The last of the WIS epistles from foreign fields is themed around an old mixtape from nearly forty years ago. Where did all that time go? Enjoy!

First Word

Brace yourselves, folks – there is a bit of context reading in this upfront section. As hinted last week, I’ve decided to forego the normal event-related nonsense in this week of long journeys home from France and use a themed approach.  However, as you will see, there remains a minor ‘tour’ connection to the tunes presented below. 

I met Lynn way back in July 1986 and took the plunge and asked her out. We began a relationship and bonded over a shared interest in music – although our tastes were slightly different, there was a good ‘Venn diagram’ overlap to work with.

Having spent the summer getting on really well, we went off together in September to the beautiful French seaside town of Carnac in Brittany where a pal of hers had access to a house through the family she was nannying for. On the way south, Lynn had an interview for a job in a European ski resort for the winter. As, if that wasn’t enough, she also told me she intended to take up a nannying job the following summer in Boston with a family she knew. Shit! I’d fallen for this girl big time and she was about to bugger off to foreign climes!!

I realised I had to take action but I wasn’t the kind of guy who showed his affections through the provision of bunches of flowers or boxes of chocolates. Those were the days when awkward men like me struggled with these more conventional romantic overtures and relied on the medium of music to woo the woman of their dreams.

In those pre-Spotify days, the only option was to create a mixtape recorded on to a C90 cassette direct from your own record collection. I knew that her recent ex-boyfriend had made her mixtapes which she still had on her shelf.  So, I needed to show that I could improve on his mixes and win her heart. 

I began work compiling a tape of great tunes with that one aim. It had to be cool and contemporary but, most importantly, it had to show that I had an emotional depth that I clearly couldn’t communicate verbally. I was Scottish, ferchrissakes! We didn’t do that kind of thing. 

So with my records piled around me on the floor, I beavered away in the background that autumn with draft lists of tunes for this important tape. After much soul-searching and deep analysis of the Venn diagram of our musical tastes, I presented her with my tape. Naturally, it was titled Flowers & Chocolates and it had the title and tracklist carefully handwritten on the tape sleeve. 

That fact that the very same tape is still sat on my shelf at home forty odd years later probably tells you things worked out OK. But what I didn’t know was that Lynn had recently compiled her own Spotify playlist of the tunes on Flowers & Chocolates.  So, on one of our long drives in the van in France over the last couple of weeks we rolled back the years with a listen to the playlist. It was quite something to hear it again in its original running order after all this time. As the waves of romantic nostalgia flooded over me, I thought, there’s a blog in this!

Probably not surprisingly, a few of the the 24 tracks on the tape have already appeared on WIS, but there were plenty left to allow me to pick six and present them here. Three songs on the tape from my vinyl collection are unavailable on Spotify. So, you’ll never know if Shampoo Tears by Win, Lions In My Own Garden (Exit Someone) by Prefab Sprout or the heavenly Just Like Gold by Aztec Camera would have made the playlist.

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Come On Home (Piano and Vocal) – Everything But The Girl (1986)

It didn’t take too long for us to discover that Everything But The Girl were right in the centre of the musical Venn diagram. I had enjoyed the indie jazz folk of Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn since their early days on Cherry Red and had been collecting their records for a couple of years to get all those obscure non-album singles and b-sides. The band’s third LP Baby The Stars Shine Bright was released in August 1986 but was preceded by lead single Come On Home in July, just when Lynn and I started going out. They kind of became ‘our band’ for these few months and the new LP, with it’s country music inflections and Tracy’s new Louise Brooks haircut on the cover, was played endlessly in my bedroom in the flat I had recently moved into in East Claremont St in Edinburgh with my friends Mike and Mel.

So it’s not surprising that there are four – yes, 4 – tracks by EBTG on Flowers & Chocolates, all of them b-sides or non-album singles like the excellent Native Land from 1984 which very nearly made the cut for this playlist. However, given the circumstances of the tape and this blog, I’m going with the opening track on Flowers & Chocolates which is this beautiful, plaintive piano and vocal version of Come On Home. Taped from the limited edition double-pack single release of Don’t Leave Me Behind from September 1986, it was my not-so-subtle response to the news that Lynn was about to go off travelling. Given we had spent a fantastic summer together, the line “I don’t like drinking/Or painting the town on my own/So please come on home” struck a particular chord with me.

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Some Candy Talking (Acoustic) – The Jesus And Mary Chain (1986)

And talking of limited edition double-pack single releases from 1986, track 2 on Flowers & Chocolates was also from one of these. From the start, I had been hooked by the NME hype surrounding the Jaz and Maz boys and had bought early singles like Never Understand and the Psychocandy LP. However, I recall Lynn being unimpressed by the layers of distorted guitar, the mumbled vocals and all that squalling feedback. So, unlike EBTG, these lads were well outside that common area in the Venn diagram.

However, having bought the aforementioned double pack of the Some Candy Talking EP when it came out on in July 1986, I found the three bonus tracks of the ‘free’ single included this great acoustic version of the song which was to take the East Kilbride noise-merchants into the top twenty that summer. The stripped back approach to the recording didn’t have an overdrive pedal in sight and I must have thought it was absolutely perfect for my mixtape with the aim of confounding her ears.

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Apology Accepted – The Go-Betweens (1986)

I’ve talked about my fondness for Brisbane’s finest The Go-Betweens before on this blog. So it should be no suprise they got a slot on this important tape, especially with the release of their their fourth LP in March of 1986, just before I met Lynn. We listened to it a lot together that summer and it remains a favourite record of ours to this day. There are so many great songs on it – from Robert Forster’s Spring Rain (which I playlisted back in March this year) to the deceptively jaunty Head Full Of Steam, featuring guest vocalist Tracey Thorn.

