It’s an unusual week for WIS with two tracks by one artist playlisted. However, it’s both sides of the first single I bought so the rules have been waived. Enjoy!

Just Friends – Amy Winehouse (2006)

The big music story crossing over to mainstream media last weekend was the release of the Amy Winehouse biopic named after her Back To Black album from 2006. It got roundly panned nearly everywhere although newcomer actress Marisa Abela came out with some plaudits for her thankless task of trying to replicate someone as totally unique as Winehouse without falling into parody. I read a review where the writer felt that the movie setting managed to to catch the feel of Camden in the 2000s and another article using the scene where Winehouse performs in the Dublin Castle pub as part of the 2007 Camden Crawl festival as a backdrop to a wider piece on the threat to the UK’s grassroots venues. Showing Winehouse playing there and then moving on to bigger stages in New York and winning Grammys at least shows the role these venues have in breaking new artists. I’m not holding out too much hope for the House of Commons’ Culture Media & Sport Committee review of the marked increase in closures of small venues but sticking a £1 levy on every already overpriced enormodome arena gig ticket seems like not a bad shout to me.

I scoured the internet for the setlist to Amy’s gig at the Dublin Castle and found out that it took place this week in 2007 on April 19. Sadly, I can only find an incomplete setlist of five songs but I’ve chosen one of these for the playlist this week. Just Friends is one of the lesser-played tracks from the Back to Black LP and while I had the option of picking a live version from a BBC recording that same year in the Porchester Hall, I’ve gone for the studio version. The live version has a bigger band on it and doesn’t quite have that soulful ska feeling of the studio take which I think would have stood out on the cramped stage of the Dublin Castle. A tale of a woman struggling in an illicit affair (“The guilt will kill you if she don’t first”), it’s one of those songs where Winehouse demonstrates her innate ability to bring jazz phrasing into any rhythm, even a firm reggae groove with a rock-steady beat on the snare.

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Soul Wandering – Paul Weller (2024)

So Monday was Lynn’s birthday and it was really nice of Paul Weller to arrange to play a live show just up the road in Dunfermline to honour the occasion. With the seats removed in the stalls giving great stage views from the stepped floor, the venue capacity of the Alhambra is just over 2000. The place was rammed with punters for this ‘small-town’ show by a major artist which sold out online in minutes. The very long (cold) queue outside showed the old place was struggling a bit with logistics but everyone was in to catch at least part of the generally well received support set by bright and breezy 70s pop act Barbara.

Weller and his band took to the stage at 8.45 sharp with the Guv’nor resplendent in Queen Bey approved double denim. What followed was a career-spanning 28 song set just shy of two hours where those that came for the hits (and there were quite a few) were made to wait. Kicking off with Rip The Pages Up (a 2008 b-side from his recent rarities collection), the early part of the set mainly featured tracks from his 90s albums (Wild Wood, Stanley Road) and a healthy number from his recent more recordings, the lockdown era Fat Pop and the more ‘trippy’ On Sunset in particular – see set-highlight More earlier in the tour here. With his new record 66 (titled after his age) out next month, we got the excellent recent single Soul Wandering as well as the punchy Jungle Queen (written with Noel Gallagher) and the lovely Nothing. The former was a bit meh but the latter was a standout – Lynn felt it had echoes of Blackstar-period Bowie – and fitted with the (heavy) soul feel of most of the evening. When they came, the hits hit home – That’s Entertainment, Start!, Broken Stones, Headstart For Happiness, Changingman and a final crowd-pleasing Town Called Malice. Dedicating the beautiful Rockets to long gone local hero Stuart Adamson in the first encore was a classy touch.

The band were really tight and, like Weller himself, they all performed with real feeling such that their obvious enjoyment in what they were producing on stage spread through the audience, even those less familiar with the deeper cuts. Saxophone and flute (yes flute!) maestro Jacko Peake was a revelation and Steve Craddock put in one of the most accomplished guitar performances I’ve ever seen. From flashy lead breaks to understated deft infills, it was a masterclass. With Weller at the piano for Stanley Road, his footwork on his FX pedals for the parts played on his cherry Gibson SG was like an Irish dancer!

That the so-called Modfather is still producing amazing new music in 2024 is something we should be grateful for, so I’ve chosen to playlist the Soul Wandering single this week as it seems to capture all aspects of what is great about his music in three short minutes.

