Back in the saddle with the challenge of following two great guest blogs by picking six tunes that vaguely relate to the last couple of weeks. Enjoy!

The Light Pours Out of Me – Magazine (1978)

This is the first blog appearance for Magazine, the highly influential post-punk band formed by singer Howard Devoto when he left Buzzcocks immediately after their debut Spiral Scratch EP. He formed Magazine with Greenock-born guitarist John McGeogh and this month sees Devoto’s 71st birthday and also the anniversary of McGeogh’s death from epileptic fit in 2004 at only 48. The ‘classic’ line-up also included future Bad Seed Barry Adamson on bass, Dave Formula on keyboards and John Doyle on drums. My mate Norrie and I were lucky enough to see them perform at the Strathclyde John St Union in August 1979. It still ranks as one of my favourite gigs, featuring songs from 1978 debut album Real Life and its follow up Second Daylight. On leaving Buzzcocks, Devoto wanted to make less traditional rock music, adopting keyboards and synthesisers as well as guitars to shape his music. Widely seen as one of the pioneers of post-punk, they have influenced a multitude of bands – Manic Street Preachers and Radiohead are said to be major fans.

I have playlisted one of their most popular tracks from the first LP which epitomises their early sound – dramatic, dynamic and full of grandeur, despite (or maybe because of?) Devoto’s baleful voice intoning lyrics such as: “Time flies/Time crawls/Like an insect/Up and down the walls”. The song dates from Devoto’s days with Buzzcocks as Pete Shelley gets a co-writing credit along with McGeoch, who added the flair of the guitar solo which brings the song to its sudden end. After the release of the band’s third LP in 1980, McGeoch left to join Siouxsie & The Banshees and within a year Devoto split the band. Out of nowhere, the original line-up reunited for a five gig 30th anniversary tour in 2009. Apparently Devoto asked Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood to take on McGeogh’s role but he didn’t feel he could do it justice. So, with Devoto’s old friend Noko on guitar, Norrie and I saw them again in the 02ABC in Glasgow. They opened their set with The Light Pours Out of Me and the 2009 performance can be viewed here and compared with their much younger selves on a 1979 version here.

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Police On My Back – The Equals (1967)

Another recent musician birthday was that of Guyana-born multi-instrumentalist Eddy Grant who was 76 years old. He came to London in 1960 at the age of 12 and learned to read and write music at his local secondary modern. Over his long career he has taken elements of many black music genres and blended them into catchy tunes which gave him a series of hit singles. These began in 1979 with the reggae pop of Living On The Frontline and continued through to the African polyrhythms of 1988’s anti-apartheid hit Give Me Hope Jo’anna. But before all that, Grant was a founding member of the ground-breaking multi-racial sixties rock group, The Equals. The five members all met at school in Haringey and got gigs around London. They played an energetic mix of pop, blues and soul with some ska thrown in and were signed to President Records in 1966, releasing their first LP Unequalled Equals early in 1967 and then Explosion a few months later – bands were worked hard in those days! Their fourth single, the great I Get So Excited scraped into the top fifty but it was the Grant-penned Baby Come Back that made their name, giving their label their only No 1 record. Check out the great Black Sinned Blue Eyed Boys, too!

I’ve playlisted another track written by Grant from the second Equals LP to mark his birthday and one that had a longer life when it was covered by The Clash on their sprawling triple album Sandanista! released in late 1980. I think most people (including me!) assumed Police On My Back was a Strummer/Jones original given the subject matter and overall vibe. The cover is a fairly faithful reading of Grant’s song, albeit with more punch in the rhythm section and, along with his vocal, Mick Jones replicates Grant’s distinctive police siren guitar part. There is a really great video for the original here complete with a Benny Hill-style police chase sequence at the start and Grant playing a Prince-style cut out guitar in the performance bit. And here is The Clash playing it at 100mph in Tokyo in 1982 with poor Topper on the drums trying to hold the rest of them back!

