Another week of tunes before I head east and the guest bloggers take over the airwaves with their thoughts on their choices of music. Enjoy!

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When I Dream – The Teardrop Explodes (1980)

It was Julian Cope’s sixty fifth birthday this week so it seems fitting to playlist a tune in honour of this unique musician and author. His musical career began in Liverpool as a founding member of legendary but shortlived Liverpool punk band the Crucial Three alongside Ian McCulloch and Pete Wylie. Echo & The Bunnymen, Wah! and The Teardrop Explodes were formed by each of the three in 1978, with Cope leading the way with the latter band’s psychedlic post punk sound. After some reasonable success (Reward got to No 6), they split in 1982 and Cope began what was to become a lifelong solo career which to date has generated an incredible 36 albums (and many more collaborations). Singles from these gave him some modest low charting hits like the great Trampolene in 1987 but after the lovely Planetary Sit-In in 1994, he concentrated on the LPs . His writing career began in 1997 as a musicologist when he published the critically acclaimed Krautrocksampler about underground 60/70s German music. He followed this with his The Modern Antiquarian, a comprehensive 448-page work detailing stone circles and other ancient monuments of prehistoric Britain which was described by historian Ronald Hutton as “the best popular guide to Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments for half a century”. A similar but even larger book The Megalithic European followed, as did more obscure music books before he moved into fiction with 2014’s One Three One which the Guardian described as “brilliant, serious, funny and completely bonkers”. Having read about his early Liverpool days in Will Sergeant’s excellent biography Bunnyman, I am playlisting the fantastic When I Dream which was released as a single in 1980 just before The Teardrop Explode’s debut LP Kilimanjaro. I had taped the LP off a mate at school and loved it’s pysch quality which is exemplified in When I Dream’s looping outro vocal sung over repeated guitar arpeggios and harmonics. A life of eccentricity was follow.

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Stay Right Here – Allison Russell (2023)

So I did a lot of angsting in last week’s blog about losing my connection to current music and the blog becoming too dominated by tracks from the distant past. Last week, I playlisted a recent Brandi Carlile track and, as I wrote that piece, I was reminded of her support to developing the career of the incredible Allison Russell who I saw this year at the Black Deer Festival (WIS 23 Jun 23). Carlile had persuaded Fantasy Records to sign and release Russell’s great debut record Outside Child which dealt with resilience and survival from the abuse she endured as a child at the hands of her stepfather. At the weekend, I stumbled across a new release by Russell in the Spotify Singles series. These are two track affairs, the streamer inviting musicians to reimagine one of their own songs and a song that they love. The cover is a great take on the Hozier global hit Take Me To Church with the Resistance Revival Chorus helping Russell take the song to a new level – click the link and listen – you’ll enjoy it. The ‘own song’ track was a brilliant new version of a single she had out back in July, which appears on her second album The Returner released last month. The LP came with a press release which described it as a “body-shaking, mind-expanding, soulful expression of liberation, love, and self-respect”. The new version of Stay Right Here takes what was a really good piano-driven funk groove and makes it a great song. The synths sound fatter and the bass bounces more with a grittier lead vocal and joyous backing vocals from the all-girl “Rainbow Coalition” band we saw her play it live with back in the summer. There are distinct shades of 70s/80s black disco – kinda Gloria Gaynor meets the Weather Girls – and its all gloriously uplifting!

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Roadrunner Blues – John Grant and Midlake (2023)

Like buses, you wait among all the historic stuff for some current music to arrive and two tracks come along at once. Not content with one 2023 release, this week the blog also includes this fine new single released jointly by John Grant and Midlake. Like Allison Russell, Midlake were another act we saw at Black Deer Festival this year and also featured on WIS 23 Jun 23. But this is John Grant’s first and somewhat overdue appearance on the blog. Grant was co-founder, singer and songwriter for 90s Denver band The Czars who are best known for their 2004 single Paint The Moon which had a great cover of Abba’s Angel Eyes on the b-side. When the band split, he had a hiatus from music but a chance encounter with Midlake in New York in 2008 resulted in them persuading him to write again. Huge fans of his voice and style, they joined him to record and produce his stunning debut solo LP Queen of Denmark which explored Grant’s struggles with alcohol and drug addiction as well as his personal struggle to reconcile his homosexuality with his strict Methodist upbringing. The record is full of impossibly sad yet optimisitc love songs sung in Grant’s deep contemplative baritone and backed by Midlake’s delicate accoustic instrumentation and lush layers of 70s analogue synthesisers – try the wonderful Outer Space to see what I mean. Having received huge critical acclaim (it was Mojo magazine’s album of 2010), both artists went on to build impressive careers and this new track is their first collaboration since then. It seems to be a one-off, but a very welcome one as all the attributes of their previous work together shine once again. The man just has the most brilliant voice.

