As we edge into the last month of the year, here is another collection of topical tunes to distract minds from the increasingly dark days of winter. Enjoy!
Destination Venus – The Rezillos (1978)
Unless you have been living under a (space) rock, it will not have escaped your notice that last weekend saw the 60th anniversary of the first ever broadcast of the Dr Who TV series. Many acres of newsprint and several hours of television have been celebrating the sci-fi series whose first episode was broadcast by the BBC the day following JFK’s assassination in November 1963. I am old enough to recall William Hartnell as the first Doctor although not the first episode – he continued on until I was six in 1966 and, as we didn’t have a TV in the house until 1967, I used to go to my friend’s house across the road to watch it. My parents used to tell the tale that they only started renting a telly from Radio Rentals due to the embarrassment of trying to extract me from the neighbours to get my tea on a Saturday night after Dr Who. Arch TV nostalgists Stuart Maconie and Mark Radcliffe hosted a brilliant show on 6Music on Sunday where they themed a number of tunes around the anniversary. Of all the tracks they played, it was this single by the wonderful Rezillos that jumped out the radio at me, as it was some time since I had taken it down off the shelf and played it. Recorded with producer Martin Rushent in October 1978 as the follow up to their hit single Top Of The Pops, it was released just as the band were starting to splinter in two. It is packed full of their signature full-speed sounds – pounding drums, burbling bass and some manic guitar by future Human League member Joe Callis. And a great false ending too! Eugene Reynolds and the fantastic Fay Fife belt their way through the usual daft lyric – what could be more Dr Who than: “Further modulation of the frequency rotation/Triggered waveband activation”? I drove to Edinburgh from Paisley to see them play in Clouds at Tollcross on 25 August 1978 and here they are one month later playing the song on Whistle Test with different lyrics to the version they eventually recorded.
The Story Of The Blues (Parts 1 and 2) – Wah! (1982)
Forty one years ago, one of my favourite 1980s records was released. Along with Julian Cope and Ian McCulloch, Pete Wylie was one of the holy trinity of Liverpool post-punk who were the Crucial Three for about 8 weeks in the summer of 1977. All mavericks, Wylie went on to form a band whose core name was Wah! but the name morphed for each release eg The Mighty Wah!, Wah! Heat and, best of all, Shambeko! Say Wah! The early singles from 79-81 were indie hits with full on guitars but by 1982 Wylie was looking to expand his sound into something more soulful. Wylie tells it that he was drinking with Clash manager Kosmo Vinyl when he sat down at the piano and tried to channel Sinatra’s One For My Baby and out came: “Here in my pocket, I’ve got the story of the blues…” He began working on the song as a labour of love and asked Associates producer Mike Hedges to get involved with the aim of getting Wylie’s voice central in the recording. They didn’t have a drummer so used an early Linn machine which they didn’t really know how to work. Hedges claims the slightly odd conga pattern on the recording wasn’t intentional and was left in as they didn’t know how to delete it! Adding layers of acoustic guitars, strings and backing vocals almost to the point of distortion gave Wylie the epic Phil Spector meets Alan Bleasdale sound he was after. However, after four weeks in the shops the record was getting some airplay but not selling. Then they lucked a slot on a show called Pop Goes Christmas on ITV and the single landed at No59 on the Christmas day chart, rising to No3 by 16 January via a slot on Top Of The Pops. I bought the 12inch single and make no apologies for including the full 8 minute version on the playlist, complete with its “Talking Blues” stripped back Part 2. Arguably it veers towards the pretentious by quoting Kerouac, but you have to admire the pride and honesty he puts into his lyric. Anthemic.
Photograph – Ringo Starr (1973)
I’ve always had a soft spot for Richard Starkey who was at number one in the US charts fifty years ago this week with this single from his third solo album Ringo. He always seemed to me to be fourth in the Beatles pecking order and was often left holding the jackets in the arguments between the others. This suspicion was confirmed when I waded through the many hours of the Peter Jackson documentary Get Back a couple of years back, seeing Ringo sat at his kit desperate to play something while the others did a considerable amount of dicking around. Sharing a creative space with the other three was clearly not easy and, as the inevitable break up happened, Starr fell out with McCartney over the timing of their separate solo releases. Notably, Starr continued to collaborate with Lennon and Harrison on their solo work in the early part of the 70s while Macca was off ploughing his own furrow. However, by the recording of Starr’s third album in 1973, hatchets appear to have been buried and all three former Beatles contributed to the record. It was Harrison though that was most supportive of his old drummer’s solo career, having co-written and produced his first two solo hit singles, It Don’t Come Easy in 1971 and the Bolan-influenced Back Off Boogaloo in 1972. Although he didn’t get a formal co-write credit for these two, he does for Photograph where he plays the 12 string acoustic guitar and provides the distinctive harmony vocal. Legendary session drummer Jim Keltner got to play drums for Ringo but, for me, its the string and choral arrangements by Jack Nitzche that made the melody soar, flying off the radio and into my 13 year old ears. Nitzche worked as Phil Spector’s musical arranger throughout the sixties and you can hear it in that long outro. Poignantly, Ringo performed the song at the Concert For George after Harrison’s death from cancer this week in 2001.
