It’s the first of two themed weeks on the blog while WIS is otherwise occupied. It’s six songs with spoken intros and this is Part 1. Part 2 – soon. Enjoy!

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First Word

I love a spoken intro and this idea for a theme week came to me when I playlisted the “Why does it hurt when my heart misses a beat” spoken opening to Propaganda’s Dr Mabuse last month. There are a number of good examples to choose from for just a single six song playlist, so the theme will be repeated again next week. You have been warned.

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Leader of The Pack – The Shangri-Las (1964)

It could easily been the first record in a death songs themed playlist (now there’s an idea…) but here it is opening up the spoken intro playlist with the …erm… immortal line: “Is she really going out with him?”. The conversation continues for about 20 seconds before Mary Wiess plaintively sings “I met him at the candy store” and we are off on a whirlwind teen romance story that you know isn’t going to end well. I can’t recall what age I was when I heard it but I’d be still in primary school and I thought it was the most incredibly moving piece of music. Mind you, I didn’t tell anyone that at the time. Not only are the lead and backing vocals so evocative but the production by George “Shadow” Morton is fantastic. With those minor notes signalling trouble and the key change down into the bridge adding drama to the sound of Jimmy’s motorbike skidding – look out, look out, look out, look out! The key changes again for the last verse as Betty returns to school heartbroken and then that wonderful outro kicks in with more tyres skidding and the “gone gone gones”. Brilliantly morbid!

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New Rose – The Damned (1976)

A mere 12 years after Leader Of The Pack, at the end of October 1976 The Damned became the first British punk band to record and release a single. Signed to Stiff Records and sent into Pathway Studios for a day with Nick Lowe at the controls, they emerged with this incendiary song written by guitarist Brian James but ignited by singer Dave Vanium asking the Shangri-Las’ legendary opening question. I first heard it in the front room of John Dougan’s house, four doors down from me in Paisley at the start of December 1976. A year below me in school, he was a flannel shirted Rory Gallagher fan but he told me he wanted me to hear three new records he had just bought. Spread out on the carpet were the first three punk singles – this one with it’s amazing monochrome cover above, We Vibrate by The Vibrators on RAK in it’s red and white picture sleeve and Anarchy In The UK by the Sex Pistols in its plain EMI sleeve, soon to be deleted due to the Grundy TV interview. When he put New Rose on his Dad’s radiogram and I heard that intro and then those drums kicked in, taking us to that first shouted “Argh!”, my mouth dropped open. What the bloody hell was this wonderful primeval noise?! This captures the essence of the times perfectly.

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Looking For a Kiss – New York Dolls (1973)

Following the massive success of Leader of the Pack, the Shangri-Las next single was called Give Him A Great Big Kiss. Once again, it opened with a Mary Weiss spoken intro: “When I say I’m in love/ You’d best believe I’m in love/L-U-V” before dropping into a less morbid tale of how she feels when she sees her guy walking towards her. It turns out that Dave Vanium wasn’t the first singer to filch a Mary Weiss intro as David Johansen had already grabbed this opener for the second track on the New York Dolls’ eponymous debut album three years earlier. Spoken in his unmistakable Statten Island accent, the song which follows seems to be more about looking for a fix than a kiss per se. Which is not hugely surprising for this notorious proto-punk rock band who were hugely influential but achieved little commercial success. At a time of great homophobia, they would appear on stage dressed in high heels and makeup which, along with their heavy drug use, courted great controversy. As a young teenager, I vividly recall wasting my time flicking through the racks in Listen Records across the High St from the museum in Paisley and coming across this album cover. I was really struck by its weirdness but I saw something more unsettling in their look that seemed more than just the currently fashionable glam rock style. Here they are swaggering through Looking For A Kiss on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1973.

