Three weeks into the tour and a third carte postale, this time from the south west corner of France on the dramatic Atlantic coast. Enjoy!

First Word

So having swallowed the cost and done the long drive west on the A64 toll road under the shadow of the Pyrenees, we did a quick detour into the hills above Biarritz via the impressive spa town of Cambo-les-Bains and finally touched down at our campsite for the week on the edge of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. A planned ‘long stop’ in the middle of our tour, this has made it a different kind of week without the churn of moving every couple of days. The outcome of this is that even more tenuous links have been deployed to choose the tunes for the playlist. You have been warned.

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Wild Is The Wind – David Bowie (1976)

Our campsite for the week was located right on the beach and a quick explore in the evening sunshine when we arrived last Saturday ticked all the boxes – sandy beach, gentle rolling waves, rocky outcrops, and waterfront bars and restaurants were all on hand. Beautiful. However, within a couple of hours of setting up the van and making some food, the wind started to get up and before long we were in the teeth of a full-blown Atlantic storm and we retreated inside. After the rain finally stopped battering off the van roof, we were left lying in bed listening to the wind trying to remove our awning until, at 3.30am, we gave in to the inevitable. Venturing outside where the tents on either side of us were billowing in the gale and decorative lights had gone flying, we wrestled the hold-down ties off the awning and hurriedly wound it in. And finally got to sleep.

On the drive west that afternoon, this track from Bowie’s 1976 LP Station To Station had come on a playlist I was listening to as Lynn dozed beside me in the passenger seat. I was a late convert to the tune, primarily through its inclusion on the 1981 compilation album CHANGESTWOBOWIE and its release as a single to promote the record. The song was written by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington for the 1957 film Wild Is the Wind and was a hit single that year for Johnny Mathis. But it is Nina Simone’s interpretation of the song that drew Bowie to it. She recorded it live in 1959 but then released a studio version in 1966 which was sparsely instrumented and allowed her dramatic and emotional voice to star. Presumably in the middle of his unstable, coked-up phase in Berlin, he decided to commit his own emotional version to tape and the recording found a slot as the closing track of Station To Station. It is often ignored by the critics in any Bowie career assessment, seen I think as too much of a pastiche due to his mannered vocal. But there is something about his voice set against Carlos Alomar’s swirling, jazzy acoustic guitar in the mix that draws me in every time. “You’re spring to me, all things to me/Don’t you know your life itself?”

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Pool Hall – The Wave Pictures (2016)

So I’m sure you will all be mightily relieved to hear that the Atlantic storm blew through and after a windy, grey day on Sunday, the warm sun returned to Saint-Jean-de-Luz on Monday. But a trip down to the beach revealed that the residue of the storm was that the breakers crashing onto the beach were still substantial enough to knock small children and old geezers like me over! I failed to observe the experienced old gits on the beach who stood stock still in the shallows braced against the wash and waited their moment when there was a big enough gap in the large waves and then ran forward into the sea beyond the breaking point. I came out after several undignified spills in the surf with enough sand and gravel in my swim shorts to require a Great Escape-style jettisoning as I walked uncomfortably back to the van along the promenade.

With waves very much on my mind, I recalled this brilliant single from 2016 by the quirky alt-rock band The Wave Pictures who hail from somewhere called Wymeswold in Leicestershire. I don’t know a huge amount about them but I found a quote from the Guardian which described their work as “charming, witty pop songs shot through with Jonathan Richman’s gawky glee and Suede’s doomed provincial romanticism”. Well. That explains why I like them every time I hear them! I don’t really know what to make of a lyric like: “A Spanish guitar leant up in the corner/You’ve been to the river to talk to your brother/You’ve sung minor key songs with your parents’ friends” but when combined with the lo-fi instrumentation and the slightly off-key guitar licks it all seems to make perfect sense. I can also recommend the melancholy Shelly from their 2018 LP Look Inside Your Heart and the excellent part-spoken word The Little Window from Brushes With Happiness, also released in 2018. Prolific and well worth further investigation.

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Surf City – Jan & Dean (1963)

So the aforementioned waves mean that the Atlantic SE coast of France is big for surfers. On the windy Sunday, we watched people in the bay at Saint-Jean-de-Luz doing traditional windsurfing (with the board and the sail type thing – sorry for the poor description, Ian Grant!) but we also watched some guys doing something I think is called wingfoiling. This involves smaller boards fitted with some kind of hyrdofoil below and a smaller sail unattached to the board but held by the arms of the surfer. Once the sail catches the wind, the board flies along and rises out of the water as the hydrofoil skiffs along the water surface in a cool kind of way. The next day we saw a similar board and hydrofoil being used but without a sail. I can only conclude that these were battery powered in some way but it looked like the hoverboard out of Back To The Future!

It’s all a long way from old fashioned surfboards where it was just a bit of curved wood being used to “hang 10” and harness the power of the waves. But the towns down here were full of expensive surf brand shops like Rip Curl, Billabong and Quicksilver which themselves are probably also scorned by Southern Californian traditionalists out on the west coast of the USA where surf-rock was born back in 1958. There were two strands of surf music back then – firstly, the instrumental surf groups, as exemplified by Dick Dale and the Del-Tones with their reverb-heavy guitars mimicking the waves hitting the beach. Then there were the vocal surf groups who held on to bits of that sound but added vocals with multiple harmonies, most famously The Beach Boys. Their creative genius Brian Wilson was responsible for writing the 1963 hit Surf City along with Jan Berry of vocal group Jan and Dean and it became the first surf song to make No1 in America. And with a lyric like: “Well, with two swingin’ honeys for every guy/And all you gotta do is just wink your eye” you can understand why. Not only does Brian Wilson sing on this recording but a young Glen Campbell plays in the backing band. Playlisted for all the surfers out there!

