when Strange Little Girl and their harpsichord-driven pension plan, Golden Brown, became major hits. But back at the start, they roared out the traps with this first single, with Hugh Cornwell snarling his way through lyric which proclaimed “The worse crime that I ever did was playing rock’n’roll!” Up until writing this piece, I never knew the first line of the song referenced not having enough money to buy a “Morry Thou”. My dad’s first car was a Morris Minor 1000, the first British car to sell over a million units. His was lucky(?) enough to have one of the ones with the windscreen split into two panes with a pillar support running vertically up the middle. I wonder why that got phased out..?
The Faith Healer – The Sensational Alex Harvey Band (1973)
Another TV choice for the playlist could suggest I have the life of a couch potato but that would not be accurate. However, having watched the first two series of the Edinburgh-set BBC drama Guilt, we started to catch up with the much praised third and final series. With one of the main characters owning a record shop at the start of the story, I recall the previous series having killer soundtracks which I read were chosen by a small group from the production team led by writer Neil Forsyth. Series 2 had The Fall, The Skids and they even got Dylan to agree a very modest fee for using It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. The third series has followed the same path with Episode 2 opening with the appropriately named Strange by Wire. And, as the atmospheric closing scene commences with Mark Bonar facing down Greg McHugh’s pyscho character Teddy on a lonely Highland road, the familiar pumping synth intro for one of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s best songs starts playing. As the percussion kicks in, Zal Cleminson’s guitar riff cuts across it and more synth squeaks and whistles drop in, along with another chugging guitar. The intro to the track lasts until 2:30 before Alex Harvey’s unmistakable voice sings: “If your body’s feeling bad/and it’s the only one you have/you want to taken away the pain/go out walking in the rain”. As the excerpt of the track used for the scene doesn’t last that long, I thought the track from their 1973 LP Next it was a perfect choice for this week’s playlist. We were huge Alex Harvey fans at school and I was only 14 when I first saw SAHB live in the Apollo. To this day, they remain one of the most incendiary live acts I have ever witnessed. They opened that night with an unforgettable performance of Faith Healer and it also opens their 1975 Live LP, performed like most other band’s encores. Everything they did was laced with the theatre of Alex’s slightly mad personna – you couldn’t take your eyes of him – but the band were brilliant musicians. Sadly long dead, the image of Alex on the cover above is how I vividly remember him standing on that high stage in Glasgow. A shortened version of the original track was released as a single on Vertigo Records and a video of them performing it on the BBC’s Whistle Test in 1973 can be seen here. Completely and utterly unique.
Bernadette – The Four Tops (1967)
So Levi Stubbs was born this week in 1936 and I thought including a track from the Four Tops was a worthy way of celebrating one of the great voices in soul music. Arguably the pre-eminent Motown group, Stubbs’ powerful and emotive baritone voice contrasted with the more common tenor singers and is instantly recognisable. The four original members (Stubbs with Duke Fakir, Obie Benson and Lawrence Payton) first performed together at a birthday party in high school from 1953 and continued to do so until 1997 when Payton died of liver cancer. Stubbs was also to die of cancer in 2008 but what a legacy they left behind in their run of 17 US hit singles between 1964 and 1968. Most of these came from the legendary Holland-Dozier-Holland writing and production team, including this brilliant track from February 1967. Each of the three writers were thinking of their own ‘Bernadette’ when developing the song with Lamont Dozier’s inspiration coming from his unrequited love for a girl when he was 12 who he described as “a beautiful Italian girl with eyes for somebody else.” Dozier loved writing for Stubbs who he considered to be a dynamic singer who had to stretch himself to deliver the drama in a song. Bernadette provides this drama in spades with the pulsating Funk Brothers rhythm driving the track forwards while Stubbs passionately pleads for his girl to ignore the approaches of other men and stick with him. The song has a relatively complex structure with the glorious “in your arms” bridge at 1:50 allowing the strings to soar before dropping back into the verse. Best of all is the false ending at 2:40 where the instruments stop and the The Andates backing singers hold their note to a fade before Stubbs yells “Bernadette!” and the band come crashing back for a 20 second outro where a she is told “you’re the soul of me”. It was a great trick to catch the listener’s ear while being broadcast on AM transistor radios and took the single to a well-deserved top ten position in both the US and the UK. There is a very grainy US TV performance from 1967 on YouTube here.
