Well here we are again but for a change the sun is streaming in the window. Perfect timing for a blog half filled with dark tunes. Enjoy!
Gigantic – The Pixies (1988)
We’re starting with a couple of quick catch ups from last week. The death of alt-rock studio master Steve Albini from a heart attack at 61 was confirmed on Thursday. Although infrequently working with mainstream acts, the corners of the internet where I venture was abuzz with tributes and commentaries on his importance in music. So, I wanted to mark his passing with a track on the blog. He was a really interesting character who defied convention in all he did – he hated the term ‘producer’ and preferred to be known as a ‘recording engineer’. Unusually, he would never take a sales-based fee for his services on principle – he always took a flat fee and, in the case of his best-known job on Nirvana’s final LP In Utero, lost out on significant income. (This approach is partly explained by his bizarre but lucrative side-career as a high stakes poker player in the World Series of Poker tournaments!) Known for his high quality but minimalist approach, he refused to spend any more than two weeks recording an album of songs, no matter who the artist was. His philosophy was that if you couldn’t do it justice in that timescale, it wasn’t worth doing – multiple overdubs be damned! In 1993, he worked with PJ Harvey at her request on her second album Rid of Me “because all I ever wanted is for us to be recorded and to sound like we do when we’re playing together in a room”.
As well as engineering, Albini played guitar in Big Black and Shellac, the latter known as the definitive ‘noise rock’ group. However, his legacy is that he engineered an incredible 3,000 records in his lifetime, many for obscure American hardcore bands in small towns across the country. The ‘name’ bands he recorded included Manic Street Preachers, the Stooges, B52s and even Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. But I’ve playlisted a track from his work on the seminal debut full length LP by Boston noise-merchants Pixies. Albini went round to the band’s manger’s house to have a general discussion on how they wanted their record to sound and he was in the studio with them the next day! He used all sorts of techniques – filtering vocals through guitar amps, recording vocals in the studio toilet to get more echo but it was done and dusted in 10 days. There is some really raw stuff on the record – the re-recording of Vamos from their previous mini-LP has an amazing range of guitar sounds on it and some world class screaming by Black Francis. But I’ve opted for something slightly less in your face. Gigantic is one of only two Pixies songs to have Kim Deal on lead vocal and the tune revolves around her simple but effective bass-line. It displays their quiet-loud-quiet approach with some …erm… gigantic guitar chords powering the chorus. Despite it’s abstract lyric thought to be about a voyeuristic sexual encounter, Apple adopted a cover of the song to unveil the iPhone5S to the world. Nice.
The Prettiest Eyes – The Beautiful South (1994)
It was Paul Heaton’s 62nd birthday this week and, after 40 odd years of making music, I reckoned it was high time that he appeared on the blog. The Guardian described him as “one of our finest songwriters: his music reveals an exuberant ear for melody, his lyrics a keen eye and a brilliant wit” which I thought was a perfect description of his art.
He began in 1983 as founding member and singer with Hull band The Housemartins whose brand of sixties guitar pop often mixed with soul/gospel vocals saw them have six top twenty singles in 1986/87. Their a cappella cover of Isley/Jasper/Isley’s Caravan of Love got to No1 just before Christmas. He then formed The Beautiful South with fellow Northerner Dave Hemmingway in 1988 and their pop sensibilities and wry, socially observant lyrics gave them a long line of hit singles from 1989 to their break up due to “musical similarities” in 2007. These included Song For Whoever, A Little Time and the brilliant Perfect 10. Jacqui Abbott had joined The Beautiful South in 1993 and after a couple of solo albums, Heaton teamed up with her again and they have been recording as a duet since 2014. The five albums they have released have all made the top five and received wide praise from the critics – if you have lost touch with them musically, I can recommend their 2014 single D.I.Y. as a perfect re-entry point.
