And we’re back… No doubt full of post-op typos, the blog returns to its tenuous premise of six tunes related to the week (or so) gone by. Enjoy!
Red Right Hand – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (1994)
As I’ve been banging on about it for weeks, I’d like to use a slot on the blog to thank the good people of NHS Fife who have provided me with exceptional care over the last twelve months in diagnosing, assessing and ultimately treating my carpal tunnel compression. This is a minor but very common complaint which causes numbness and pain in your thumb and two adjacent fingers. My condition was primarily impacting my sleep but was starting to affect my hand when gripping things. It is treated by a fifteen-minute procedure under local anaesthetic and I was in and out the hospital in two and a half hours. Everyone I came into contact with was brilliant – from the technician who did the nerve conduction study to Mr Harrison, the consultant who wielded the scalpel; from the theatre nurse who arranged for some EC & The Attractions to be playing in the operating theatre, to the day-ward nurse who got me a post-op cup of tea and toast. And not forgetting the lovely Suzi who took out my stitches yesterday. So all hail the NHS! I came home with a bandaged hand and while there had been some attempt to clean up the blood from the procedure, there was an inevitable residue leaving me with my very own red right hand. Given this, there was no other song I could playlist but this one. From their 1994 LP Let Love In but better known as the perfectly-chosen theme tune to all six series of Peaky Blinders, the moody, gothic splendour of Red Right Hand is probably Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds best known song. Beyond the chilling death knell of the tubular bells, the bass rumbles and Cave attacks the oscillator on a synth, while his trademark baritone lays out the tale of a murderous devil who preys on the unfortunate and dispossessed. When Cave growls “You’re one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan/Designed and directed by his red right hand”, you really believe it. I saw the latest version of the Bad Seeds brilliantly perform it in Glasgow in 2017 – watch it here from the same tour in Copenhagen.
The Train From Kansas City – The Shangri-Las (1965)
During the last fortnight, the death of Mary Weiss was announced at the age of 75. Weiss was the lead singer of the fabulous 60s girl group The Shangri-Las whose most famous tune Leader Of The Pack featured back in WIS 6Oct23 under the spoken intros theme. Named after a restaurant in Queens, New York where they were born and grew up, the group featured Weiss’ powerful voice backed by her sister Betty along with identical twins Mary-Ann and Marge Ganser. Following debut single Remember (Walkin’ In the Sand) and then Leader Of The Pack, they developed a reputation for big production, teen anguish songs and used their Queens background to present a tough ‘street’ image, in contrast to other girl groups at the time. They toured in the US with both the Beatles and the Stones and were regulars on the famous Murray the K radio show. By the end of 1966, their hits tailed off and the group soon disbanded. Not long after I wrote the Shangri-Las piece in October, I heard a live track by American singer songwriter Neko Case which really caught my ear. A former member of Canadian indie collective New Pornographers, I like Case’s solo stuff (2002’s Blacklisted album, in particular) and enjoyed her 2016 collaboration with Laura Veirs and kd Lang. But this was different. A few clicks later, it turns out that Case was performing a cover of a fantastic Shangri-Las b-side from 1965 which I have playlisted here to mark the passing of Mary Weiss. Brilliantly produced by George ‘Shadow’ Morton and full of edge-of-the-seat drama as ever, an emotional girl is telling her fiancée that she has to go and meet an old boyfriend off the train from Kansas City. As the train rolls in, she tells him he isn’t to worry as nothing can break them up and she’ll show her old love the ring on her finger. ”So wait right here and I will hurry/I’ll be back in the time it takes to break a heart”. But, then again, maybe she won’t! Here comes the train…
