Back on the horse this week with no theme in sight other than these six tunes are tenuously linked to the week gone by and they all sound very different. Enjoy!

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Kelvingrove Baby – The Bathers (1981)

The silver lining on the cloud of the blog’s truncated travel plans last week was that I was able to attend what was almost certainly the final live gig at the Woodside Hotel in Aberdour. Last month I wrote a piece about my friends John and Lis who own the hotel and the many great gigs they have put on there. John is moving on to a new project promoting gigs at the Kings in Kirkcaldy and there are plans to redevelop the hotel. Saturday night saw the old place host a wonderful performance by The Bathers promoted by the Blue Nile Fanclub and appropriately one of John and Lis’ favourite bands. Formed back in 1985 as a loose collective of musicians in the aftermath of Chris Thomson’s first band Friends Again, they performed with their now regular line up of Thomson, Callum McNair (guitar), Ken McHugh (bass) and Hazel Morrison (drums and vocals). They were joined on keyboards by Thomson’s old Friends Again colleague Paul McGeechan, who now records as Starless. Their fantastic career-spanning set featured songs from all these bands and included two new tunes from the forthcoming Bathers album due for release shortly. In a set full of highs, the new track Locomotion Is Easy stood-out with McNair’s subtle slide guitar and Morrison channeling Joni Mitchell in her amazing vocal. Despite bringing the house down by finishing with a rousing version of the Friends Again track Honey At The Core, I’m going to playlist another standout which was the wistful title track to their much loved 1997 LP Kelvingrove Baby. A fitting way to bring the curtain down on the Woodside.

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If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next – Manic Street Preachers (1998)

This week saw the 25th anniversary of the release of This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, the fifth album by Manic Street Preachers. It followed their 1996 commercial breakthrough record Everything Must Go which had seen a change in their sound to incorporate synths and strings following the disappearance and presumed suicide of troubled guitarist Richey Edwards. The anticipation for This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours was such that it entered the UK album chart at No 1 selling 136,000 copies in its first week. It went on to achieve global sales of over five million copies – not bad a for a record whose title was a quote from a speech by Welsh Labour politician Nye Bevan, the father of the NHS. It was their first collection of songs written and performed as a trio and it’s slick sound, anthemic choruses and glossy artwork won many awards. At the same time, it alienated their hardcore fanbase who accused them of “selling out”. The album spawned four great singles but I’m playlisting the lead single which earned the band their first UK No 1. A Design For Life had only reached No 2 two years earlier. The song’s theme is inspired by the Spanish Civil War and it takes its startling title from a Republican propaganda poster of the time written in English. The record soars on the back of sweeping strings and James Dean Bradfield’s strong but melancholic vocal, while Nicky Wire’s stirring lyric borrows imagery of Las Ramblas from Orwell’s Homage To Catalonia. And the line “If I can shoot rabbits/Then I can shoot fascists” has been attributed to a conversation between peasant brothers joining the Republican fighters. It rings particularly true to me as I am currently halfway through Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls which is peppered with similar dialogue.

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(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang – Heaven 17 (1981)

And on the subject of fascism, forty two years ago this week the debut album by Heaven 17, Penthouse And Pavement, was released. When the original line-up of Sheffield electronic experimentalists The Human League split in two, it allowed vocalist Phil Oakey and ‘visual director’ Adrian Wright to keep the name and morph into a massively successful synth-pop band. The League’s founding members Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh decided to call Glenn Gregory, their original choice of vocalist before Oakey joined the band, and together they formed a production company British Electric Foundation. Inspired by the name for the first Sony Walkman and fascinated by how this revolutionary new mobile device made users feel as they walked along listening, BEF recorded a series of electronic instrumentals to be released as a limited run cassette only album called Music For Stowaways. The last track on side 1 of the tape was a funky piece given the throwaway name Groove Thang. However, they then added a lyric to the backing track and released it as the first single under their new band name Heaven 17, who were a fictitious band mentioned in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Despite being banned by the BBC for slandering Ronald Reagan as a “fascist god in motion”, (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang was a minor hit. Added to the positive reception by music critics, the single helped Penthouse and Pavement reach No 14 in the album charts. Had I bought the track as a 12 inch single and not seven inch, it would have fitted well into last week’s student dancefloor theme.

