December dawns and WIS has developed an antidote for Mariah Carey and Michael Bublé in the form of six tunes with no sleighbells whatsoever. Enjoy!
First Word
I’m beginning this week with a clarification relating to last week’s blog on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and the piece on the cover of Sweet Thing by The Waterboys. Having recently abandoned the Musk-led cesspool that is X, I have been using Blue Sky Social to promote the blog to the music-friendly community that has relocated there. I shamelessly tagged Mike Scott of The Waterboys, noting carefully that my facts in the piece about him might not be 100% accurate – I was thinking about my comment re how true it was that he improvised Blackbird at the end of the recording of Sweet Thing. I thought the exchange that followed might be of wider interest:
MS: Thanks, Alan. True I improvised the segue into Blackbird on the spot. Recording was Jan 23 1986, 10 months after the unused take for This Is The Sea (since released on our box set “1985”). Drummer on Fisherman’s Blues version, Belfast boy Pete McKinney, contributed the funky rhythm with offbeat snare beat.
WIS: Cheers, Mike. I will put your clarification into next week’s edition! And I meant what I said – the segue works a treat. Did you ever hear if Mr Morrison liked your version?
MS: “Not as good as mine” he reportedly said, which is praise indeed from him.
For now, Blue Sky feels like a great place to be blethering about music, free from all the hate and bile that Musk likes to encourage. If you’re on there, I’m @agr45rpm.bsky.social so give me a follow.
Tin Soldier – Small Faces (1967)
I realise that many people receive this blog directly on a Friday evening and many click on the playlist then too. So, of my six choices this week, this had to be the opener as it absolutely flies off the blocks and into your ears – just what is required to kick the weekend off! The tenuous link to playlisting Tin Soldiers comes from the tenth anniversary of the death of the brilliant Small Faces keyboard player Ian McLagan occurring on 3 Dec this week. He doesn’t get a writing credit for this tune but his electric piano and Hammond organ are all over it.
Tin Soldiers was written by Steve Marriott but credited to Marriott/Lane – presumably he and his old mate Ronnie Lane had a Lennon/McCartney thing going on? Marriott had originally intended it to be a song for soul singer PP Arnold, however became so taken by the song he decided to keep it for the band. By way of some recompense, he invited her to sing backing vocals on the chorus. The song seems to have been inspired by a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a toy tin soldier who loved a paper ballerina: “I am a little tin soldier that wants to jump into your fire”. It was released as a single in December 1967 just as the band was morphing into the more psychedelic sound which came to full bloom on their revered Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake LP the next year. Tin Soldiers remains more true to the band’s R’n’B roots and, for something recorded in October 1967, it sounds amazing.
After the slightly ominous swirl of McLagan’s keyboards opens the track, Marriott’s guitar arpeggios arrive before his shout of “C’mon”, kicks the rhythm section in. Jones’ crashing drumming is terrific throughout, as are Lane’s thoughtful basslines. But it’s the dual between McLagan’s colourful keys and Marriott’s slashing guitar chords that is so engaging. Marriott also adds the dynamic soulful vocal but the tune really soars when Arnold steps up to the mic and adds her voice to the choruses. It’s not live but this excellent film of the band attacking the song for a French TV show in March 1968 with Arnold in tow is a great watch. Strike a pose, won’t you, Steve?!
The day after Marriott’s accidental death in 1991 from smoke inhalation during a fire at his cottage in Essex, Paul Weller was appearing at the Brixton Academy on his Movement Live tour. He performed a blistering version of Tin Soldier as a tribute to one of his musical heroes.
Prefab Sprout – I Never Play Basketball Now (1984)
This selection is a throw-back to the week before last week’s theme and relates to a gig we attended in the Voodoo Rooms in Edinburgh on Friday 22 Nov. Prefab Sprout’s Martin McAloon was in town to play a few of his brother Paddy’s tunes to a small but hugely receptive audience that Martin told us included Paddy’s daughter Grace. It is clear that this show comes with familial support.