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Oh No! – The Decemberists (2024)

In our time here on the south west edge of France, we have been stuck by the strong Basque influence which is apparent in everything – the language, the architecture, and the food all feel more Spanish than French. Even the road signs are dualled with the Basque words looking really unusual, full of Xs and a strange A-type letter. It looks nothing like French or Spanish and God knows how you pronounce the words. The Basque flag flies in many places – it has the form of a Union Jack but with a red backdrop, a green diagonal cross and a white orthogonal cross. Very striking.

The music you hear in bars around here can sound Latin-influenced but I’m not going to tell you I have sought out Basque music playlists and got into all that. What I have spent a bit of time listening to this week is the new album by folk-troubadours The Decemberists As It Ever Was, So Will It Be Again. My gig-buddies Ken and Norrie are big fans and had been messaging me about how good it was. And they were right! It’s the band’s first release in six years and frontman Colin Meloy’s obsession with putting arcane, historical stories to hummable tunes shows no sign of abating. The LP’s opening track and terrific first single Burial Ground deals with mortality, a subject Meloy is never far from, but this invite to everyone to meet at a graveyard comes with a melody that could have been written by Brian Wilson – click the link and you’ll see what I mean. In recognition of being in the Basque region, I’m playlisting the second track and latest single Oh No! which has a wonderful Latin sway to it but an underlying dark shadow: “And it seems that we’ve caught you in tow/Between the devil and the devil you know”. Meloy has commented that “it’s about causing havoc, causing chaos, its narrator forever followed by an even greater form of chaos, a great darkness. But it’s a darkness you can dance to!” Marvel at the tune and watch them perform it live here.

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Lady – CVC (2023)

On Thursday night, we left the pasta in the cupboard in the van and strolled along the beachfront where we treated ourselves to an amazing Cote De Boeuf in a small Basque restaurant. It was set back from the beach and came without the inflated prices charged for the views – a carafe of very drinkable house red came in at 11 Euros! We had intended heading straight back to the van but the lure of the view from the very busy last waterfront bar before the campsite was too much and we stopped for just one last glass of red. A DJ was spinning records to an enthusiastic crowd and the dancefloor was the narrow road between the bar and the tables at the sea wall. All good until the little No 67 bus that plies up and down the coast road had to edge its way through the revelers.

I didn’t recognise too many of the tunes being played but Lady (Hear Me Tonight) by French house-duo Modjo (which was a UK No1 single in hit in 2000) got a welcome spin. This reminded me of the last time we had heard the tune which was midway through the barnstorming set-of-the-festival by CVC at this summer’s Black Deer. Their cover version fitted in with their funky 70s vibe and had the most amazing bamboozling bassline driving it. The good news is CVC recorded it for a single b-side and it is now available as part of a collection called B-Real and so can be playlisted for you lucky readers to enjoy it as much as we did on the day.

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Another Man’s Rain – Jackie Leven (2007)

I came to the Rebus books of Ian Rankin relatively late and had the pleasure of reading them in reasonably quick sequence and enjoyed seeing his writing develop along with his characters. To anyone who has spent time working and living in Edinburgh, they are incredibly evocative of the city – right down to the back room in the Oxford Bar. My delayed start meant I was able to shorten the five year gap between Exit Music (Rebus retires) and Standing In Another Man’s Grave (Rebus returns). The former inspired me to blog about the Radiohead song its title was based on and now it is the turn of the latter.

I finished the Another Man’s Grave on our travels about ten days ago so playlisting the famously misheard track by Jackie Leven is a bit delayed. And, while I really enjoyed the novel, I thought it was one of the weakest endings to any of his books so far. But at least I get to playlist an artist who I saw Rankin talk about in The Woodside Hotel in Aberdour a few years back as part of a weekend festival of music. Unknown to me, Rankin was a huge fan and had recorded an album with Leven in 2005 with the wry title, Jackie Leven Said. My introduction to the Kirkcaldy-born songwriter had come through a compilation CD Heroes Can Be Any Size which was cover-mounted with the March 2012 issue of The Word magazine as a tribute following his death from cancer aged 61 in November 2011.

Apart from a brief flirtation with fame and commercial success with the band he formed in the late 70s called Doll By Doll, Leven’s subsequent prolific solo work flew very much under the radar. A recovering heroin addict, he was an intense singer songwriter and considered the cult artist’s cult artist, collaborating with fans Ron Sexsmith, Johnny Dowd and Pere Ubu’s David Thomas. The Guardian’s obituary called him “a brilliant outsider who built up a devoted cult following during his lengthy, wildly varied and often turbulent career, but never achieved the level of success that he deserved.” If you enjoy the wonderful Another Man’s Rain and lyrics like “Someone I knew once told me/Said I should beware/Said my girl had secret clothes/She wore when I was not there”, then I recommend searching out the compilation at the link above – you will not regret it.

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Last Word

So that’s your lot for this week. Tomorrow we pack up and get back on the road, heading for Bordeaux where, if we can get to the campsite through the traffic chaos (it’s en route to a stadium being used for some the Olympic football games), we are planning to sample some more red wine. And talking of which, this week’s featured picture comes from last night’s nightcap at the beach!

This week’s tenuously linked tracks have been added to the Master at the link below. Cheers!

WeekInSoundMaster

AR