As the summer winds on, the WIS blog continues it’s campaign to bring you a weekly selection of great tunes to listen to – hopefully this week is no different. Enjoy!
Body Paint – Arctic Monkeys (2022)
So from one festival weekend to the next one – except this time I was watching the bands perform in front of a gathering of some 200,000 people at Glastonbury from the comfort of my sofa at home without these bloody flags getting in the way. My daughter and her boyfriend were there so I was getting some feedback from them on how things were going down on site. The Friday night Pyramid Stage headliners Arctic Monkeys produced a performance which seemed to split the fans. It wasn’t just because they featured songs from their two post-AM albums – indeed, there were only 5 tunes from 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel and 2022’s The Car in the 21 song set. What really seemed to upset some of the faithful was that the lounge-bar, ‘non-rock’ style of these two records was applied to the sound of their older, more popular tracks. It wasn’t that they didn’t play the hits, it’s just that they played them differently. Their performance of fan-favourite Mardy Bum from their 2006 debut record saw tempers boiling on social media. Idiosyncratic frontman Alex Turner, all slicked hair and aviator shades with his chelsea-booted foot up on the monitor, has adopted a crooner vocal style which came in for some fair old criticism. Some of the memes posted featured Vic Reeves’ pub singer slot on Shooting Stars which was harsh but pretty funny. But the many fans on the ground seemed to like the show. I must admit my familiarity with their music had drifted since the high of AM in 2013, and I hadn’t found time to catch up with the songs on The Car at all since its release last year. Call me perverse (and many do) but I quite enjoyed the louche vibe and sweeping strings of the new songs like There’d Better Be A Mirrorball. I was particularly caught by the opening line of Body Paint where Turner’s sweet-soul falsetto croons: “For a master of deception and subterfuge/You’ve made yourself quite a bed to lie in”. So it goes first into this week’s playlist. Carried along by a string pattern which at times reminds me a little of the arrangements George Martin deployed for the Beatles, this time-worn betrayal song uses traces of body paint as the metaphor for lies that are not completely hidden. It’s a far cry from I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor but it’s a classy bit of pop writing to these ears.
Bennie And The Jets – Elton John (1973)
So drawing a veil over the horror of Saturday’s headline set by G’n’R, we move swiftly on to the first and last appearance of Reginald Kenneth Dwight at Glastonbury, one which apparently attracted it’s biggest ever crowd for an artist. It sure looked that way from the drone shots on the telly. What anyone saw at the back, I have no idea. And even if you could see the screens, the time delay with the audio must have been huge. But there he finally was, staggering a bit to get on the stage, but once his fingers reached the ivories, he could have been 25 again. His voice was OK for a two hour set by 76 year old and he did have some back catalogue to choose from, although his much rumoured guest-list was a bit thin on big names – Macca stayed firmly in the wings. Beloved through the years by critics and other musicians, he now seems to be cemented in the upper level of the public’s National Treasure hierarchy, requiring a Huw Edwards black tie and a state funeral when he finally pegs it. For all his charity work and support to new artists over the years, I am of the slightly curmudgeonly view that he hasn’t done anything worthwhile musically since 1975’s Captain Fantastic and possibly even as far back as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in 1973. But this period dominated his setlist so all was well. His partnership with Bernie Taupin back in those early days produced some amazing ballads with only Tiny Dancer making it on to the Glasto list – but if you like that song I would recommend a listen to wonderful Amoreena from Tumbleweed Connection and the fantastic title track to Madman Across The Water. Also, many critics ‘best of lists’ place Mona Lisas And Mad Hatters from Honky Chateau near to the top – listen to it and you will see why. [During his duet with EJ on Tiny Dancer, Brandon Flowers uses a line from Mona Lisas And Mad Hatters as the song finishes.] But I’ve opted for the Bennie And The Jets for the playlist as it was part of Reg’s upbeat opening trio of tunes on Sunday night. The studio recording sounds live due to added crowd cheers, whistles and hand claps. I love songs about bands or being in a band (see Ian Hunter ad infinitum!) and this is one of those about a fictional band fronted by an androgynous woman wearing electric boots and a mohair suit and playing “solid walls of sound”. It’s got a great rhythm especially with the overdubbed dragging handclaps by the ‘crowd’ and it has featured in Reg’s sets for the last 50 years since he recorded it. So very fitting that he bashed it out again on Sunday. [Black Deer footnote: Blue Rose Code included a cover of this tune in their Sunday afternoon set at the 2022 festival – its all mysteriously linked, you know!]