I have only seen him once in 2014, performing in Glasgow along with Abbott, but have enjoyed his work through every stage of his career so the choice of song to playlist was tough. In the end, I’ve chosen Prettiest Eyes, a minor hit single from 1994 LP Miaow. The wedding we attended last week was that of an old friend of ours who, much to his surprise, found himself getting married again to a fabulous woman he met having just turned sixty. It was a great day, full of emotion and laughter and sunshine and dancing. And while this song is about the stages in a lifelong relationship, I just felt that the chorus celebrated the joy of a relationship when not in the first flush of youth. “Let’s take a look at these crow’s feet, just look/Sitting on the prettiest eyes/Sixty 25th of Decembers/Fifty-nine 4th of Julys”
I Was Made To Love Her – Stevie Wonder (1967)
Stevland Hardaway Morris was 74 years old this year – a fact which reminds you that Stevie Wonder began his career making hit records when he was very young. On Saturday morning I was listening to the Huey Morgan show on 6Music and his Block Party mix at the end was created by MIche to mark Wonder’s birthday. It was a belter of a mix with the great man’s tunes being set among others by Jose Feliciano, The Supremes and Ray Barretto’s original of Pastime Paradise. It’s available on BBC Sounds for the next month here.
Berry Gordy signed Wonder to Motown Records in 1961 at the age of 11 just as producer Clarence Paul gave him the stage name Little Stevie Wonder. On his previous appearance in these pages (WIS 4 Aug 23), I playlisted the incredible Living In The City which sits right in the sweet spot of his 1972-76 classic period – a time when he had just wrested artistic control of his work from Gordy’s grip. This time round we’re going back to his Little Stevie days to enjoy one of the many incredible soul records he made for Motown while still under the influence of the dictatorial label boss.
I Was Made To Love Her was written by Wonder with his mother Lula Mae Hardaway, Sylvia Moy and producer Henry Cosby. It was released in May 1967 after a period where Wonder’s career was just beginning to flatline slightly – his last US top 5 hit had been Uptight (Everything’s Alright) in November 1965. As well as dropping the “Little” from his name in 1964, he had also stopped playing harmonica on his songs. But it returned with a vengeance on this track which flies out the traps with tight instrumentation by The Funk Brothers and joyous backing vocals by The Andantes. The 16-year-old Wonder had written the lyric about his first love, a girl named Angie, and his stunning vocal was coaxed out of him by producer Cosby. He took Wonder on a trip to a Baptist Church in Detroit where he encouraged him to imitate the style of the preacher. After some flat attempts to record it back in the studio, Cosby then filled the room with people he got off the street to give Wonder the sense of their presence like at the church. The vocal energy duly flowed and the record hit No2 in the US and No 5 in the UK.
The Jezebel Spirit – Brian Eno, David Byrne (1981)
It’s not often two artists who have worked together have their birthdays in the same week but Brian Eno turning 75 and David Byrne reaching 72 this week does provide a perfect opportunity to playlist this amazing track. The Jezebel Spirit was a May 1981 single from their collaborative album My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts which was released in February that year. Following Talking Heads debut record 77, Eno had co-produced their next three albums along with Byrne and the band, including Remain In Light which was released in October 1980. They got together to record Ghosts before they worked on Remain In Light but problems clearing samples delayed its release by several months.
The pioneering concept of My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts was to use African and Middle Eastern rhythms and replace conventional vocal tracks by lifting spoken voices from other sources and ‘found sounds’. Although they were not the first to use cut-up tape samples in those pre-digital days, their approach was radical in 1981 and it helped move the sampling of sounds into the mainstream. The record was hugely influential and echoes of this style of recording can be heard throughout modern music. In 2006, the 25th anniversary re-issue had acclaimed sampler Moby quoted on the cover saying “A beautiful record standing the test of time with no wear whatsoever.”
The Jezebel Spirit is the kind of track that astounds on first hearing – and still does today. Over a pulsating Afrobeat rhythm track, similar to those which appeared on Remain In Light, the synths howl and wail queasily and the ‘found sound’ vocal is that of an exorcism on a woman performed by an anoymous American male preacher on a radio show. That first burst of manic laughter sets the dark tone as the preacher tells the woman the voices she hears mean she is possessed “from the pit of Hell”. About halfway in, things really take off as he tells the woman to start blowing the spirit out and her heavy outbreaths counterpoint his yelled commands. After a few misogynistic tropes suggesting a lack of ‘virtue’, the exorcism reaches its climax with “Out Jezebel! Out!” and Eno’s synths go into a mad overdrive to take us to the end. Some reviewers were critical of Byrne and Eno for their voyeuristic trivialisation of this event. But I think that criticism requires a belief that this was a true religious experience and not just a woman with mental health issues being exploited by an end-of-the-pier evangelical grifter. Which it clearly is. Still sounds amazing, though.