Ashes To Ashes – Steve Earle (2002)
Dust has been an ever present matter in my life for the last six weeks. When you get someone to knock a wall down in your house then put new walls up and plaster them, it completely takes over. It gets everywhere – in every nook and cranny as well as up in your clothes, up your nose and down your throat. You can sweep, hoover, wash and wipe but it just keeps coming. I read somewhere that the fine particles released in this kind of work (particularly sanding down plastering) can stay in the air and left undisturbed could take five years to fully settle out! With the power isolated in the room, I went in to get something I had left there late one night and the torchlight illuminated all the dust particles floating around – it was like I was in a blizzard. So songs about dust started to jump into my mind and I chose this one to add to the playlist. With its refrain of “ashes to ashes and dust to dust”, this is Steve Earle’s 9-11 song from his post 9-11 album Jerusalem. Maybe this seems like a trite association with my building works but songs referring to dust are not frequent in popular music so I decided to go with it. I’ve been listening to Earle’s work since his alt-country rock bad boy beginnings in the mid 80s with his loud band The Dukes. Always an activist, following his heroin addiction/prison/rehab fallow period he released a series of increasingly political albums through the late 90s with 1997’s El Corazon being a stand out. I saw him live a few times and found him an engaging performer – a hard core troubadour to use his own words. By the turn of the millennium, he was starting to expand into writing which would ultimately lead to his involvement with David Simon and his appearances as characters in both Simon’s HBO series The Wire and Treme. The 2002 Jerusalem LP was born out of anger and confusion and crafts a vision of America thrown into chaos, where the falling of the World Trade Center towers is just another symbol of a larger malaise facing the country. This being the opening track, it steps right back from the immediacy of the terrorist atrocity and reminds us that throughout history “every tower ever built tumbles” and “someday even man’s best laid plans will lie twisted and covered in rust”. Thought provoking stuff.
48 Crash – Suzi Quatro (1973)
As long as there is popular music in the UK, there will be music industry svengalis whose use their songwriting and/or production skills turn a buck out of some youngster’s dreams. In the last 20 years or so, this area was pretty much sown up by the rather slimy Simon Cowell and his Saturday night TV reality competitions. In the 80s and early 90s, it was Stock Aitken and Waterman who racked up the hits for a range of artists and soap actors. But in the early 1970s, it was Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman who ruled the roost having no fewer than 19 UK top 40 hits in 1973 and 1974 with just three bands Mud, The Sweet and Suzi Quatro. Five of these singles went to number 1, two of which were recorded by Quatro who was 73 years old this week. Chinn and Chapman developed a relationship with another producer, Mickie Most, who ran RAK Records and all of their of their hits came out through the label, with its distinctive and evocative image of the sailing boat. Quatro was an American, born in Detroit of Italian descent – her family name Quattrochi meant four eyes! She taught herself bass and, at the age of 14, her father gave her a 1957 Fender Precision Bass which she still uses to record to this day. During the sixties she played with her sisters in a band but moved to London in 1971 where she eventually met the “Chinnichap” pairing and they started shaping her as a leather clad singer for the burgeoning glam rock scene. After a tour with Thin Lizzy and Slade as headliners, Can The Can was released and topped the UK charts, probably on account of her appearance on Top Of The Pops. I recall being amazed by this short girl with a feather cut hairstyle, dressed head to toe in leather while singing and playing a huge bass guitar nearly as big as her. She really attacked the vocal and, although the song was plain daft, it had one of those great radio hooks that the writers were so good at. The school playground was abuzz the next day! Chinn and Chapman then cranked out three similar songs all of which were UK hits – 48 Crash, Daytona Demon and Devil Gate Drive (the second No 1). So just for old times sake, I’ve decided to mark Suzi Q’s birthday with the second of these tunes, which got to No3 in the UK chart in 1973. It kicks along fine but the lyric is hard to fathom – other than for reasons of rhyme, whatever the 48 Crash is, why is it a “silk sash bash”? She is quoted as saying she knew that the writers just threw the nonsense words together but in her head it is a song about the male menopause. Hmmmm….. okay. It’s hard to believe but she still plays live and, following some Scandinavian festival dates over the summer, she has a short tour lined up for the UK in early November. Coming no further north than Manchester, though. I found this online from a gig in Frankfurt a couple of weeks back – fair play to her, she still wears the leather!
