A theme week presenting six unusual tunes you would never expect a covers band to do in a pub but, as you will see, it really happened. Enjoy!

First Word

There is a very long intro this week to set up the theme, but the posts on the tunes are generally shorter. Please bear with me!

Regular readers might have picked up a couple of vague references in past blogs to me once being a member of a band. I can confirm this to be the case and this week’s blog comes with an introduction focussing on the third iteration of the legendary Useful Shoes who played together between 2010 and 2018 and from whose eclectic setlists this week’s six tunes have been plucked.

Before that, I know that real rock’n’roll scholars will want to know the full story of the band who actually formed back in 1978. For this, I am re-directing the curious with time on their hands to a separate page that presents my personal history of the band, written in 2010 as the Useful Shoes Mk 3 were in secret rehearsals for an unlikely comeback. Click the link in top right of the header. Among many delights to be found, the origin of the name is revealed as are the identities of as many of the members of previous versions of the band as I can remember through the haze of alcohol and time. Please note the book and film rights for this story are available – call my agent!

The Useful Shoes rose from the ashes to perform at my 50th birthday party in April 2010. Myself as singer and my best mate Norrie Clark on guitar were the only original members in this third iteration of the band, though drummer Davie Barbour had been in the Mk 2 line-up in 1981. Twenty-nine years later, the new members comprised Stuart Gillies on guitar, Tony Pearce on keyboards and Robbie Peterson on bass. On a memorable night, we lashed out five songs from my teenage years – I Fought The Law (The Clash), Suffragette City (David Bowie), Buff’s Bar Blues (Sensational Alex Harvey Band), I Saw Her Standing There (The Beatles) and The Golden Age of Rock’n’Roll (Mott the Hoople). The last track declares “It’s good for your body/It’s good for your soul” and it must have been, because we did it all again a month later for Davie’s 50th birthday. This time we were so giddy with excitement we played eleven songs!

Having had such a good time, we decided to make room in our respective busy lives for the Shoes as a hobby band, rehearsing songs in Stuart’s front room and trying to find gigs wherever and whenever we could. As time moved on, we bought our own modest PA system and even had a couple of sessions in a studio trying to record things. The band expanded in 2012 when Stuart’s long-suffering wife Marion decided that, if we were going to be noising up her house every few weeks, she might as well join the band alongside me on vocals. Then in 2013, Tony decided to leave to pursue other interests and Stuart was promoted to ‘multi-instrumentalist’ because he had a keyboard as well as his (many) guitars!

By the time we threw in the towel in 2018, we had only played 31 gigs ranging from a sparsely attended late-night show in PJ Molloys in Dunfermline to a set performed in the packed front room of Marion’s sister’s house in Beith. PJ Molloys was a ‘big-time’ venue with a proper stage and in-house sound system and we used a photo taken there in 2013 for future promotional posters. As you can see in the example below, the image is a bit blurry but you can observe the shameless use of Photoshop to create the flailing limbs of an audience that was much more modest than the poster suggests. Hey, it’s show business!

I have records that show that we had rehearsed nearly 130 songs over these eight years, of which an incredible 89 were performed live to an audience at least once. And that’s where this week’s playlist comes in. It’s fair to say the Shoes were not your average covers band. Of course, we had fun bashing out some well-known tunes – Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand, Touched By Your Presence Dear by Blondie and, most frequently, a rousing rendition of the Stereophonics’ Dakota. But we often went off-piste, to places covers bands rarely go, following our own musical tastes and interests. Set out below are six tunes that we performed in front of audiences, many of whom had not actually come out to see us but found us squeezed into the corner of their local pub. They are all great tunes but once you’ve had a listen to them together, you’ll understand why a whopping six gigs in 2013 made it our ‘busiest’ year. The Useful Shoes were definitely an acquired taste.

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I Don’t Believe In You – Talk Talk (1986)

First performed at The Cedar Inn, Aberdour on 28 June 2011

This track was released on 10 November 1986 as the fourth single to be lifted from the third studio album by Talk Talk, The Colour of Spring. The LP was widely regarded as the bridge between the band’s earlier synth-pop sound and their later more intense, improvisation-based work. This gentle bluesy song barely scraped into the top 100 in the UK, unlike the radio-friendly hook of the album’s first single Life’s What You Make It which was a No 16 hit. So naturally, we covered the miss…

Stuart carried the torch for this track and persuaded us to consider it. It was a million miles from the knock-about stuff we had worked up for the first gig a year previously but was in keeping with our desire to challenge ourselves more. Once he’d suggested it, everyone got on board and worked hard at the instrumentation – it really needed the two guitars and Tony on the keyboards to pull it off. Initially, I struggled with the phrasing of the lyrics, which don’t sit on the beat in places, so there was a lot of counting going on in my head as we learned it! But it came together well and I can say that when Davie played that drum drop into the guitar solo and Stuart then played that solo so beautifully, it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