You Are Not Alone – Allison Russell (2022)
January is a real drag of a month so I’m really glad that back in 1994 a guy called Colin Hynd came up with the idea of using the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall’s normally quiet post-festive period to put on a few concerts. He focussed on Scottish traditional and folk music and named it Celtic Connections – both words having a hard ‘c’! What began as a few shows in one venue has grown over the last 30 years to become a renowned international festival of roots music with over 300 events performing in around 30 venues across Glasgow. While the focus remains on Scottish music, a large number of artists from other countries participate and last weekend, we travelled west to see a couple of shows. I first wrote about French Canadian Allison Russell in WIS 23Jun23 after seeing her amazing performance at Black Deer Festival last summer. Lynn managed to grab a couple of tickets for her Oran Mor show before they sold out. Russell was performing again with her Rainbow Coalition band and their five voices singing in perfect harmony brought the same level of joy to the small basement in Glasgow as it did to a large tent in a field in Kent. The animated Russell is at the heart of everything, her gorgeous, powerful voice sings her songs of survival and hope while she provides clarinet and banjo parts during certain tunes. Much to her amusement, her stage outfit’s net sleeves kept getting caught in her banjo – “pretty but impractical”, she quipped. She is effusive in her praise for her fellow musicians and, following a beautiful acappela version of single Persephone with them all gathered round the mic at the front to the stage, she handed the spotlight to guitarist Joy Clark. Backed by the other’s voices, Clark performed her lovely forthcoming single Lesson. I’ve chosen to playlist Russell’s encore on the night You’re Not Alone, a song of shared strength she recently recorded with her mentor Brandi Carlisle. Live with the Coalition, they built it up to an anthemic finish, with the chorus resonating around the room full of smiling faces. Uplifting stuff.
Burn Whatever’s Left – Margo Price (2022)
The second Celtic Connections gig we went to last weekend reminded why I love live music. Lynn had spotted that Nashville-based singer songwriter Margo Price was playing at the Old Fruitmarket the night before Allison Russell, so we decided to make a weekend of it. Price first came on to my radar through her 2016 debut LP Midwest Farmer’s Daughter with songs like Hands of Time and Tennessee Song living up to the Americana echoes of the album title. In 2020, I heard the title track of her third record That’s How Rumours Get Started and mistook it for Stevie Nicks. Since then, she has been developing her country rock sound as can be heard on her fourth album Strays (and the extended Strays II) from last year. Maybe not a huge surprise since Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers plays on the record, which was produced by Jonathan Wilson. However, what I wasn’t prepared for was Price leaping on stage on Saturday night in a tight white catsuit and cape, grabbing the mic and leading the band in a rousing version of the Springsteen-esque title track from Strays as she stalked the stage banging a tambourine. The song is a nostalgic riff on being young and free and her infectious stage presence set the tone for the evening, which was a real “show”. She has an amazing voice and her band were brilliantly tight, led by husband and co-writer/guitarist Jeremy Ivey. There was a thumping rendition of her single Change Of Heart (with Price on a second drum kit) as well as a lovely cover of Tom Petty’s Have Love Will Travel. But there was light and shade to the set – she performed the emotional and bittersweet piano-driven County Road and my highlight of the evening was her powerhouse delivery of the brooding Burn Whatever’s Left which is playlisted here; “Build me a house for memories I’ve kept/Then burn whatever’s left”. Price is a true star – there was a costume change and roses thrown to the crowd at the end – but she really understands her musical history. She finished the encore in the middle of the crowd with a singalong version of Janis Joplin’s Mercedes Benz. What a blast!