Time Is Tight – Booker T & The MGs (1969)
If you liked cake, two birthdays this week for members of Booker T & the MGs must have made this a good time to be in the band at their peak in the late 60s. Drummer Al Jackson Jr was a founder member in 1962 with bass player Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn joining in 1965 and both would have been blowing out the candles this week along with fellow members, guitarist Steve Cropper and organist Booker T Jones. It feels like a good excuse to playlist this great single from 1969 which comes from the soundtrack which the band wrote for the movie Uptight. The movie version is longer and slightly faster but with a slow intro and extended organ outro – I’ve just gone for the single version which was the band’s only UK hit single, reaching No 4 in the charts. I must admit I wasn’t aware of it until a cover of the song by the Clash appeared as one of the tracks on their 1980 10″ EP Black Market Clash. The band used to play the tune as a warm up in soundchecks. Before joining the MGs, Jackson began his career in the early 50s playing drums for trumpeter Willie Mitchell and was brought into Stax Records on the recommendation of Jones. He was affectionately dubbed “The Human Timekeeper” for his drumming ability and, as well as his work with the MGs, he played on all the major recordings by Stax artists like Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, Eddie Floyd and Carla Thomas. In the 70s, he went on to co-write Let’s Stay Together with Al Green and sessioned for everyone from Elvis Presley to Aretha Franklin. Jackson was murdered in 1975 aged just 39 during a robbery at his house but no-one has ever been prosecuted for the crime. Dunn had a similarly illustrious but much longer career as a sought-after session player – he even appeared in the Blues Brothers movie as himself, often smoking a pipe while playing. He died in his sleep in 2012 aged 70 after finishing a double set in Tokyo playing live with Eddie Floyd and Steve Cropper, his old pal from the MGs. What a way to go!
Big Sur – The Thrills (2003)
Hearing a great song for the first time in ages when you are out driving in the car is a pretty weak excuse to include it on this week’s playlist but, hey – it’s my blog so I’m going to do it anyway. To be fair, I was driving the car in sub-zero temperatures with frost on the road and the contrast with both the location in the title of the song and the sunny West Coast sound made by the band was so striking I found myself joining in with the bit where they reference the theme tune to The Monkees TV series. It started me thinking – whatever happened to The Thrills? Big Sur was the third and most successful single to be lifted from the debut LP by the young Dublin lads, called So Much For The City. It had been preceded by Santa Cruz (You’re Not That Far) and One Horse Town which were also overflowing with early seventies Californian harmonies and Byrds-style guitars. On the strength of these records, which all made the top forty, I bought the album and it went on to be nominated for 2003’s Mercury Music Prize, losing out to Dizzee Rascal. The band were being lauded by everyone from REM to Morrissey in what was a meteoric rise from pretty much nowhere. The hype around them was memorable and the likes of Ethan Johns (then producing records by Ryan Adams, Counting Crows and Kings of Leon) was reduced to lobbying their management to record their second LP Let’s Bottle Bohemia – unsuccessfully, as it turned out. This album had the same musical formula and did almost as well as the debut record but then the band decided to take an extended break, with the aim of ‘evolving their sound’. It was a fatal mistake as, when they came back, their fanbase had evaporated. After very disappointing sales of their third LP Teenager in 2007, their label EMI dropped them like a stone. Five years after starting out, their time in this fickle business was over. I hope they had fun while it lasted…
The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn – The Pogues (1985)
Death has been stalking Shane McGowan for a long, long time. So, news of his passing this week at the age of 65 made me think it was incredible he got this far. Indeed, my pal Ken tells me the BBC had a obituary ready for him about 25 years ago, which will inevitably be being rolled out as I type this on Thursday afternoon. Will his founding membership of London-Irish punk band The Nipple Erectors get a mention, I wonder? He certainly saw the opportunity to combine punk’s energy with traditional Irish music and, with new band Pogue Mahone, he grabbed it with both hands. So what song to playlist to musically raise a parting glass to McGowan’s remarkable longevity in the face of a lifetime’s chemical excess? Well, taken from the Elvis Costello produced 1986 EP Poguerty In Motion, his finest song A Rainy Night In Soho has already featured in WIS 14 July 23. So I headed for what I consider to be the band’s best album, 1985’s Rum Sodomy & The Lash. By this point, the excellent Phil Chevron had joined Spider Stacy and Jem Finer in the band behind McGowan and Cait O’Riordan had not yet left to briefly become Mrs Costello. The album was also produced by EC and I pondered which of McGowan’s tender and brutal songs to pick. What about the epic ballad A Pair Of Brown Eyes, the first Pogues single I bought and full of incredible war imagery and drunken longing for home and lost love? Or maybe the next single, the rousing drinking song Sally MacLennane, which I can’t hear without memories of thrashing around dancefloors of the 80s with my friend Alison. In the end, I’ve playlisted the album opener which typifies McGowan’s writing and was a live favourite throughout the band’s career. The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn is an appropriately chaotic song mirroring his life, centred on self-destructive drinking in the Euston Tavern (which ironically became an O’Neils Irish theme bar in 2007). Using language that would nowadays be described as ‘problematic’, McGowan fuses Irish folklore mythology (the title refers to an ancient wasting curse) with Irish republican activists and obscure figures from literary and arts history, like Viennese tenor Richard Tauber. After nearly 40 years of living up to his words, that self destructive urge finally caught up with this unique musician who undoubtably was “a man you don’t meet everyday”.
Last Word
Along with John Byrne, Shane McGowan’s passing brings the week to a close in slightly sombre fashion and its timing means his much-loved seasonal duet with the brilliant Kirsty McColl will be everywhere during December. I’m working on a seasonal playlist for the end of the month with tunes that you won’t hear in every bloody pub and shop you go into, so stay tuned for that.
In the meantime, the master playlist will swell like a turkey during the next few weeks and will be oven-ready for the holidays!
AR
Week In Sound 
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