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Carpetbaggers – Jenny Lewis (2008)

First performed at Sport Relief Fundraiser, Aberdour on 25 March 2012

Looking back we did some obscure stuff but this is potentially as obscure as it gets – with the possible exception of the last track below, which is actually related to this one. As you will see later, Jenny Lewis was the singer with the American indie rock band Rilo Kiley. She had recorded her first solo record in 2005 which included a cover of the Traveling Wilburys song Handle With Care performed with American indie luminaries such as Ben Gibbard, Conor Oberst and M. Ward. So when Rilo Kiley split after their fourth album in 2007, Lewis worked with her Bishopbriggs-schooled boyfriend Jonathon Rice on her second solo LP Acid Tongue. This featured more collaborations including this Rice-penned duet with Rilo Kiley admirer Elvis Costello.

When Marion joined the Shoes we were able to expand our repertoire to include a number of popular female vocal tunes by the likes of Blondie, the Pretenders and Sheryl Crow. And while these were great for playing live and engaging the audience – at last, one we know, we could almost hear them saying – once we started doing Carpetbaggers it became a great favourite of the band. We would usually use it for soundchecks and would often start rehearsals by running through it to warm up. It was the ‘unknown song’ we played most often live and, despite this, it always seemed to go down really well with those listening. As the band’s main EC fan, I was the one who suggested the song to Marion, even though I’m unconvinced by his vocal contribution on the original which sounds far too forced – a bit Costello-by-numbers. I am hoping that my attempts at singing the part were less so, but it was Marion that really carried the song – you could hear how much she enjoyed singing it in her voice.

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Hate It Here – Wilco (2007)

First performed at The Cedar Inn, Aberdour on 2 December 2011

With both myself and Norrie in the band, it was a racing certainty that there would be a Wilco song in the set at some point – despite virtually nobody in our target audience having ever heard of them. I’m not sure Davie and Robbie had either when I proposed the Shoes try out this track which is buried on Wilco’s sixth album Sky Blue Sky from 2007. The record was a move away from the more experimental songs that Wilco had recorded between 1999 and 2004, towards a more traditional folk-rock sound. But try it we did and after a while everyone got behind it, enjoying its laid-back groove built around Tony’s electric piano part and Norrie stepping into the large shoes of Wilco guitarist Nels Cline in carving out the great lead guitar lines which pepper the song.

The big challenge for everyone was to master the rhythmic changes as the song moved into the chorus sections and everyone worked hard at getting this right. There were a lot of drum fills behind the riff and Davie seemed to relish getting let loose on these. It was made more difficult as the second time this chorus section comes around, it extends for several bars where the guitar and piano take over from the vocals. I had to remember to shut up and Norrie and Tony needed to remember when to play! Even though we got it gig-ready, there were still a few nervous moments playing it with lots of mad staring eye-contact as everyone tried to stay together. For some reason (probably due to it being a great Jeff Tweedy song), it really connected with audiences and I think I got asked about Hate It Here during post-gig discussions at the bar more than any other tune we played.

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The Golden Calf – Prefab Sprout (1988)

First performed at the Enormodome, Beith on 28 August 2011

Prefab Sprout are arguably the most well-known band on the blog this week having had a number of UK hit albums in the 80s and 90s. Many of their singles released from these long players “bubbled under” the fab forty, as DJs used to say, but only four made it into the chart. Their biggest hit came from their From Langley Park To Memphis album released in 1988 where the nonsense lyric chorus and absurd video for The King of Rock’n’Roll took it to the giddy heights of No7 in the singles chart that year. But when those of us in the Shoes who liked their stuff went looking for Sprouts tracks to cover, as usual we went for the misses. We had a go at the lead single from this album Cars And Girls (No44 in Feb 88). This hook-heavy tune was Paddy McAloon’s gentle fun-poke at Bruce Springsteen’s writing oeuvre and we played it live a couple of times. But, even more obscure, was the decision to perform The Golden Calf (No82 in Feb 89), the fifth and final single from the Langley Park LP.

Originally written by McAloon back in the late 70s and apparently first played during the Langley Park sessions for a laugh, The Golden Calf is actually as rocking a tune as the Sprouts ever recorded with a great reverb-soaked guitar riff. Producer Thomas Dolby sticks some 80s shimmer on it all which I doubt we managed to reproduce with our corner-of-the-pub stage sound but all those F#7sus and Dmaj9 chords rang out beautifully. The imagery of disappointment in love in the chorus lyric adopts some classical and biblical references like the dashing horseman and the titular calf. My west-coast Presbyterian upbringing meant I was aware of the golden false idol made by the Israelites while Moses was away receiving the Ten Commandments. When we played this tune at the Northfield House Hotel on the southside of Edinburgh, I recall introducing the song to a puzzled audience with “And here’s one for all you Old Testament scholars out there”. Yes. I know. I really said that.