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Hurt So Good – Susan Cadogan (1975)

Sometimes you hear a song from a long time ago which you haven’t heard since back then and, as you listen, time falls away and you feel you are sat in front of Top Of The Pops on a Thursday night in your parent’s front room. This happened this week when I heard this record, a top five single in 1975 performed by a former Jamaican librarian. A little digging unearthed this backstory. Hurt So Good was originally a soul tune recorded by Millie Jackson in 1973 and reached No 24 in US Billboard charts. I hadn’t heard it before and thoroughly recommend a listen at the above link – it’s excellent. Inspired by her mother who recorded gospel tunes in the 1950s, Susan Cadogan was a talented singer who was discovered by legendary reggae producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. Although he was better known for his heavy rasta and dub style of reggae, he was impressed by her clear voice and he produced Cadogan’s gentle ‘lovers rock’ cover of Jackson’s tune, Having failed as a single on one of Perry’s labels in Jamaica, a UK label called DIP International released it and it topped the nascent UK reggae chart. A young gun A&R man for Magnet Records called Pete Waterman then heard it and promoted the re-release on Magnet all the way to No4 in the UK singles chart and an appearance on TOTP. After a follow up that scraped into the top thirty and a couple of other attempts, Cadogan returned to the library job in Jamaica. She kept singing on and off and had a couple of Jamaican hits in the 80s. I have no memory of former Bronski Beat and Communards singer Jimmy Sommerville having a UK hit with a cover of the tune in 1995. Best stick with Susan or Millie’s version, I think.

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Hickory Wind – Gram Parsons (1973)

I recently playlisted a track by First Aid Kit called Emmylou which celebrated the partnership between Emmylou Harris and the ‘cosmic American musician’ Gram Parsons. Combining country, rhythm and blues, soul, folk and rock, Parsons was enormously influential despite living a short and troubled life, dying from an overdose of morphine and alcohol in 1973 aged just 26. I was led to his music by Elvis Costello recording two of his tracks on his 1981 record Almost Blue. Parsons was a short-lived member of the Byrds when recording their acclaimed Sweetheart Of The Rodeo album and then formed the Flying Burrito Brothers in 1969. Their first album Gilded Palace Of Sin has been cited as influencing many Americana artists even to this day. By 1970, Parsons’ drug habit was building and was not helped by him developing a close friendship with Keith Richards. Richards’ writing became influenced by Parsons with the Stones’ Wild Horses being the most obvious example. As his drug use continued, Parsons left the band and recorded his solo album GP with Emmylou Harris but narcotic use meant the resulting tour was chaotic and held together by Harris. An apparently cleaned up and more focussed Parsons recorded a second record Grievous Angel with Harris but he was dead before it was released. I have playlisted the beautiful Hickory Wind, his simple signature ballad first recorded with the Byrds but re-recorded as a poignant duet with Harris with that aching steel guitar. Gram overdosed in Bedroom No 8 of the Joshua Tree Inn on the 29 Palms Highway where, thirty three years later, we rented the room next door while on a California road trip with our kids who were 10 and 8 at the time. They got to to Disneyland but also had the joy of dollar fifty tacos served through a hatch in a run-down brandless Mexican place full of freaky people on Main St, Joshua Tree. I like to think that’s the memory they’ll share with their kids.

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Teeth – Lady Gaga (2009)

Like everyone’s gran in the late 60s/early 70s, my Gran was an avid reader of The Sunday Post. This meant that when we had our tea at her house every Sunday, I got to read Merry Mac’s Fun Pages which had The Broons and Oor Wullie cartoon strips. Drawn in some kind of Dundonian 1950s timewarp style by Dudley Watkins, each Oor Wullie strip opens with him sat on his bucket in his dungarees. I can vividly recall one where Wullie had toothache. You knew this as he was sat there with a bandage looped under his chin and knotted at the top of his head with one side of his face was swollen. I had cause to think of this image at 2am on Wednesday morning as I stalked the house with horrendous toothache and looked in the mirror to see my face swelling up. Modern antibiotics are slowly reducing the pain and swelling now but the other thing that came into my banging head that night was a song about toothache called Unfinished Sweet on Alice Cooper’s great 1973 album Billion Dollar Babies. It had the line: ” St Vitus Dance on my molars tonight/Aching to get me” – true dat! The overuse of dentist drill sounds on the track means I have playlisted something more contemporary related obliquely to dentistry. Teeth appeared on the extended version of Lady Gaga’s debut album called The Fame Monster. A strange, stompy, distorted tribal tune, it caught my ear at the time as it was quite different from her more polished showy pop songs. Listening to it again, it seems to have more to do with sado-masochism than dentistry and I’m not quite sure what Wullie, Wee Eck and Fat Boab would have made of it all. It makes you think, as The Sunday Post would have said.

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Last Word

Last week’s Last Word included a plea for volunteers to prepare a guest blog in advance for publication in November when WIS is off overseas. I’ve had one head above the parapet so far but I’m sure there are others out there with a desire to get their thoughts on six of their favourite tunes into print for us all to enjoy. If so, contact me soon to get the ball rolling.

The master playlist continues to be the place where people can get an eclectic hit of great music to soundtrack their day. Spread the word, brothers and sisters!

WeekInSoundMaster

AR