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One Step Beyond – Madness (1979)

Spoken intros don’t come more in your face than this one. Camden Town’s finest, Madness had jumped off the Coventry-based 2-Tone bandwagon after one single which paid tribute to their ska hero Prince Buster. They signed for Stiff and recorded their first album in September 1979 under the watchful eye of in-vogue pop producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley. One Step Beyond is a Prince Buster tune and Madness recorded a version which became the title of the LP and was simultaneously released as a single which went top ten in the UK. Buster’s original song had the title shouted out at the start which was replicated in the Madness version by Chas Smash, memorably credited on the ‘Nutty Train’ LP sleeve as providing “backing vocals, various shouts and fancy footwork”. However, Smash took the intro …erm… one step beyond this by adding in the “Don’t watch that, watch this” intro from another Prince Buster tune Scorcher. He then added the “This is the heavy heavy monster sound” intro from the Dave & Ansell Collins reggae song Monkey Spanner. It was this version of the intro that was on the version released as the single. The LP track has a longer intro which you can see Smash badly lip syncing to in their hugely enjoyable first video here. It was shot mostly at our old friend the Hope & Anchor pub in Islington and shows a very young looking Suggs who isn’t doing much better miming to the background ‘here we go’ ska beat chant either!

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Suspended Sentence – John Cooper Clarke (1977)

From the Bard of Salford’s debut EP released on the wonderfully named Rabid Records label, this remains my favourite spoken intro even though it’s some 46 years since I first heard it. It’s one of the many records that my mate Ken had bought and introduced me to. With brilliant simplicity, poet Cooper Clarke proposes how the song should begin to his makeshift band The Curious Yellows and off we go into a synth layered story produced by Martin Hannett. It opens on just another typically dull tabloid day in late 70s Britain, where someone writes the typical tabloid letter demanding hanging is brought back “for everyone”. We then slide into a surreal story where this demand is granted and images of the resulting dystopian country emerge which are both chilling and oddly comic – “There were corpses in the avenues and cul-de-sacs/Piled up neatly in six-man stacks/Hanging from the traffic lights and specially made racks/They’d hang you for incontinence and fiddling your tax”. Strange stuff indeed and not for everyone, I expect. But Ken and I loved it and John Peel liked it so much he made it No 5 in his 1977 Festive Fifty. Cooper Clarke’s acerbic but witty writing and his Mancunian vowels have gone on to give him a long and acclaimed career and alternative national treasure status, with the possible exception on those Sugar Puffs adverts.

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Better Than Revenge (Taylor’s Version) – Taylor Swift (2023)

I’m very aware that the first five tracks in this selection of spoken intros all come from the dim and distant past and so I have reached for Taylor Swift to try to make me look like I am not the old fart that everyone knows I am. The date of this track is slightly misleading in that it first appeared on her 2010 LP Speak Now. However, as all good Swifties know, she is waging a high profile war with her former record company Big Machine and is part way through re-recording and re-releasing her first six records. So this is Swift’s ‘different enough to avoid a lawsuit’ 2023 version of what is a belter of a vengeance song, allegedly aimed at Camilla Belle, the young actress Joe Jonas pursued after he and Swift broke up. [I had to look that bit up!] With her now slightly more mature vocal clearer in the mix, her teacher-like spoken intro admonishment runs into a thumping snare drum before a decidedly rock guitar kicks in, Dave Grohl style, picking off the song’s repeating riff. However, whoever it was aimed at, Swift decided she was unhappy with the ‘slut-shaming’ which was read into the original chorus lyric by many listeners and seized the opportunity to change it. Rather than “She’s an actress/But she’s better known for the things she does/On the mattress”, Swift now sings “She’s an actress/He was a moth to the flame/She was holding the matches”. Being a hurt 18 year old when she wrote it, things clearly looked a bit different to her when she came back to it at 32. She’s no daft, is Taylor.

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Last Word

There is more of this nonsense to look forward to next week – be still your beating hearts! Also delighted to say I have three guest bloggers lined up for next month – further details to follow.

And finally, like Cilla once sung, the master playlist link is always there to remind you at the usual place below….

WeekInSoundMaster

AR