But the opening couplet to the Grant McLennan-penned closing track probably explains why it was Apology Accepted that was included on the tape. “I used to say dumb things/I guess I still do” is an accurate description of me at that stage in my life and pretty much ever since. Seeking an apology for opening my big gob and saying something without thinking has happened on more than one occasion. Luckily for you, it means you get to hear this terrific tune with its languid piano part intertwined with those strummed acoustic guitars and driven on by Lindy Morrison’s simple but thoughtful drums. Watch out for goosebumps when McLennan’s emotive vocal is joined by Thorn’s harmony on the chorus.

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Walk Away Renee (Version) – Billy Bragg (1986)

I’m aware that Billy Bragg had a track on the blog a couple of weeks back but I couldn’t avoid playlisting this amazing song. I’m also aware that I keep saying I’m going to playlist Levi Stubbs’ Tears but, although the sleeve for this song is shown above, it is one of the single’s two b-sides that is getting the nod this week as it features on Flowers & Chocolates.

With Levi Stubbs on lead vocal, The Four Tops covered Walk Away Renee in 1967 which had been a US hit for The Left Banke the year before. For his ‘version’, Bragg takes the memorable chorus melody of this song of unrequited love and gets Johnny Marr to construct a beautiful picked guitar part for him. After some wonderful opening minor chords signalling trouble ahead, Bragg narrates his own brilliant story of unrequited love. As you will hear, it is one of Bragg’s best lyrics with a pay-off line to die for. I could have chosen any line from it to quote but maybe this section from early in the story explains its inclusion on the mixtape I was making for my new girlfriend: “The next day we went on a bus ride to the ferry/And when nobody came to collect our fares/Well, I knew then this was something special”

Fun fact among all this romantic nostalgia: Johnny Marr recorded his guitar part while moonlighting from The Smiths and so the back sleeve of Bragg’s single cryptically states ‘Introducing Duane Tremelo on guitar’.

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Heaven – Talking Heads (1979)

Talking Heads featured in that sweet spot of the Venn diagram, although I recall going on about the early records albums like 77 and Fear of Music while in 1986 my memory was that Lynn’s preference was for their more recent work. The one thing we did agree on was that Stop Making Sense was a great movie and the 12 inch single of Slippery People taken from the soundtrack was the party tune we would always throw some ridiculous shapes to when it went on.

As the tape compilation proceeded, I must have decided to dip back into my vinyl collection away from the purchases I had made in 1986 in search of some key tracks that kept the chilled mood of the piece going. Heaven was an easy choice to make as it was a great favourite of mine. In writing it, David Byrne seemed to be wilfully creating something calm and straightforward in direct contrast to the polyrhythmic musical and quirky lyrical direction the band was heading in – their next LP was the all-out aural assault of Remain In Light. Heaven has a simple chord progression and his uncharacteristically impassive vocal paints the afterlife as some kind of repetitive utopia where “nothing ever happens”. But, in the third verse, his voice just starts to crack on the brilliant line: “It’s hard to imagine that nothing at all/Could be so exciting, could be this much fun”.

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Town Cryer – Elvis Costello and The Attractions (1982)

Regular readers will be aware I am a lifelong fan of Elvis Costello and so it was inevitable that Flowers & Chocolates would have a choice pick from his body of work. In 1986, he was in the middle of a messy divorce from The Attractions as his artistic desires led him in a myriad of directions. EC had decamped to LA with his friend T-Bone Burnett and they recorded a series of songs with a large roster of musicians (including James Burton who had played guitar with that other Elvis bloke) which were released in March 1986 as the LP King Of America. Although EC was not really in the centre of the Venn diagram, constantly playing the record to Lynn that summer resulted in it becoming one of her favouraite records.

There were several great songs from that LP that could have gone on Flowers & Chocolates but I wanted to step back a few years and choose something that fitted better. Released in 1982 with Barney Bubbles’ last album artwork, I still consider Imperial Bedroom to be EC’s masterpiece but, although many critics agree with me, it didn’t do very well commercially. It was expertly co-produced by EC with former Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick and featured complex song arrangements, some including elaborate orchestral settings. The brilliant album closer Town Cryer is one of those and I chose it to close Flowers & Chocolates. I think the lyric: “Living for the pity that you’re going to get hurt/Just a little boy lost in a big man’s shirt” was my last unashamed romantic throw of the dice to demonstrate to Lynn that I really was worth coming home for.

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Last Word

Well, that was a bit of an emotional journey, eh? The epilogue to this very long tale is that Flowers & Chocolates travelled to Switzerland with Lynn, where it was joined a few months later by a second tape, Edelweiss & Toblerone. Then, the next summer in America, the third in the trilogy was issued across the water titled Yellow Roses & Cotton Candy. The original ‘Come On Home‘ message obviously got through as all three tapes have stayed with us over the last 38 years and sit together on my shelf in their original boxes. Tracks from the second and third tapes may well feature as themes in future blogs.

And with that, the carnival is over and tonight we’re back home in a decidedly cloudier and cooler Scotland. There is still time to add a final pic of the week which has to be this one of Chateau Gaillard which sits high on the limestone cliffs above Le Petit Andely on the Seine in Normandy which we visited this week. With a throwback to last week’s blog, this is truly a ‘castle in the air’!

The final six tour tracks have been added to the Master Playlist which has just passed through the 450 mark in terms of top tunes. Manifique!

WeekInSoundMaster

AR