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Literary Mind – Sprints (2022)

And taking of live gigs, I’ve been looking for an excuse to play this brilliant single by the name-to-drop, hip young gun-slingers Sprints for a while now. The Dublin based garage-punk four piece led by vocalist and guitarist Karla Chubb released their dynamic debut LP Letter To Self in January to wide acclaim – five stars in the online NME, if that means anything these days when the newsprint doesn’t come off on your fingers. Inevitably compared to the Irish guitar music of Fontaines DC, I picked up on this single back at the end of 2022 and have been listening to it ever since. As you’ll hear on the track, Sprints seems a likely title for a band who can clatter along at a hell of a pace. The LP version is a bit cleaner in the production but I’ve gone for the original slightly rougher single mix.

My excuse for playlisting this comes from an excellent music blog I follow – The New Vinyl Villain. Posting every day of the week and covering a huge amount of music, its been running for years under the guiding hand of JC, who has some regular guest bloggers but carries much of the heavy load himself. Like me, he’s based in Scotland, now in his early sixties and has a passion for live music. Unlike me, he managed to get hold of a ticket for Sprints recent show in a rammed King Tut’s in Glasgow as part of their sold-out UK tour. Last week, he posted his review of the gig on his blog under his ‘Life Affirming Experiences’ series. It was a great review (read it all here) but I am shamelessly replicating an entire paragraph below as I related to what it has to say very strongly!

It is a bit confounding, as I creep closer to the age of 61, to find myself falling hard for bands whose members could pass for my grandkids and really wanting to get myself along to their gigs. Not that I could manage along night after night, given how I ended up staggering out of King Tut’s hot, sweaty and quite tired. Oh, and I was in possession of two t-shirts, courtesy of the merch stall – yup, it was such a great night that TWO (count ’em) band t-shirts came back with me to Villain Towers….and that was the third surprise of the night…..a band with so many young followers offering up t-shirts for those of us who need to reach for the larger sizes (still haven’t forgiven Working Men’s Club for looking after only their skinny fans!)

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Love And Happiness – Al Green (1972)

A musical birthday of note this week was that of the Reverend Albert Leornes Green, the ‘Last of the Great Soul Singers’, who was 78 years old on 13 April. Brought up in a devoutly religious family, Green was kicked out the family home as a teenager by his father who found him listening to Jackie Wilson’s A Woman, A Lover, A Friend – clearly it was the devil’s music! Freed from his family constraints, Green indulged his love of soul and rock’n’roll and began singing in various groups and making records which weren’t that successful. Having signed to Willie Mitchell’s Hi-Records in 1969, Mitchell encouraged Green to stop trying to imitate his musical heroes like Sam Cooke and Wilson Pickett and find his own voice.

Mentored by Mitchell, Green went on to have his most successful period as a recording artist in the early 70s where his sweet, soulful but vulnerable voice propelled singles like Tired Of Being Alone, Let’s Stay Together, I’m Still In Love With You and L-O-V-E (Love) into the top ten on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1974, he recorded the much-covered Take Me To The River for his eighth album and, while this mixed up tale of teenage lust and baptism was never a single, he adopted it for the title of his autobiography in 2000.

Green’s life took a dark twist in October 1974 when an argument with his girlfriend Mary Woodson, who had mental health issues, led to her assaulting him with a pan of boiling grits. He sustained third degree burns but she went on to fatally shoot herself with his handgun. Green took this as a sign to devote his time to God so he became a pastor and founded the Full Gospel Tabernacle in 1976. However, assault charges of his own dogged the late 70s and he withdrew into his church and his gospel music. He returned to secular recording in the 90s and 00s but it is his 70s heyday that is his legacy.

I’ve chosen to playlist a favourite track of mine which has a title which is a bit at odds with that last paragraph. Love And Happiness was co-written with guitarist Teenie Hodges for his 1972 album I’m Still in Love with You. Considered by many critics as one of his finest songs, it was released as a single in the UK on London Records in 1973 but didn’t get a US single release until 1977 as his secular career was already faltering. The opening is amazing with the scat vocal and sparse guitar gently leading you to a count-in which is apparently Hodges tapping his foot on a box in the studio. The guitar riff kicks in, the Hammond organ bubbles and bursts into life and we’re off, building the song around the driving beat. The horn figure in first half is good, but the much-sampled stabbing horn part that rises through the second half is just genius.