God Only Knows – The Beach Boys (1966)
This week saw the 58th anniversary of the release of Pet Sounds, the eleventh studio album by The Beach Boys. As they’ve never appeared on the blog, I’m taking this opportunity to sort this by playlisting the track at the heart of the record. Although Pet Sounds is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest and most influential albums in music history, regularly topping those tiresome ‘best ever’ lists, I have to admit it is not a record I turn to very often. I was six when it came out and I haven’t really done the work to go back and really connect with it.
However, I can fully understand it’s importance in terms of how it revolutionised the making of a collection of songs into an ‘album’, at a time when a long-playing record was just a convenient way of grouping together some singles and cover songs. By conceiving it as a coherent body of work with a narrative arc and where every sound you heard counted, Pet Sounds was one of the first records to be regarded as a piece of ‘art’. Songwriter and producer Brian Wilson was at the heart of it, influenced by the likes of Phil Spector and the production work on the Beatle’s Rubber Soul. (Ironically Pet Sounds would go on to heavily influence their Sgt Pepper.) Wilson’s musical sensibilities introduced unusual sonic textures and structures to the Beach Boys’ sound which, up until this point, had been firmly focussed on pop records. Their previous LP was a covers record titled Beach Boys Party! which gave them the hit with The Regents’ Barbara Ann.
Co-written by Brian and songwriting collaborator Tony Asher, God Only Knows is the album’s heavenly centre piece, a baroque love song full of instrumental and harmonic complexity. Brian’s brother Carl produces the lead vocal performance of his life – the way he sings that fantastic “I may not always love you” opening line sets the tune on its way. The harpsichord and French horn parts stand out but listen carefully and you hear sleigh bells, strings and the brief burst of flutes in the third verse is incredible. After just two minutes, the song enters a highly unusual outro section of vocal rounds where Carl trades the title refrain with Brian and Bruce Johnston while the harmonies circle above their heads. Cited as the favourite song of Paul McCartney and Jimmy Webb, it’s sure not your average pop tune!
Lovely Head – Goldfrapp (2000)
The last anniversary this week is the 58th birthday of London-born musician Alison Goldfrapp. Another blog debutant, she began her music career in the mid-90s providing vocals for the likes of Orbital and Tricky before she met film composer Will Gregory in 1999 and they teamed up to form the electronic duo using her surname. Goldfrapp’s debut album Felt Mountain was released in 2000 and was shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize, which is how it came on my radar. Between then and 2017, they released a further six albums, with 2005’s Supernature being the most commercially successful, generating the top ten UK hit singles Ooh La La and Number 1. In recent years, Alison has dedicated more time to her role as a photographer and director but in 2023 she released her first solo record, The Love Invention, which made the UK album chart top ten.
But I’m going back to that first record for my choice of track to playlist. Lovely Head was released in May 2000 as the lead single from Felt Mountain, a collection of elegant and haunting music covering a number of genres. Gregory’s background in film scoring comes to the fore on Lovely Head which feels like it comes from a 60s spy movie. It opens with a squonking synth before an incredible whistling section sets the Ennio Morricone style theme of the piece. Having been scarred for life by Roger Whittaker on Saturday night TV variety shows, I’m not usually a fan of whistling on records but the echo applied to this one adds an eeriness that suits the song. A harpsichord creeps in and Alison’s vocal sets us off with a suitably obtuse lyric: “It starts in my belly then up to my heart/Into my mouth, I can’t keep it shut”. There is then a kind of operatic wail which I assumed was fully electronic but I’ve since found out that it is actually Alison’s voice compressed and processed through a Korg MS-20 synth. The layers of strings and echo-drenched vocals leaves a Shirley Bassey feeling floating about your ears by the time the song has one last blast of that whistling before wrapping up. Classy stuff.
Last Word
Last week’s Last Word noted a couple of guest blog opportunities for June which I’m delighted to say have been sorted out. Old hand Fraser Maxwell is going to do his third one for us and new-boy Dave Heatley is currently losing sleep over which tunes to select for his debut appearance. I’m always looking for more contributions so please get in touch if you feel the need to create. Just choose six tunes you love and scribble some words to tell us why – I’ll do the rest.
In communication with Fraser, his eagle eye had spotted that I had failed to update the Master Playlist with the last two week’s tunes, despite saying on here that I had. Very kindly, he put it down to old age…
AR
Week In Sound 
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