Sadly, I missed Prefab Sprout’s early gigs in Scotland on the back of their first album Swoon and first saw them in the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh in October 1985 just after the release of Steve McQueen. Wendy Smith was ill that night and her vocal contributions were missed. It was five years before they toured widely again on the back of Jordan:The Comeback and we saw them in the Edinburgh Playhouse in 1990. There was then a ten year gap before seeing their career-spanning 30-song set in Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall. It was part of an April 2000 tour that brought the band’s live performances to an end. By then Paddy had developed a sight-threatening retina problem and shortly afterwards his hearing collapsed with severe tinnitus.
So it was a surprise when, all these years later, Martin returned to the stage in 2023, performing selections of the Sprout discography on his array of Gretsch semi-acoustic guitars. Although he lacks his brother’s vocal delivery skills, for the band’s bass player, he plays the jazz chords required by his brother’s tunes with great skill and dexterity. And, like many of his era, he is a first-class raconteur telling stories between songs with Geordie aplomb. His tale of being driven through torrential rain in upstate New York by Tony Visconti, who was concentrating more on demonstrating his ‘diphonic singing’ skills to Martin than he was on the road in front of him, was worth the modest ticket price alone.
While Martin’s set-list was wide-ranging, it was a particular joy for this member of the audience to hear tunes from that ‘difficult’ first album Swoon which I love with a vengeance. Here On The Eerie, Don’t Sing, Cue Fanfare and Cruel were all performed, complete with their strange time signatures and glorious mid-song key changes. He had asked the audience for requests and, during the interval chat I had with him at the sound desk, I tentatively suggested he play I Never Play Basketball Now from the second side of Swoon. Sure, he replied, I’ll give it a go. And he did. I’m playlisting it here in the full knowledge that those unfamiliar with the pre-Steve McQueen sound of the Sprouts will probably find its shifting melody and rhythm as perplexing as I did when I first heard it. But, like the other songs listed above, on repeated listens the wonder of the music and mystery of the lyric will explode in your head. I have no idea what it’s about but I love the imagery in the lines: “Think of all the things that grew here/Long before we moved here/All of it good and strong/And all of it gone”. And Martin’s bass playing on the original studio recording is just fantastic!
Sympathy For The Devil – The Rolling Stones (1968)
Choosing songs for the blog I often mention the frequency that certain artists appear. When I saw that Beggar’s Banquet by the Rolling Stones was released on 6 Dec 1968, the same day as Sympathy for the Devil was released from the LP as a single, I thought WIS was probably overdue something from the Stones. However, on checking back, I was surprised to see that their satanic majesties had only made the blog once before, when Jumping Jack Flash was playlisted in WIS 27Oct23 for its opening line about being born in a hurricane coinciding with a storm that week.
So here is Sympathy For The Devil, one of my favourite Stones tracks, in no small part down to the brilliant “whoo-hoo” backing vocal refrain deployed for two thirds of the tune. I expect that some people may find its repetition annoying but, for some reason, it is a musical device that really connects with me. Indeed, at one point in the past, I had it in my head to do a playlist entirely based of songs with catchy hooks in their backing vocals like this one. But once I had playlisted World Party’s Way Down Now to mark the death of the great Karl Wallinger in WIS 22Mar24, any future playlist would have been short of that track which brilliantly mimics the Stones’ “whoo-hoos” in its outro.
Another song to be written by one half of a writing partnership but credited to both, Mick Jagger’s Sympathy For The Devil is Side 1 Track 1 on Beggars Banquet. It started off as a Dylan-esque folk song with Jagger claiming that the first-person narrative being sung as the Devil was inspired by French poet Baudelaire. However, it was Keith Richards who suggested deploying additional percussion, changing the tempo and getting Charlie Watts to play it with a jazz-samba feel. So maybe Keef was due his co-credit after all.
This what the internet tells me about that backing vocal refrain. As this was the last full album that Brian Jones would work on, his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg was in the studio control room while Jagger was belting out a guide vocal for Sympathy in the vocal booth. It was Pallenberg that heard producer Jimmy Miller with his head over the controls talking to himself, saying “who who” in time with the music after Jagger had sung the line “I shouted out/Who killed the Kennedys”. She joined in with him and the idea for adding this hook to the track was born. The backing vocal was recorded by a chorus of all the Stones bar Jagger, assisted by Pallenberg, Marianne Faithfull (Jagger’s squeeze at the time) and regular Stones photographer Michael Cooper.