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Jeepster/Life’s A Gas – T.Rex (1971)

I read something this week telling me that it was on 19 April 2002 that Jeepster by T. Rex became the first song successfully identified by Shazam in a pre-launch version of the service that required the user to call a number and receive a text message with the name of the song! As a relatively recent convert to the music identification app, I can say that smartphone tech has shortened that process. But why did they choose Jeepster to test it out, I wondered?

Jeepster was the first single that I “bought with my own money” and how I answer when asked the standard ‘first record’ question. The truth is that nine months earlier I asked for a copy of Three Dog Night’s single Joy To The World for my 11th birthday in April 1971. Yeah – “Jeremiah was a bullfrog/Was a good friend of mine” – that’s the one. Anyway, I bought the much cooler Jeepster single myself when it was released in November 1971 in Cuthbertson’s music shop in Moss St in Paisley. I asked to hear it first in one of those listening booths made of perforated sheets of hardboard painted white. I already knew what it sounded like but I’d never been in one of those booths and wanted to try them out. The single was released on Fly Records and when they handed it across in the paper bag and I took it out to look at it, I was astounded. The record itself was normal black vinyl and mine came in a plain white sleeve but it was the labels illustrated above that amazed me. The ‘This side’ label was pretty cool graphically but the “Other side” was the surprise with the image of Marc Bolan holding his Les Paul and Mickey Finn looking over his shoulder. Bolan was the star and he wasn’t even looking at the camera!

I was completely captivated by these labels which were pretty unusual for UK 7 inch singles at the time, and I was equally captivated by the b-side track Life’s A Gas. Given this record was where it all really began for my love of music, I’ve gone rogue and playlisted both sides of the single this week. Crazy, eh?

Produced by Tony Visconti, Jeepster is a thumping glam-rock monster with that instantly recognisable Bolan boogie riff that he ripped off from the Howlin’ Wolf song You’ll Be Mine. According to Visconti, it was recorded live and the stomping and rattling during the intro was down to Bolan jumping up and down as he played the guitar, shaking the mic stand in the studio. Visconti left the sounds in the final mix as he felt they added to the feel of the song. The lyrics are brilliantly nonsensical (“You’ve got the universe reclining in your hair”) and full of sexual energy, something that passed me by at age 11 – I think? After the infamous vampire line at the end, Bolan’s vocal goes mad with a final shout of “Hot Love!” referencing back to his February No 1 hit. Get It On got there in July 71 but Jeepster was held off making it a hattrick of No 1s that year by Slade’s Coz I Luv You and then Benny Hill’s magnum opus Ernie.

Although also produced by Visconti, Life’s A Gas is a whole different ball game, leaning back slightly to Bolan’s pre-glam days when the band was still Tyrannosaurus Rex and played psychedelic folk. While the ballad has the typical planets and priestesses in the lyric, Visconti’s tight production keeps the song focussed and crisply structured. The acoustic strum is supplemented by a fuzz guitar riff which eventually breaks out into a full blown solo as the song comes to a brilliant conclusion. Having listened to it for over 50 years, it is burned into my brain and triggers so many memories for me. Thankfully, one of these memories is not his appearance performing it accoustically with the host on The Cilla Black Show on TV which I was blissfully unaware of until now – but if you must see it, it’s here.

I went on to buy hundreds of singles over the next 15 years and I still have them all on the shelf behind me including my original copy of this one – the disc that started it all. I’ve probably listened to the b-side of every single I’ve bought as I might have found something as good as Life’s A Gas tucked away out of sight. Hmmmm….I feel a future blog theme coming on…

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Last Word

They say nostalgia’s not what it used to be but that last piece hit the spot for this old git, so please excuse the indulgence of blethering on about it and playlisting both tracks. Don’t worry, it won’t happen again. Actually, I’ll be an even older git by the time you are reading the next blog as it will be published on my birthday. There is a very obvious song choice for this particular birthday, but believe me, it’s not going to happen…

For now the Master Playlist remains intact as one monstrous digital pile of quality records, which now includes this week’s sound selection.

WeekInSoundMaster

AR