Forest Fire – Lloyd Cole and the Commotions (1984)
The news yesterday was full of stories of the air quality in New York, Washington and other cities on the eastern seaboard of the US. They were being impacted by smog created by smoke being blown south from extensive Canadian forest fires. Climate change was cited as having a hand in this and not just the temperatures and the weather patterns – apparently the climate now makes tree-killing bark beetles more prevalent in Canada and the intensity and extent of the usual seasonal fires was considered to be greater because of the increased number of dead trees. If this all makes you want to weep for our future and that of our children, my somewhat trite suggestion is to turn to this somewhat inevitable last song on the playlist and lose yourself in the twang of one of the great 80s guitar solos. This track was the second single from Rattlesnakes, the first LP by the Commotions who were formed in Glasgow by Derby-born Lloyd Cole while he attempted to study English Literature and Philosophy there. The city had not necessarily followed the UK’s early 80s dive into synth pop and the new local bands were still in thrall to America(na). And so it was that Perfect Skin emerged as the perfect debut pop single, all jangly guitar and Cole’s vibrato heavy voice tumbling with Dylan-esque words. It catapulted him and his excellent band of local musicians (including former Bluebell Lawrence Donegan) from gigs at the Uni to Top Of The Pops – I love the look Cole and Donegan give each other at the start of this rough clip of their performance. Rattlesnakes followed and it was a huge record in my social circles in the winter of 1984 with its knowing, bookish lyrics and carefully crafted tunes, enhanced with string arrangements by Lexicon of Love arranger Anne Dudley. They were the darlings of pop academia and my copy of the Forest Fire single came in a gatefold sleeve which opened up to show some arty monochrome photos of the band looking achingly hip and cool, matching the shot of Cole on the cover. The brilliant Muscle Shoals type arrangement pulls you slowly into a tale of some girl who is on her way to a burn out. The sustain on the organ, the bounce on the bass, the crispness of the drums – they are all just building to the point at about 3:08 when Neil Clark’s guitar solo kicks in gloriously with those first few notes at the lower end of the fret board. Drenched in reverb, it shimmers ever onwards, counterpointed toward the end by some beautifully controlled feedback. Just fantastic.
Last Word
A couple of things to mention this week. One is a bit backwards in that if you subscribe to the blog via email and you are reading this, then you will have already seen that the format of the weekly subscriber email has changed! Rather than issue the full text of the post embedded in the email, it now requires you to click on the link to visit the web version of the blog to read the post. While this means you have to deploy one more click, it also helps me assess the reach of the blog as all readers are recorded by the site stats. It had always been my intention to do it this way but I’ve only recently got round to finding out how to adjust the software to do this.
The second point is more interesting. As we’re spending a few days next week travelling down to the Black Deer Americana Festival, time will be tight for me to get a blog written and issued. So, I’m delighted to say that, for the first time on WeekInSound, the songs and text for the 16 June 23 blog will be chosen and written by guest blogger Fraser Maxwell. Fraser is an old work colleague and gig buddy of mine and has been a great supporter of WIS since I launched it. He’s got a really interesting taste in music so I can’t wait to see what he has chosen. But I’ll have to, I suppose…
In the meantime, the Master Playlist grows even longer and clamours for the attention of your discerning ears at the link below.
AR
Week In Sound 
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