Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, as some old prog rockers once named their live LP. Dive in and enjoy!
Come Back – The Mighty Wah! (1984)
I don’t normally make resolutions at New Year but I did resolve to see more live music this year, particularly at smaller venues. So, a week after our Celtic Connections double header, I joined 200 others being wonderfully entertained in the Edinburgh Voodoo Rooms by the legend that is Pete Wylie and The Mighty Wah! The demographic was such that the queue for the bar was polite (no, you were first) and conversations between strangers broke out on the market value of punk singles by obscure bands from Northern Ireland. I’d never seen him live before but Wylie was everything I was expecting and more. Genuinely hilarious stage patter delivered with his Liverpool-sized heart very firmly fixed on his sleeve. After a wee bit of a ropey start, he got hold of his guitar playing and while his voice is not able to reach the heights it used to, it is still a powerful thing to behold. Opening with Wylie’s excellent version of Johnny Thunders’ You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory, the few hits and many misses were banged out with style including great renditions of modest hit Hope (I Wish You’d Believe Me) and bigger hit Sinful. Introducing the miss Heart As Big As Liverpool, he said the record company told him that it would only sell in Liverpool. ”But they were wrong. It didn’t even sell there!”. The set finished with a fantastic crowd singalong to biggest hit The Story of the Blues (see WIS 1Dec23). However, I am playlisting the glorious single Come Back, which, despite being everywhere in the summer of 1984, only reached No20. Yes, it’s completely over-produced and full of those 80s keyboards and drums but somehow it still sounds great, just as it did on the night. His soaring vocal is just epic: “Well did you ever hear of hope? Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”. At the start of the encore, Wylie tells us how he never liked bands who were too slick when playing live. “I loved artists who performed on the edge like The Clash and Alex Harvey. And Mott the Hoople”. Were it not for the 200 miles that separate Paisley from Liverpool, we might have been separated at birth…
Tomahawk Kid (Live) – The Sensational Alex Harvey Band (1974)
Pete Wylie’s comment on Alex Harvey came in the same week that the great man was born in Glasgow way back on 5 February 1935. Sadly, this was also the week he died from a heart attack the day before his 47th birthday in 1982. I couldn’t let the week pass without marking these anniversaries relating to one of my boyhood heroes. Harvey famously won a competition in 1956 that was seeking “Scotland’s Tommy Steele”. He then formed his Big Beat Band who supported Johnny Gentle in Alloa Town Hall in May 1960. Gentle was backed by a group called the Silver Beetles from Liverpool comprising John, Paul, George and Stuart Sutcliffe. Harvey followed them out to Hamburg as Alex Harvey’s Big Soul Band playing soul and blues in the clubs. He then spent a number of years in the ‘pit band’ for the London stage show Hair, when David Bowie occasionally slept on the floor of his flat. Harvey went back north seeking to synthesise all these years of experience into a new eclectic rock based project. In 1972 he found an incredible set of musicians called Tear Gas and together they became the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Over the course of eight albums, the highly adaptable band gave a backdrop to Harvey’s wild imagination and theatrics playing a wide range of musical genres. While the records are great and later inspired the young Nick Cave to form a covers band, it was the unpredictable craziness of their live performances that set them apart. They captivated my young impressionable mind on the three occasions I saw them live, the last time being them upstaging The Who at Celtic Park in 1976. So, I’ve chosen a track from their 1975 Live LP for the playlist and you will hear Alex introduce it as being inspired by Robert Luis Stevenson. Tomahawk Kid has all the yo-ho-ho that you’d expect from a pirate story until the incredible bridge which sees the Kid say “Let’s be bold my captain and I’ll hold your hairy hand/And let’s forget the treasure and we’ll skip across the sand”. I can’t find any live footage of this track but an old BBC In Concert film has recently turned up on YouTube of a 1974 gig at the Rainbow in London. The opening two minutes show you all you need to know about this legendary performer.
Punky Reggae Party – Bob Marley & The Wailers (1977)
Whilst this week saw the anniversary of Bob Marley’s death, it also brought the news of the death of long time Wailers bass player Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett at the age of 74. ’Fams’ had been a member of reggae super-producer Lee Perry’s Upsetters before joining the Wailers in 1971. He appeared on all their recordings from that time onwards, including this great track from 1977 which was written by Perry and Marley and released in the UK on the B-side of Jamming by Island Records. I read a great story about this period by ex-Sounds journalist Vivien Goldman. She was talking about an article she wrote in 1977 which traced the new sub-cultural connection between reggae and punk. She interviewed both and Marley and Perry, the former having just fled Jamaica to record Exodus in London, having survived an assassination attempt in Kingston. Both expressed their bewilderment to her about the punks they were seeing parading along the Portobello Rd and Goldman reached for her unreleased white label copy of the first Clash album. She dropped the needle on their cover of Police and Thieves, a song Perry had produced in Jamaica for singer Junior Murvin, and asked them what they thought of it. At first, they were taken aback by Joe Strummer’s barking voice compared with the gentle lilting falsetto of Murvin. But a couple of listens later, Marley came round. “It is different, but me like ’ow ’im feel it” was his conclusion. He went on to draw the parallels between the two tribes of alienated youth in punks and rastas. Within a couple of weeks of this conversation, Marley and Perry began writing and recording Punky Reggae Party and The Clash would continue to cover reggae songs like Toots & the Maytals’ Pressure Drop and bands like The Ruts made records like Jah War. Marley’s ‘new wave new craze’ tune has a great groove and it sounds like some party: ” The Wailers will be there, the Damned, the Jam, the Clash/Maytals will be there, Dr. Feelgood too”. I love that the bridge following this verse repeats a chant of “no boring old farts”!