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Sugar Hiccup – The Cocteau Twins (1983)

The Cocteau Twins second LP Head Over Heels was released forty years ago this week and as I type this I can sense my great friend Marion smiling to see me playlisting a track from this early record by the legendary Scottish band. Years ago, Marion and I shared a flat for a short while in Edinburgh which meant sharing our record collections, and many booze fuelled evenings were spent debating music. She was a great fan of the Cocteau Twins but I just didn’t see the attraction. During one particularly booze fuelled debate, I apparently declared them to be “hippy-dippy shite”, a phrase I have had quoted back to me over the years, even though I have come round to the delights of Liz Fraser’s soaring and ethereal voice and Robin Guthrie’s swirling, effects-drenched guitars. Formed in the unlikely setting of Grangemouth, a town overwhelmed by a massive petro-chemical plant on the mudflats of the upper Forth Estuary, the band were unique in their approach to their music. Using Fraser’s (often wordless) voice as an instrument emerging from the sonic fog of Guthrie’s instense production, they are often credited with defining a genre which became known as ‘shoegaze’. They were signed to post-punk label 4AD who matched their sound with a series of idiosyncratic graphic designs for their record releases. The internet tells me the design for Head Over Heals was inspired by a scene from the 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker – nope, me neither. I’ve playlisted Sugar Hiccup which is probably the best known of track of their early career along with 1984’s Pearly Dew Drops Drop which they famously declined to appear on Top Of The Pops to promote. Meanwhile, I’m delighted to say that Marion is doing one of the upcoming guest blogs, although her theme suggests there will be no Cocteau Twins on it!

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Forever Now – The Psychedelic Furs (1982)

It seems to be the week for old Edinburgh flatmates who you have a musical connection with. On Thursday night we met up with Michael who, along with his partner Mel, I shared a couple of flats with in the mid 80s. They now live in Adelaide and so we don’t see them very often and very sadly Mike’s trip back to Scotland was due to the death of his younger brother Mark from cancer. Mel wasn’t able to get across this time but it was great to see Mike again, even in the terrible circumstances of his trip. We used to go and see bands together (an ear-bleedingly loud Pixies gig in the Queen’s Hall sticks in my mind) and there was always music playing in the flat. We shared compilation tapes and I still have three handwritten TDK C90s on my shelf which I copied from Mike’s collection way back then. I hadn’t looked at them for a while so dug them out for him coming round and decided to create a playlist of the tracks – surprisingly all 73 songs were available on Spotify. It’s a fabulously eclectic mix running from The Woodentops to The Blue Nile, from ABBA to The Doors, and from The Cure to Frank Sinatra. We listened to the playlist as we talked late into the evening with the intent of Mike choosing one track for today’s blog but it was too difficult to decide. Since there were four tracks from The Psychedelic Furs on the three tapes, and as I always associate them with him when I hear them, I have plumped for Forever Now, the title track from the Furs’ third LP released in 1982. Produced by Todd Rundgren, it had a wider soundscape than their first records where Steve Lillywhite was at the controls and grew their fanbase in the US and Europe in those far off analogue days.

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Holiday In Cambodia – Dead Kennedys (1980)

For the last tune before I head east, I had to playlist this. For someone like me who was 20 when this single came out, it still seems incredible that Vietnam and Cambodia are now part of the world-wide tourist trail, given what had occurred in the region in the 60s and 70s. Formed in San Francisco in 1978, the Dead Kennedys were probably the most controversial of the late 70s American punk bands. Their provocative choice of name was intended to shock and their lyrics satirised political figures and authority in general, as well as popular culture. Their 1979 debut single California Uber Alles had a poke at Governor Jerry Brown’s “Zen-fascist” views, citing Shakespeare and Ingrid Bergman along the way. Holiday In Cambodia was their next single which satirised privileged American college kids who struck a pose about being empathetic with the oppressed. Writer and singer Jello Biafra (not his real name!) believed what these kids really needed was a holiday in Cambodia, where they can find out what it’s actually like to be persecuted and enslaved. Notable for its ending where murderous Khmer Rouge dictator Pol Pot’s name is chanted over and over, the song is deceptively musical for American punk of its time. It begins on a fantastic rolling bass riff punctured with shards of guitar before the riff takes over. It then roars off at speed into Biafra’s lyrical deluge about college kids who play ethnic jazz on their five grand stereos and brag about the slums having soul. The Kennedys’ most popular song, it led to a major fall-out in the late 90s where the rest of the band sued Jello Biafra for unpaid royalties after he had refused to sanction the use of the song for a Levi’s advert, citing their unfair work practices. He lost, and with it lost the publishing rights to the band’s back catalogue. Biafra has remained politically active, even getting the New York State Green Party presidential nomination in 2000, though getting only 10 of the 319 delegate votes in the national run-off. He went on to support Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election.  

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Last Word

As heavily trailed, the next few week’s blogs are being written by three guests who have kindly volunteered to choose the tunes and scribe some words. I am certain you are going to enjoy the diverse choices of Iain, Marion and Fraser (making a second guest appearance!) and I’m only hoping I’m not out of a job by the time I get back.

The master playlist is primed and ready on my phone to try to drown out the noise of plane engines – I never did get those fancy noise cancelling headphones, so I’ll just need to jack the volume up to 11.

WeekInSoundMaster

AR