Fun Fact. The night of that gig coincided with Hibs winning their Scottish Cup semi-final against Aberdeen and a busload of very drunk but happy Hibs fans arriving in the bar. Things got pretty lively and, in the gap between our two sets, we hurriedly worked up a rough, busked version of 500 Miles by famous Hibs fans The Proclaimers. We finished the second set with it and the crowd was literally dancing on the tables by the end! Something they weren’t doing after the final that year…

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Rain King – Counting Crows (1993)

First performed at East End Park, Dunfermline on 28 May 2011

So this was the second gig by The Useful Shoes which, as explained in the intro, was never really meant to happen. But the euphoria of performing for my fiftieth birthday got to us all and we reconvened shortly afterwards to put a set together for a follow-up show at drummer Davie Barbour’s fiftieth party. This was already booked to take place four weeks after my event and remains our only stadium gig, albeit in the function suite of Dunfermline FC’s ground on the Halbeath Road. We knew we wanted to do more than the five songs from the first gig but time was short so we aimed to add ‘easy’, well-known tunes like Brown Sugar and Route 66 as per the Dr Feelgood version. In a tip of the hat to Davie, Norrie and I being in the Mk 2 band in 1981, we also included Heatwave which was probably marginally better than it was when we played it back then. But our thirst for something different had already begun and this Counting Crows track was suggested I think by Norrie or it might have been the birthday drummer boy himself – I can’t recall.

Anyway, as those familiar with the debut album August And Everything After will know, taking on a Counting Crows song at short notice was a challenge. Although the chord sequence and the driving rhythm track for the verse and chorus section of Rain King is reasonably straightforward, the bridge is trickier and Tony had a wee keyboard solo to do as well. But it was the vocals that were the real nightmare to get on top of. I’m a huge fan of Adam Duritz’s style but his relaxed approach to phrasing his lyrics, particularly in the bridge section with those drum rolls and then the free-forming in the last verse, took many attempts to even get near. I am not sure I ever did get near it and I do remember doing that final shout of “Yeah!” at the end and thinking ‘Thank God, that’s over’. It is a fantastic tune, though, and, if not sung that well, I recall the musicians did a great job on it that night.

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Portions For Foxes – Rilo Kiley (2004)

First performed at Lorenzos, Dunfermline on 10 August 2017

This was one of the last songs we worked up as a band. And why it should have taken so long to attempt it is a bit of a mystery to me. Rilo Kiley were an LA-based band formed by Jenny Lewis and Blake Sennet in 1998. I bought their third album More Adventurous after hearing them on a covermount CD on The Word magazine and seeing an article with Elvis Costello declaring his admiration for the track Does He Love You? However, the oddly named Portions For Foxes was the standout track on the record. Having started playing Carpetbaggers from Jenny Lewis’ subsequent solo career in 2012, why it took me until 2017 to put this Rilo Kiley track on the table for the band, I don’t know. Not that I watched it, but the song was featured frequently on the Grey’s Anatomy TV series, so arguably it wasn’t completely unknown.

In its short life with the Shoes, it became a song we loved playing. It’s a belting track with a great driving rhythm, very much enjoyed by Robbie and Davie. Although the dread-filled lyric details a collapsing relationship which is “bad news” but keeps staggering on, it has a great melody and a catchy hook chorus. And Marion always seemed to enjoy delivering that great opening line: “There’s blood in my mouth ’cause I’ve been biting my tongue all week”! Musically, it provided Stuart and Norrie with the challenge of the dual lead parts which intertwine with each other throughout the second half of the song. They carried it off beautifully but it did require me to make a very rare appearance on third guitar deploying my best three-chord skills.

Fun Fact: It’s another one for the Old Testament scholars! The reference in the title to the dying relationship eventually becoming food for scavengers is taken from Psalm 63: “But they have sought my soul in vain; they shall go into the lower parts of the earth, they shall be given over to the power of the sword, they shall be portions for foxes.” Imagine hearing that spoken in an old Johnny Cash voice and don’t say you don’t learn anything by reading this blog.

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Last Word

While I am aware that this week’s long ramblings may have crossed the line into full-blown self-indulgence, I have to admit, it’s been a real blast putting this WIS together. It reminded me of the great times we had in the band which my daughter once described as an “acceptable mid-life crisis”.

So I’d like this blog to be a salute to the joys of playing live music together with all the false starts, unintentional jazz chords and mangled lyrics it brings. To Tony, Robbie, Davie, Marion, Stuart and Norrie, who was there from the start – in the words of the legendary Ian Hunter, “Thanks for the great trip”.

There will be no more indulgent stuff from me next week as WIS will be in the hands of John Linnett presenting his debut guest blog, stuffed full of fine tunes for your ears.

WeekInSoundMaster

AR