Fun Fact: Michael Cooper was responsible for the photograph on the cover of the Stones’ previous LP Their Satanic Majesties Request in 1967. The cover mimicked the psychedelic imagery of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album and all four Beatles faces are hidden in plain sight among the flowers surrounding the Stones in the photograph. This was seen as a subliminal tip of the hat to the Fabs by the Stones for the doll included on the cover of St Pepper wearing a t-shirt saying ‘Welcome The Rolling Stones’. The photographer responsible for the photographs on Sgt Pepper was none other than Michael Cooper!
More More More – Carmel (1984)
Sometimes the internet can throw you a surprise and recently it was a post on Blue Sky wishing singer Carmel McCourt a happy birthday. Is that the Carmel that had a couple of hits in the 80s I wondered and a few clicks later I confirmed this was indeed the case. I must admit I hadn’t given Carmel much thought in the last forty-odd years since I bought a couple of her singles. But I dived in again and decided it would be worth increasing the range of music genres on this week’s blog by playlisting a track which I’m sure some readers will remember but, like me, haven’t heard it for years.
It turns out that, as well as being her first name, Carmel is the name of the band that McCourt formed as a student in Manchester in 1981 with bassist Jim Paris and drummer Gerry Darby. They were actually multi-instrumentalists and set about providing the backing to McCourt’s distinctive and powerful voice on a series of soul, blues and jazz songs which the band were writing. As is often the case, my first exposure to the band was through one of those NME tapes, this time NME002 Jive Wire from 1982. The music paper was on a kind of new jazz crusade at the time and compiler Roy Carr’s tape box sleeve bore the legend that it was “dedicated to Hoagy Carmichael, Thelonious Monk and Sam ‘Lightnin’ Hopkins”. And this despite a tracklist which included Subway Sect, Black Uhuru and Theatre of Hate! Among the jazzier cuts was the smokey soulful ballad Storm by Carmel which had been released as a single on Red Flame Records. It was an impressive debut which reached No13 on the UK Indie Chart.
The band signed with London Records and hit their stride in 1983 with their second LP The Drum Is Everything. One reviewer on Discogs brilliantly described it as “An expertly engineered neat little soulful funky sophisti-pop-jazz album with a sinister mix of beatnik bar jazz, R’n’B and tribal percussion that borrows from Motown, jazz, soul & reggae with an underlying African air mixed with post-punk-pop sensibilities”. Erm…. I couldn’t have put it better myself – so I haven’t tried! Another soulful ballad Bad Day was released as the first single from the album and sold well, reaching No15 in the main UK singles chart and helping the LP into the album chart top twenty. The next single was the band’s up-beat, modern take on the jazz standard Willow Weep For Me but this only crept into the top 100. They returned to the UK top thirty with one of their own compositions as their fourth single, More More More in early 1984. As I listened to the vocal and the terrific horn-filled swing of its chorus, I couldn’t help but think of Amy Winehouse. So, in it goes to this week’s playlist.
Fun Fact: The brilliant graphic artwork which adorns The Drum Is Everything LP and all of its singles is by the distinctive pen of French comic book artist and illustrator Serge Clerc. As you will see from the More More More sleeve image above, he brings a wonderful retro feeling to his work. And the graphic artist on the NME Jive Wire tape? You’ve guessed it – Serge Clerc.
Brooklyn (Walt Whitman in the Trash Mix) – Jesse Malin (2022)
A few weeks back I included a link to a Substack piece by my friend John McTaggart where he discussed the joy of discovering music that you had been ignoring, possibly because you thought you wouldn’t like it – but it turns out you do. He was inspired by a Nick Cave epiphany but went on to list other artists that he thought he now wanted to go and explore, maybe with a more open mind. Along with the Go-Betweens and Jason Isbell, his list included Jesse Malin. I discovered Malin when I went with my friend Marion to see Ryan Adams in Edinburgh in 2002 when he was touring his breakthrough Gold album. Malin was the support that night and had just released his debut LP, The Fine Art of Self Destruction which Adams had produced. I was hugely taken by Malin’s Johnny Thunders’ long-lost younger brother, rock’n’roll troubadour schtick that night and several of his songs stuck in my head, most notably the plaintive Brooklyn.