The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte – Sparks (2023)
My third and final pick of the Glastonbury coverage is not Lizzo, Lana Del Rey, Christine and the Queens or even Alison Goldfrapp – I kinda wish it was. These are people that were talked up in the coverage in the media but a short dip into their sets didn’t provide me with anything particularly memorable to these old ears. I know I really need try harder to embrace the new music being made today but sadly nothing grabbed me and got into my head. I caught snippets of Rick Astley impressively drumming on his cover of Highway To Hell and also some of his Smiths covers with Blossoms, swinging the mic about and striking a pose – he was certainly having fun. But the most memorable moment for this old duffer came when Sparks performed their set in front of a more mature gathering at The Park stage. Now I have long been a fan of the Mael brothers (see my gushing piece on Amateur Hour in WIS 5 May 23) and I re-connected with them strongly when I saw them perform live in 2017 in support of their brilliant Hippopotamus album. Despite this and their excellent 2021 movie documentary, I hadn’t really listened to their latest record which was released last month and enigmatically titled The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte. A playlist I was listening to a few weeks back threw me the great single Nothing Is As Good As They Say It Is where all the familiar Sparks ingredients were in place – witty lyrics (check!), infectious upbeat melody (check!), power-pop guitars (check!), Ron’s piano and Russell’s voice (check! check!). So far, so Sparks, and I wondered was their return to Island Records after 47 years possibly a return to their 70s style music? But the week before Glastonbury, I heard this title track for the first time and their reputation for being savvy art-pop shapeshifters was re-confirmed. The synths cracking and buzzing in the verse feel slightly out of control and when the drum machine kicks in on the chorus is adds a dark pulsing tension to the story being told. Which seems to be about a woman weeping into her coffee in a cafe but it builds into the melancholic observation that “so many people are crying in their latte” with Russell speculating that the world is to blame. It sounds amazing but they then up the ante by involving Oscar-winning celebrity fan Cate Blanchett in the story. I had heard that she appeared with them on stage but when I watched their set on iPlayer, I wasn’t prepared for her performance. I subsequently watched the brilliant video they made for the song and it all made sense – well, as much as anything Sparks do makes “sense”. Ron Mael’s performance in the video is as much as must-see as Blanchett’s – the look she gives him when he walks off is really funny, as is his return to the scene. The Brothers Genius.
Warwick Avenue – Duffy (2008)
Music radio programming is in a difficult place in the 2020s. Streaming platforms can offer up all the music anyone might want and the host of so-called radio stations offering a specific genre are everywhere. I was amused by the the builders working on the house recently who were dedicated Absolute 80s Radio listeners. No DJs talking – just the occasional station ID and what, at first, appears like an endless stream of hit singles from the 80s. Only with the work taking place over several weeks, you soon realise that there are only a few hundred tracks programmed into the broadcasting software. So the same songs keep coming round. It won’t surprise you to hear that my preference is for some human thought to go into what is broadcast so I can hear people talking about the records. This generally happens with the likes of 6Music and other BBC music stations and probably on the commercial stations that I don’t listen to because of the bloody adverts. So it was that I learned that it was Aimee Anne Duffy’s birthday this week when 6Music played this great song while I was in the car. Her debut No 1 track Mercy is what the algorithm in Absolute Noughties would have been playing, if there is such a station. But I was pleased to hear this classy soulful track come up as I hadn’t heard it in some time. When the record was out, I recall reading that Duffy had got off the Tube at Warwick Avenue Station by accident one day and when working on a half-written song the next day, the name dropped on to the page from the depths of her brain. Checking on the internet, now I’m glad to see that I hadn’t made this up! Featuring a lovely shuffling loose beat, the recording has Bernard Butler on guitar and a string arrangement to die for. She makes great use of her amazing Welsh vocal chords throughout, holding that note perfectly at the end of the bridge into the last instrumental section. Someone online suggests the soul shuffle of the tune is reminiscent of The Temptations 1964 Motown classic My Girl and I absolutely get that, albeit Duffy’s song has the melancholy of a minor key in this break-up story where “I’m leaving you for the last time, baby”. A really lovely tune for a sunny summer’s day.
