Another guest blog, with the experienced hand of Fraser Maxwell firmly on the decks as he spins us six more great tunes, all from this century. Enjoy!
First Word
Thanks to Alan for calling me off the subs bench again for another WIS contribution. I’m writing this in advance on Sunday 9th June, and music has dominated the day – my wife and daughter are at Murrayfield to see Ms Swift, and my son is in Majorca clubbing for the first time. Social media and the news seem to be dominated by the arrival in the UK of the Eras tour, and a friend has described Edinburgh this weekend as like ‘the worst hen party ever’ due to the amount pink stetsons and sparkly outfits. But it’s 73,000 people coming together, listening to music, and at nearly three and a half hours long no one can say Taylor doesn’t put in a crowd pleasing and Springsteen-esque shift.
Anyhow, onto this week’s tunes while Alan is on his travels. I’ve gone for a vague theme of (tenuously?) linking to songs or artists that have previously appeared on the master playlist, but they’re appearing here under a different guise that isn’t similar to their earlier appearances.
Hounds of Love – The Futureheads (2004)
I’m from Sunderland, and I think it’s fair to say that we don’t seem to be a city with a rich musical heritage. As a kid, I was aware that Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics was from Sunderland (and would occasionally turn up for a home match and be paraded to the crowd). And there was a blip of excitement locally when local punks the Toy Dolls made it onto Top of the Pops in 1985 with Nellie the Elephant. So I was chuffed when a decent Sunderland band (to these ears anyway) finally appeared on the scene. The Futurehead’s self-titled first album was released in September 2004, and I bought the album on the back of the single Decent Days and Nights. But the treat within, which I didn’t know about, was a cover version of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. It was released as a single and reached No8 on the UK Chart in its first week. It was named Single of the Year by NME and the band then supported Franz Ferdinand, the Pixies, and the Foo Fighters on their respective tours. As Kate Bush was featured on WIS 4 Aug 23, I had found my first tenuous connection!
Kate Bush’s original was barely recognisable after being given a terracing-ready intro and jerky post-punk-pop guitar treatment. Bush even rang to congratulate the Wearsiders as it took off, but lead singer Barry Hyde later admitted he was too scared to take the call and then mistakenly deleted the message she left. I love the energy of it, and the broad Mackem twang of Hyde’s singing always makes me think of home.
I think this goes down as my second favourite cover version of all time. I’m sure we can all agree that Johnny Cash’s version of Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt and the accompanying emotional video knocks all the others into a cocked hat, yes?
History Song – The Good, The Bad & The Queen (2007)
Warming to my theme of artists previously on WIS, both Blur and The Clash have appeared before – the former with This Is A Low and the latter, a whopping five times! The Good, the Bad & the Queen were a ‘supergroup’ formed by Damon Albarn of Blur, bassist Paul Simonon of The Clash, guitarist Simon Tong of the Verve, and drummer Tony Allen – the legendary Nigerian and Fela Kuti drummer hailed by Brian Eno as ‘the most important musician of the past 50 years’.
The band began as a solo project by Albarn with production by Danger Mouse, but by July 2006, the project had evolved to become a band effort. Albarn had met Simonon at the wedding of Clash singer Joe Strummer in 1997, and Tong had worked with Albarn on Blur’s 2003 Think Tank tour, filling in as guitarist following the departure of Graham Coxon. Allen contacted Albarn after hearing the 2000 Blur single Music Is My Radar which references him. The band played their debut gig in a village pub in Devon, which seems remarkably low key for the music royalty involved.
History Song is the album opener, and sets the mood for the whole album, as moody, cinematic, textured and a little ethereal. Opening with a simple acoustic Spanish guitar motif that’s soon fleshed out by the submarine bass of Simonon, Albarn’s fairground organ, haunted backing vocals, and a surprisingly restrained Allen skittering along. It was stated at the time that the record is a concept album, as its songs are all themed around modern life in London and Albarn described it as ‘a song cycle that’s also a mystery play about London’. The mood is more melancholy than the lineup would suggest, one review stated much of the album ‘sounds like Waterloo Sunset-era Kinks set to languid dub grooves’. The band disbanded in 2019 after a second album, and sadly Allen died in 2020.
Missed The Boat – Modest Mouse (2007)
The Smiths featured in the very first WIS back in February last year, with Reel Around the Fountain from the 1984 album The Smiths, and The Headmaster Ritual appeared in WIS 26 May 23. After The Smiths split in 1987, Johnny Marr went on to perform with various bands, and seems to be having quite a late career renaissance with his solo career currently. I can remember spells with The Pretenders, The The, and Electronic (with New Order’s Bernard Sumner) – I’m sure everyone can remember Getting Away With It.
Marr was regularly working as record producer and in 2006 began work with Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock on songs that eventually were featured on the band’s 2007 release, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. The band subsequently announced that Marr was a fully fledged member, and he toured extensively with them around that time. The new album reached number one on the American Billboard charts in late March 2007, the first time Marr had had a No1 in the US.
Missed The Boat was the second single lifted from the album which Brock described as a ‘nautical balalaika carnival romp’. The single has beautiful, crisp guitar riffs, a squeaky guitar solo (as you’d expect from Marr), and some soaring harmonies that just really catch my ear. But there are also some striking lyrics, about ‘missing the boat’ in life: “Oh, and we owned all the tools ourselves / But not the skills to make a shelf with / Oh, what useless tools ourselves”.