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A Day’s Wait – Altered Images (1981)

WIS likes to avoid the obvious wherever possible. So, when I spotted Clare Grogan of Altered Images had her 62nd birthday this week, there was no way I was going to playlist that record! My memories of Altered Images go right back to the early days when Grogan was a waitress in the Spaghetti Factory in Gibson St in Glasgow. For a little while at the start of the 80s, it was the place to be seen and all the ‘Faces’ of the emerging Glasgow music scene used to hang out there. Apparently, it was where Bill Forsyth spotted her and cast her for Gregory’s Girl. Apparently, she shot the film in parallel with performing with Altered Images, who she had formed along with her old school mates. She managed to keep her two careers separate, hiding them from each other so when the film came out, it was a surprise to Forsyth that her music career was taking off. The band were all members of the Siouxise & The Banshees fan club and Grogan was apparently a bit horrified by John Gordon Sinclair’s flared trousers and Rush patches on his jacket when she first met him on film set.

The band’s early sound was heavily influenced by the Banshees, as a listen to their debut single Dead Pop Stars will illustrate. I saw them play in the Bungalow Bar in Paisley in 1981 around the time the single was released and I have a memory that a former schoolmate of mine David Band was there that night too. He was friendly with the band and was just finishing his degree at Glasgow School of Art. The band had asked him to produce some paintings for the cover of Dead Pop Stars and after this first commission he went on to do nearly all of their cover artwork as well as cover art for Spandau Ballet and Aztec Camera. He did the above sleeve for second single A Day’s Wait which wasn’t a hit but I’m playlisting it as it shows them slowly transitioning from their Banshees period into the very Alive Pop Stars that they were to become.

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Ego Killah – Ezra Collective (2022)

I went along to this month’s Vinyl Sessions armed with what I thought was an eclectic choice of long-playing records – yes, kids, that’s what “LP” stands for. The fun of the evening is that you hear the music through a top-notch sound system put together by Mr Vinyl Sessions, Dave McMahon. My pile of ancient, very crackly shellac included (among others) collections by The Tubes, Talking Heads, The Triffids, Misty In Roots and Michelle Shocked and my cunning plan was to choose one of the tracks I played on the night to include on this week’s blog.

It was a quiet evening so everyone got to play all their choices and even Dave spun a few discs of his own which I hadn’t seen him do before. I had pretty much decided to playlist the excellent Man Kind by Misty In Roots from their 1979 album Live At The Countervision when Dave stuck on his shiny new orange vinyl double LP version of Where I’m Meant To Be, the Mercury Award winning album by Ezra Collective. He had selected side B track 3 and Ego Killah’s huge reggae jazz groove came thumping out the bass bins. It sounded fantastic – so good, that I have put my Misty In Roots track on hold and playlisted the brilliant Ego Killah instead. The horn motif is just glorious and the soloing throughout is a sonic joy, impossible not to move along to. And I love the little touches of dub in the production – it’s easy to overdo the effects but here they are used sparingly to add some sparkle and depth to the track. If you want something more dubby, then the album has just been re-released as one of those extended “Deluxe Editions” and comes with an additional stripped back Channel One Sound System Mix of Ego Killah. It’s entertaining but the playlisted original is best. Turn the bass up…

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Way Down Now – World Party (1990)

The blog is going to finish this week with two artists who have recently passed away. I’ve sadly reached that age where the deaths of people whose music I have bought and listened to are becoming frighteningly frequent. I’m starting with the great Karl Wallinger who died this month aged 66. Born in Wales, multi-instrumentalist Wallinger was immersed in 60s guitar music from an early age, even as he learned classical piano. Following various jobs in bands and music publishing, he answered an ad for a guitarist placed by Mike Scott of The Waterboys. He persuaded Scott to hire him as a keyboard player for second LP A Pagan Place – that’s his piano part on the title track. Scott encouraged Wallinger’s wider musical contribution to the next (breakthrough) album This Is The Sea, particularly the synths and percussion parts and that ear-catching, Fame-style descending vocal at the end of The Whole Of The Moon.