Gates Of The West – The Clash (1979)
If I wasn’t already feeling my age this week, I saw that Mick Jones of The Clash was 68 years old at the weekend. Nothing reminds you of the passing of time more than realising your kids are now ten years older than you were when you first saw The Clash. Jones was always going to be a guitar player in a band. As a teenager learning the guitar in the early seventies, he saw a lot of live music and was part of the small group of fans who used to follow Mott The Hoople around the country, often sleeping rough and jumping over train barriers to skip fares. His songwriting partnership with Joe Strummer was at the heart of The Clash’s success as a band, with Strummer/Jones on the record label being a similar emblem of quality rock’n’roll song-writing as Jagger/Richards and Lennon/McCartney. A much more accomplished guitar player than Joe, he was also the vocal foil for Strummer’s iconic raucous bark, with his slightly nasal voice providing many of my favourite moments on their records. On what I consider to be their finest song, 1977’s imperious single Complete Control, the outro has Strummer barking out slogans (“This is Joe Public speaking!”) while Jones repeats the “We are in control” refrain as the song careers towards that exhilarating ending. It is Jones who has the lead vocal on their most commercially successful and best known recording Should I Stay Or Should I Go and also on Rock The Casbah, another well known tune from 1982’s Combat Rock. While he did sing on a couple of tracks on their eponymous punky debut album, it is once they spread their musical wings from that restrictive start that he really came into his own, particularly on 1979’s double album London Calling. His vocal track shines in the the drama of a song like The Card Cheat or in the joy of album closer Train In Vain. As you can see, it’s been a tough choice picking a track for the playlist – and at the last minute, I very nearly went for Stay Free, his 1978 ode to his wayward friend recently released from prison. But it is this much underrated track from their early 1979 Cost Of Living EP that I wanted to share. Illustrating the ongoing change in their music that would emerge later that year on London Calling, Gates Of The West was a song they never played live as Strummer believed it was too complicated. It is has an opening bass riff influenced by a Clash cover (Time Is Tight by Booker T & The MGs) and a lyric that reflects their wonderment of travelling for the first time to New York and the wider USA. Jones’s guitar licks are all over this track and his vocal is brilliantly exuberant on the anthemic chorus where the melody builds to a crescendo as the song finishes. There is a lovely nod back to his early days as a Mott fan in the second verse. Jones sings: “I should be jumpin’ and shoutin’ that I made it all this way/From Camden Town station to 44th and 8th” referencing the line “From the Liverpool Docks to the Hollywood Bowl” in his heroes’ All The Way To Memphis. I remember taking this EP in it’s garish Flash parody gatefold sleeve to several parties in the early summer of 1979 and insisting it got a spin. Happy carefree days.
Enjoy Yourself – The Jacksons (1976)
On this day in 1975, the Jackson 5 announced to the music industry that they were leaving the mighty Motown Records and were signing for Epic, gaining a reported ten fold increase in their share of royalties. Formed in 1964 in Gary, Indiana, the band were a family pop group featuring five brothers (Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael) who were managed by their father Joe. He and his wife Katherine had ten children but Marlon’s twin Brandon died shortly after birth. The other nine (including Randy and sisters Rebbie, La Toya and Janet) all became professional musicians. Having begun in school talent shows, the Jackson 5 honed their young skills on support slots at gigs in Chicago and Harlem and cut a couple of limited pressing singles on small labels. They signed a year long contract with Motown in 1968 when the eldest brother Jackie was 17 and lead singer Michael was just 10. The latter’s dazzling performance in a support slot to Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers at the Regal Theatre in Chicago had got them their audition with Taylor himself persuading Motown label boss Berry Gordy to hear them. They signed a full contract the following year and with big label backing, they had a run of four consecutive US No 1 singles including the brilliant ABC and the soaring joy of I Want You Back. In doing so they became one of the first African American groups to get a significant “crossover” fan-base. Motown developed their brand globally and focussed all their marketing effort on the band. Jacksonmania took hold and by the early 70s they became one of the most famous groups in the world. Gordy could see that young Michael was the star and his solo career was developed in parallel with the band. He was 13 when his debut single Got To Be There was released which was followed by others including the saccharine-sweet Ben, originally destined for Donny Osmond. Recorded for a movie, the bizzare love ballad for a pet rat was only matched in its oddity by the outfit Michael wore in the music video I can remember seeing on Top Of The Pops. However by 1975, the Jackson 5’s run of hits with the Detroit label had petered out and the move to Epic was seen as a way of re-launching their career. The band were forced to change their name to The Jacksons since Motown owned the other name. And, having just married Berry Gordy’s daughter Hazel, bass guitarist and second vocalist Jermaine felt he should stay on at his new father-in-law’s record label. Undeterred by this, Joe Jackson quickly replaced Jermaine with his younger brother Randy. The move to Epic was initially successful with this snappy pop-funk track hitting the US top ten in 1976 but just failing to break into the UK top 40. Written by legendary Philadelphia songwriters Gamble and Huff, unusually Michael shares the lead vocal with older brother Jackie, as can be seen in the glorious video where the by then 18 year old Michael’s movement shines for all to see. The bassline pops and the horns honk out and everyone has a great time. The next release was the slick and slightly soulless Show You The Way To Go which was a UK No 1 in 1977 and this led on to a their last few big hits as a group. However, by that time, the writing was on the wall or, in fact, on the b-side, where a track called Blues Away was the first song young Michael Jackson wrote entirely himself. And the rest, as they say, is history…
Last Word
Next week’s blog will be created on the hoof as we are doing some travelling in and around London. I am toying with building on the Duffy track this week and making it six London themed songs. Watch this space.
These tracks have been added to the Master Playlist taking the total to 102 songs which works out at seventeen weeks worth of tunes. All ready to be shuffled for your upcoming summer break at the usual link.
AR
Week In Sound 
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