Fast Car – Tracy Chapman (1988)
The Grammy Awards was one of the big music news stories of the week when the 66th ceremony of the Recording Academy was held in Los Angeles. Like everything in America, it is a bit of an overblown beast, although this year the ‘fields’ of music were narrowed down from 26 to 11 but there were still a whopping 94 awards up for grabs. I know I often reference Grammy awards on the blog but the scale and the glitzy mainstream nature of it all leaves me a bit cold, to be honest. And I must admit to struggling with who many of the winners actually were as many of the fields were not ones I plough – I’m not even sure how you pronounce SZA! It was meant to be the year where female artists would dominate and so it turned out. Taylor Swift won a record fourth Album of the Year for Midnights – although not her best received collection of tunes, I guess being Time Magazine Person of the Year and breaking the internet with your ticket sales gets you over the line. Nice to see a couple of tracks I’ve included on this blog getting a gong – Not Strong Enough by boygenius and Dear Insecurity by the wonderful Brandy Clark. And of course, Joni Mitchell got her award for last year’s Newport live return and performed on the night with WIS faves Allison Russell and Brandi Carlile. However, corporate control means I can’t find footage of her online other than short ‘entertainment news’ items with some idiot talking over her. But I’m indebted to my pal Dave for sending me a tweet with a full length clip of Tracy Chapman’s fantastic heart-warming duet of her Fast Car with country nominee Luke Combs. Of course, its been taken down by The Man now but this not great screengrab might still be there by the time this blog goes out. If you can’t see it, trust me it was just a delight to see her wide smile and beautiful shining eyes as she began to play. The original recording from thirty six years ago is well worth its place on the playlist.
Bury A Friend – Billy Eilish (2019)
This blog has regularly featured songs which have been used as themes or incidental music for TV drama series that I have been watching over the last year. And this is another of them. Had the blog been running back in 2014 when the first series of True Detective starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson was broadcast, there is no doubt that the theme, The Handsome Family’s brilliant Far From Any Road, would have featured on here. The HBO series has morphed a couple of times since then, and sometimes not for the better, but with the fourth season which is currently being broadcast, it appears to be back on top form, albeit a leaning a little too far towards the supernatural elements at times. Subtitled The North Country, it is set in a blue- collar mining town in the north of Alaska and takes place over the season of permanent darkness and what appears to be constant snowfall. This makes it frighteningly atmospheric and old hand Jodie Foster, as the hard-bitten police chief, and newcomer Kali Reis, as the young native Alaskan trooper, give stellar performances that really shine in the dark. Shot in Iceland as film equipment could not cope with the actual temperatures in the darkness of far north of Alaska, they have adopted Bury A Friend, a 2019 UK top ten single from Billie Eilish, as the theme. It is taken from her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and was written when she was just 17. Its a dark and violent lyric of the monsters under the bed and seems to have influenced show-runner Ida Lopez in her scriptwriting of the drama series: “Then my limbs all froze and my eyes won’t close”. Watch the show’s opening sequence here to get a sense of how the sinister lyric works with the minor key and the choppy, stop start beats to fit the vibe of the dramatic imagery perfectly.
Marquee Moon – Television (1977)
I posted a track from Television’s debut LP Marquee Moon last November with the tenuous link that the song had been playing in a craft ale bar in Saigon. I drivelled on and on about travelling in Vietnam but promised a more detailed look at the band and their much-heralded sound at some point in the future. The LP was released 47 years ago this week, giving me the chance to make good on that promise. Television were formed by teenage friends Tom Verlaine and Richard Myers in 1973 in New York, where they had both run away to wanting to become poets. They formed a rock band instead with Myers becoming Richard Hell and recruiting drummer Billy Ficca and Richard Lloyd, taking a second guitar slot beside Verlaine. Over the next few years they gained a cult following in the New York music scene playing regularly at CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City. However, friction grew with Hell over his defiant lack of musicality and he left, eventually forming Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Television recruited early Blondie bassist Fred Smith and took a different musical route. By the time they came to record their debut record in late 1976, they were playing hook-filled rock songs with complex instrumental parts, more redolent of jazz performers due to the interplay between the two guitarists. There was also a bohemian, almost pastoral vibe to their lyrics and all this meant they were at odds with the vogue for faster, rougher music at the time – arguably a post-punk band before punk was actually established. Although selling modestly, mostly in the UK, the LP was loved by the critics and is widely regarded as a classic featuring in many of those greatest albums lists. I loved it at the time and still play it regularly today. After much angsting, I have playlisted the ten minute long title track which was released as a UK single (on two sides of a 7 inch!) and incredibly charted at No30. Yes, it’s long but it’s their masterpiece, the song that defines the band and, equally incredibly, it was recorded live in one take which drummer Ficca thought was a rehearsal. Seeing them play it forty years later in Glasgow in 2016 was mind-blowing.
Last Word
With another week in the can, the blog is now approaching it’s first anniversary at the end of this month, which kinda screws with my head a wee bit. But on we go and I’m pleased to say there are a couple of guest blogs in the works which I’ll drop in the next few weeks. These will give you all a short break from my endless ramblings as I am aware the word count is creeping up again…
As is customary, the tracks from this week’s endless ramble are now enshrined in the usual place – yes, including all ten minutes and thirty eight seconds of Marquee Moon. Give it a try!
AR
Week In Sound 
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