He quickly reappeared on my radar in 2003 with a great cover of Death of Glory on a Clash covers CD given away with Uncut magazine. Over the next years, I’d periodically hear singles like Mona Lisa and Meet Me At The End of the World as well as the 2007 single he did with Bruce Springsteen, Broken Radio. Quite why the terrific She Don’t Love Me Now from his 2015 LP New York Before the War wasn’t released as a single, I’ll never know.
I lost touch with his work but discovered last week that Malin had suffered a rare spinal stroke in May last year, leaving him paralysed from the waist down at the age of 56. A tribute/benefit album was released in September this year with a quite incredible range of artists performing 22 of this quintessential New Yorker’s songs. Among many others, the Silver Patron Saints LP features Springsteen, Costello, Counting Crows, Lucinda Williams, Graham Parker, Frank Turner, Billie Joe Armstrong, Susanna Hoffs, The Hold Steady and even Ian Hunter – it’s like WIS sponsored it! And now, after months of intensive physical therapy and stem cell treatment, Malin is walking with the assistance of a walker. He returned to the stage this week, playing two nights at NYC’s Beacon Theatre with several of the album guests planning to appear.
So I felt I needed to playlist something by Jesse this week and I’m going back to that first song that stuck in my head, Brooklyn. I’m not going to go for the great cover by Dinosaur Jr on the tribute LP nor am I going for the original acoustic version on Malin’s first album. I’m playlisting a new version of the song that Malin released in 2022 for the 20th anniversary re-issue of his debut LP where his acoustic guitar is supplemented by piano and strings. The name of the mix comes from the great opening lines: “The last car on the line/I guess you’re back doing time/The ghost of Christmas past/Left Walt Whitman in the trash”.
Out On The Floor – Dobie Gray (1966)
Friday 6 December marks the anniversary of the death of the great soul singer Dobie Gray in 2011 at the age of 71. Despite an interest in acting at a young age, his career arc took him along the traditional route from singing in his father’s Baptist church to recording contracts in the first half of the sixties with a variety of small independent soul labels like Stripe, Cordak and Charger. In the second half of the decade, he returned to acting spending several years in the LA production of the musical Hair. At the start of the 70s, he took a career turn back to singing, ending up in Nashville where a two-decade career as a pop-country singer and songwriter began. His soulful 1973 recording of Drift Away, a song written in 1970 by Mentor Williams, gave him his biggest hit and his ‘signature song’. Featuring some exquisite guitar licks by legendary country session man Reggie Young, the song’s catchy singalong chorus took it to No5 in the US chart and it remains an FM radio staple today – or whatever the equivalent of FM radio is now! But, somewhat inexplicably, it did no business in the UK.
Gray’s UK success relates to the recordings he made in his 60s soul period. His version of Billy Page’s The In-Crowd might have been released on Charger Records but it had all the hallmarks of a Motown production – swinging drum beat, blasting horns and glorious backing vocals. It reached No 25 in the UK at the time but the follow-ups didn’t. However, as Northern Soul grew in popularity in the all-night clubs of Wigan, Blackpool and Manchester in the mid 70s, fans began to seek small-label 60s American imports to give them their soul kicks. Gray’s 1964 hit The In-Crowd was an easy touchstone and this led to the championing of his 1965 single See You At The ‘Go-Go’. But the song that really… erm… got the floor filled was the appropriately named Out On The Floor from 1966. I could say that I have playlisted it because it is the quintessential Northern Soul record but I think I used that argument when I playlisted The Night by Frankie Valli in WIS 21Jul23 and Do I Love You (Yes I Do) by Frank Wilson in WIS 29Sep23. So let’s just agree that Out On The Floor is a great record to finish the playlist with and should leave the Friday night listeners with their hips moving and a big smile on their face. It might even do the same to those listening on a cold, wet Tuesday morning…
Last Word
There’s definitely been a late 60s vibe running through the last couple of week’s selections which is entirely coincidental. With this in mind, I’ll make an effort to drag things into the latter decades of the 20th century next week – I might even post more from this century, but don’t count on it!
No matter what decade they come from, these tracks have been added to the huge reservoir of great tunes from across the last 60 years or so that exists in the Master Playlist at the link below.
AR
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