He left in 1985 to pursue his own music in World Party which was really just him playing every instrument, augmented by others for playing live. Often unfairly criticised as a 60s revivalist, he was a versatile songwriter with an ear for classic pop music which crossed genres. The 1987 debut album Private Revolution passed me by but the great 1990 summer single Put The Message In The Box brought World Party to my attention. It scraped in to No 39 in the charts and I bought it and the excellent parent album, Goodbye Jumbo. Lynn and I became firm fans after seeing Wallinger perform his killer pop tunes from both records in the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh in October – the debut LP’s Ship Of Fools being a particular stand-out. They released Bang in 1993 which made No2 in the album chart and gave them their only top twenty single, Is It Like Today?

Wallinger has actually had a No 1 single as a writer, when his record label took the song She’s The One from his poorly performing fourth LP and got Robbie Williams to record it in 1999. Although angered by Williams often claiming to have written the tune, Wallinger suffered a brain aneurysm in 2000 and later stated “He nicked my pig and killed it but gave me enough bacon to live on for four years [of recovery]. He kept my kids in school and me in my studio and for that I thank him”. So, all hail to the unique Karl Wallinger and feast your ears on Way Down Now, the lead single from Goodbye Jumbo. Musically upbeat but lyrically not (Inside my future life/What I see just makes me cry), listen out for him nicking the “woo-woo” vocal refrain from the Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil as the song builds to a finish.

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Sebastian – Cockney Rebel (1973)

Back at the start of January, I used the tenuous link of hearing a song for the first time in ages to playlist it. The song was Cockney Rebel’s Mr Soft and I wrote some words about the band and particularly founder and songwriter Steve Harley. Harley’s death was announced this week at the age of 73 and nearly every media outlet reached for the band’s megahit to reference upfront in their reporting. As I noted in WIS 5Jan24, I have no axe to grind with Come Up And See Me (Make Me Smile) other than over-familiarity making me a bit bored with it. It’s still a really good song. Indeed, last week’s guest blogger Ken Macdonald described it to me as having “the best pause in all pop”, and I am not going to agrue with him on that!

But to mark Harley’s passing, I’m going to go out on a limb and playlist what I described two months ago as “the seven gothic minutes of labyrinthine 1973 debut single Sebastian.” It’s maybe not that easy a listen but in my opinion it is worth persevering with it. Lifted from the band’s first LP The Human Menagerie, it was released as a UK single by EMI not once, not twice but three times between August 73 and January 74 and each time it failed to chart. I absolutely loved its doom-laden tortured drama (“Pale angel face, green eye-shadow, the glitter is outasight/No courtesan could begin to decipher your beam of light”) but my 13-year-old self was not sufficiently flush to purchase it. However, it must have got a reasonable amount of airplay as I managed to record it off the radio on to a Boots C60 using the cheap cassette recorder and microphone set up I got for my birthday. (Press Play and Record and everybody stop talking!) I presume EMI persisted with releasing it as they had shelled out for a 50-piece orchestra and full choir to record it. History shows it was generally well-received by the critics and it certainly has been stuck in my head for many years. I read online that Peter Hook of New Order chose it as one of his six favourite tunes saying: “It’s the first song that made me realise that there’s more to music than pop. It wasn’t throwaway.” Couldn’t have put it better myself.

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Last Word

I must thank Mike Lynch and Ken Macdonald for their efforts in putting their guest blogs together over the last couple of weeks – both seemed to be much enjoyed by the WIS regulars. I can only hope that I retain the readership now that I am back on the laptop! If anyone else fancies a crack at a guest spot, then let me know.

Still haven’t found the time to sort out the Master Playlist but this week’s six tunes have migrated on there. The pool just keeps getting deeper.

WeekInSoundMaster

AR