Killermont Street – Aztec Camera (1987)
I must admit to a modicum of guilt that our trip to Celtic Connections was to see two artists who did not hail from Scotland. I can only conclude that for some reason my musical DNA is coded to respond more to American roots music than it is to Scottish roots music. It’s not that I dislike the latter, its just that there is something about the former that erm… connects with me more. Maybe it’s the unknown – I’ve never been to Nashville or anywhere in the south of America. But when some singer writes wistfully of going back to Tennessee and a steel guitar twangs, they’ve got me right there. When we were in the Old Fruitmarket, Lynn reminded me we had been there to see Roddy Frame perform in Celtic Connections and a check online suggests this was way back in 2006. While some way from a performer of traditional Scottish music, the much-loved former Aztec Camera man being born in East Kilbride does allow me to salve my conscience, if only a little bit. I was slightly taken aback to read that the seemingly permanently youthful Frame was celebrating his 60th birthday this week – even the Boy Wonder grows old! In my opinion, he is one of Scotland’s greatest songwriters, a view I know is shared by many others. Frame has slipped from view over the last few years (no records or gigs since 2015) and I was thinking about a late career track to playlist, like Small World or Western Skies. But Lynn and I took the bus through to Glasgow last weekend and, as it pulled into the bus station on Killermont St, I knew there was only one song that would do. The closing track from the third Aztec Camera LP Love, it is as achingly beautiful a tune as he has ever produced. What starts as a nostalgic paean for bus trips into Glasgow on Saturday nights turns into a post-industrial lament for Scottish migration. His own departure is revealed in the “collar upturned” bridge which drops into a trademark acoustic solo before leading us into the killer last verse: “As the ships and the steel/Slip away to the cry of ‘compete’/There’s a message for us/We can get there by bus/From Killermont Street.” Watch it here – it’s just gorgeous.
Louie Louie – The Kingsmen (1963)
Louie Louie is thought to be the world’s most recorded rock song with between 1,600 and 2,000 published versions. It was composed by American musician Richard Berry in 1955 and is based on the tune El Loco Cha Cha, with a distinctive ten note Afro-Cuban ‘tumbao’ beat. Berry’s lyric has a lovesick sailor lamenting to a barman named Louie about wanting to get back home to his girl and it adopts an unusual-for-the-time Jamaican speech pattern. Berry released it in 1957 but the song didn’t chart nationally in the US until The Kingsmen recorded it in 1963. And that’s when all the trouble started. Recorded in one take for $50 in their hometown of Portland, Oregon, the band put in a ragged but attitude-filled performance with lead singer Jack Ely’s raw vocal slurred and incoherent. There is a wonderful gaff after the guitar solo at 1:57 when Ely comes in two bars early and stops and Lynn Easton quickly fills the gap with a drum fill. A thousand copies were pressed and released in June by local label Jerden. And lo! Garage rock was born. Wand Records released it nationally in October and by December it entered the US top ten and was No2 for six weeks until the end of January 1964. However, the controversial performance with unintelligible lyrics got the American establishment riled about moral degradation. Sixty years ago this week, on 1 Feb 1964, the Governor of Indiana Matthew Walsh banned the record calling it “pornographic”. The FBI then launched an investigation, apparently getting a sound laboratory to try to decipher what was actually being said. A voluminous 118 page report was prepared which concluded that “the technique was poor but the record definitely was not obscene.” I assume that they overlooked Easton yelling “Fuck!” at 0:54 after fumbling a drum fill! The whole sorry tale and its resonance in the years that followed is laid out in a brilliant 2004 track by Todd Snider called The Ballad of the Kingsmen, which I thoroughly recommend to WIL listeners.
Last Word
I attended the Vinyl Sessions in my local pub last night and really enjoyed the eclectic range of music being played on the brilliant sound system provided by the session organiser Dave. Inspired by the Delta 5 track from the blog a few weeks ago, I played a handful of slightly obscure but excellent singles by post-punk female-led bands, including Girls At Our Best!, Mo-Dettes and Au Pairs. A bit too late to squeeze something into this blog but, if Delta 5 caught your ear and you’re interested in hearing more of this genre, I’ve created a playlist (of course I have) called Girls At Their Best! Just click the link and time travel for an hour back to 1980.
Meanwhile, the tracks from this week’s ramblings have been dropped into the usual place, turning the Master into a Monster with over twenty hours of music. What have I done..?
AR
Week In Sound 
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