Tom The Model – Beth Gibbons, Rustin Man (2002)
Talk Talk featured relatively recently (WIS 29 Mar 24) with the classic Life’s What You Make It. Paul Webb, also known by the stage name Rustin Man, was the bassist for Talk Talk between 1981 and 88. In 2002, he collaborated with former singer and lyricist for Portishead Beth Gibbons on the album Out of Season. Before she joined Geoff Barrow in Portishead, Gibbons had auditioned for the singer’s slot in O.rang, the group formed by Webb after Talk Talk’s late-Eighties departure from the label EMI. Portishead’s sudden success resulted in the collaboration not happening at the time.
While touring Out of Season in the US, Variety described her performance with Rustin as ‘Billie Holiday fronting Siouxsie and the Banshees’. It’s largely a folk album with jazz leanings (you can hear the late era Talk Talk influence pretty clearly), with other influences being Nina Simone and Nick Drake. I’ve playlisted the single Tom the Model which takes delicate folk verses with a nicely retro big-band soul chorus, with Gibbons attacking the song with verve and defiance. The album was described as ‘quietly devasting’ and although I didn’t think the whole album lived up to this single, there’s plenty of quality to make it well worth a listen.
Thirty years into her career, Gibbons has recently put out her first solo album Lives Outgrown and it’s getting really positive reviews – worth a listen if you like this, or her Portishead-era work.
Police Encounters – FFS (2015)
The Mael brothers of Sparks have featured twice on WIS, with Amateur Hour in WIS 5 May 23 and a month later with The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte, following Cate Blanchett dancing on stage with them at Glastonbury. Somewhat surprisingly, Franz Ferdinand are yet to feature in the blog – need to get that sorted, Alan! – but together with Sparks they formally formed the wonderfully named FFS in 2015. Does this make it two ‘supergroups’ in the same week?! They originally began working together shortly after the release of Franz Ferdinand’s debut studio album in 2004, when it was discovered that the two bands were fans of each other. They had sent each other a few demos, one of which was Piss Off, which ended up as the twelfth track on the album FFS more than a decade later.
Police Encounters was the third single taken from their eponymous album and is a giddy song seemingly about a visitor to Harlem (“From the West Coast gonna take a plane, Hit the East Coast gonna take an A train”) getting into a bit of bother. Although ending up being strong-armed by the police, this doesn’t inhibit the song’s protagonist from having eyes for the policeman’s wife and planning to stay in Harlem indefinitely. Just standard Sparks quirkiness, and the ultimate in weird pop perfection.
FFS appeared on Later with Jools Holland in May 2015 and performed the single Police Encounters. Having the exuberance of both Alex Kapranos and Russell Mael on stage, makes Ron Mael’s deadpan and scowling demeanour on keyboards all the more hilarious.
Once you’ve heard the song, I’ll warn you that you’ll have the “bom bom diddy diddy” refrain in your head all day. It’s infectious!
Balcony Man – Nick Cave & Warren Ellis (2021)
We’ve had Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on the blog three times, but this track comes from Carnage, Cave’s Covid-lockdown album which he recorded just with Warren Ellis. No other Bad Seeds to be seen or heard. I must admit that I didn’t immediately take to the album at the time, though this playlisted album closer was the first song that caught my attention. But I managed to see Cave and Ellis perform songs from Carnage and the 2019 Bad Seed’s album Ghosteen (recorded with the Bad Seeds) live twice, including in Glasgow with Alan. Seeing the songs performed live transformed my opinion of both albums.
Carnage is a real mix of brutal, surreal, and romantic. The synthesizer and piano-backed Albuquerque is a beautiful meditation on lockdown depression or opportunities missed, the song referencing places that Cave had maybe wanted to visit at the time. Then three songs later Balcony Man plays out as a perfect closer with a more uplifting tone. There’s typical Cave imagery and humour in his lyrics: “I am two hundred pounds of packed ice/Sitting on a chair and in the morning sun/Putting on my tap dancing shoes/Oh my lap dancing shoes”. Other verses refer to his two hundred pounds as being “a bag of blood and bone” and an “octopus under a sheet”!
There are spacey synths, Cave’s heartfelt voice, soon giving way to the piano, with Ellis’ backup falsetto vocals are as great as ever (and a highlight live). There’s a warmth and vulnerability to the song, and the repeated lines of “Yeah, this much I know to be true/This morning is amazing and so are you” seem to flip the downbeat sentiment of Albuquerque, being grateful for special times and love shared during lockdown. Utterly beautiful.
Last Word
Big thanks to Fraser for his thoughts on this week’s top tunes which he will probably have to remind me to add to the Master Playlist below as he usually does if I forget!
Next week’s blog will be themed around the date that falls before it’s 5 July issue date, which also happens to be the day that the blog sets sail for France. This will see the start of the ‘carte postale’ blog form as I test the digital nomad experiment to the extreme. I expect this to introduce a certain degree of randomness to the blog which after 16 months of being sat at my desk seems no bad thing. Stay tuned!
AR
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