WeekInSound takes on the Friday 13th closest to the festive period and whomps that sucker with six more fabulous waxings. Enjoy!
Ritchie Sacramento – Mogwai (2021)
So I promised to leave the 60s behind this week and we have an opening track taken from this decade – impressive! You have the RadMac show on BBC 6Music to thank for the first blog appearance by Glasgow ‘post-rock’ noise-smiths Mogwai. On their Sunday show this week, they were marking the 40th anniversary of the UK release of the movies Ghostbusters and Gremlins which were apparently both available in cinemas on 7 Dec 1984, matching their simultaneous US release in June of that year. Having never seen Gremlins, I was unaware that ‘mogwai’ was the name given to the small furry animals before they change into the destructive gremlins. Mogwai is apparently Cantonese for ‘devil’ and was adopted by the band as a name that they were going to change at some point, but never got round to it.
I was a late convert to the band but was aware their oeuvre was long, guitar-driven melodic instrumentals with dynamic rhythms and that quiet-loud-quiet thing going on. As well as their studio album releases (ten and counting since 1997), they are sought-after film and TV composers. This part of their career… erm… kicked off with their soundtrack to the 2006 French documentary film Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait, focusing on the playing style of footballer Zinedine Zidane. My first Mogwai exposure was to the amazing track Ether from their soundtrack to Atomic, Living in Dread and Promise, a 2016 documentary film about nuclear history directed by Mark Cousins. Rather than being guitar-led, Ether is driven by an insistent french horn figure and I’ve been hooked on their work ever since, particularly enjoying their 2017 LP Every Country’s Sun. On Sunday, RadMac played their terrificly named new single Lion Rumpus which comes from their eleventh studio album due in January. It is pretty much on-message in terms of their house style and well worth a listen.
But I’m going back to their 2021 album As The Love Continues and playlisting the track Ritchie Sacramento. Slightly surreally, the album went to No1 in the UK charts in the week of its release, almost exactly 25 years after the band’s first single was released to little interest. Ritchie Sacramento has all the hallmarks of a Mogwai tune, except that it is a rare thing indeed – it has a vocal part. And one that is clean enough to actually hear, with none of the vocoder distortion they usually apply to their rare vocal parts. Guitarist Stuart Braithwaite wrote the words about friends he had lost, including fellow Scot Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit and American David Berman of Silver Jews and, briefly, Purple Mountains. Sadly, both were troubled souls and took their own lives so the song has a haunting feel with the chorus declaring: “Disappear inside/All gone, all gone”.
It’s A Long Way To The Top – Lucinda Williams (2008)
And so to guitars of a different but no less loud kind. On 8 December 1975, AC/DC released the first track of their second LP TNT as a single in their adopted home country of Australia. Both TNT and its predecessor High Voltage were Australasia-only releases being repackaged as one LP for global release in 1976. It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock’n’Roll) was written by the band’s guitarists, the Young brothers Malcolm and Angus, along with singer Bon Scott. All three were famously born in Scotland but emigrated to Australia as children with their families. Chronicling the hardships of carving out a career in the dirty business of rock music, the song features bagpipes which were played by Kirriemuir-born Scott, previously a drummer in the Fremantle Pipe Band. Scott taught himself the bagpipes while making the record but live performances of the song were very limited due to the tuning of the drone pipe requiring the band to retune all their instruments for that one song.
I toyed with playlisting the AC/DC tune but in the end decided I’d seize the chance to playlist Lucinda Williams’ cover taken from her Little Honey album released in 2008 – so a second track on the blog released this century! Williams’ bluesy cover wasn’t universally liked by the critics when she included it as the final track, some suggesting it was a rehearsal room work-out used to pad out the album. I disagree. I like the way the song deconstructs the bombast of the original tune, stretching the instrumentation out and deploying gospel vocals in the chorus. And there are no bagpipes, thank God! When a 28-year-old Bon Scott wrote and sang the lyrics, he sang it pretty straight with a certain tongue-in-cheek nature to it. However, given the longer life and chequered career of Williams, her growling rendition of “Getting old, getting grey/Getting ripped off, underpaid/Getting sold, second hand/That’s how it goes, playing in a band” sounds much more from the heart.
The Night I Heard Caruso Sing – Everything But The Girl (1988)
The less visible half of Everything But The Girl, Ben Watt was 62 last weekend and it offers me a chance to playlist one of my favourite EBTG tracks where Watt is the sole writer and, unusually, takes the lead vocal. The track is lifted from the band’s fourth LP Idlewild, released on the Blanco Y Negro label in 1988. Although the blog has featured the band five times, two of these were tracks from their excellent surprise return LP Fuse in 2023 and two were covers to fit in with specific theme weeks on Springsteen and Costello. Only one ‘old’ EBTG tune has appeared on WIS 16Aug24 when I playlisted piano version of Come On Home, a track which had originally appeared on their third LP Baby The Stars Shine Bright.
My introduction to the band and their constituent parts was on Pillows and Prayers, the legendary ‘pay no more than 99p’ Cherry Red compilation album which I bought on its release in December 1982, 42 years ago! The two solo tracks were next to each other on Side 1, track 4 Plain Sailing by Tracey Thorn and track 5 Some Things Don’t Matter by Ben Watt. Then on Side 2, track 5 was On My Mind, the b-side to their first single. From there I became an obsessive collector of the band’s recorded output – they were masters at including non-LP tracks on 12” single b-sides!
The Night I Heard Caruso Sing was never a b-side and actually comes from the period where Watt was starting to experiment with synthesisers and drum machines which would eventually lead on to the band’s drum and bass phase. Caruso has none of that, however. Watt at the piano with a vocal mic, Thorn on the harmony vocal mic and Peter King with a fantastic alto saxophone solo. Together they create a haunting musical backdrop for a devastating lyric on the threat of nuclear devastation to humanity. Given my familiarity with the setting of the opening lyrics, I make no excuse for replicating the whole of the first verse here as it says it all:
“The highlands and the lowlands are the roots my father knows
The holidays at Oban and the towns around Montrose
But even as he sleeps, they’re loading bombs into the hills
And the waters in the lochs can run deep but never still”
And wait until that harmony vocal comes in on the third verse when the title line is sung. Just beautiful.
Superserious Supernatural – R.E.M. (2008)
And here is the third track this week recorded this century – it must be some kind of… erm… record! Last weekend saw the 68th birthday of American musician and songwriter Peter Buck who was the co-founder and guitarist of R.E.M. throughout their 31-year career. His trademark chiming guitar playing was at the core of their sound and comes from his preference for open strings and arpeggiated chords, often played on his black Rickenbacker 360. He was clearly influenced by folk rock figures such as Richard Thompson and generally played with little in the way of effects. In an interview in 2018, he commented “I’m a way better rhythm guitar player than I am a soloist.”
During his time with R.E.M. and his subsequent solo career since 2011, he has been an active member of various side-project bands and backing bands and also produced, recorded and performed with a variety of other artists from Billy Bragg to The Decemberists. Along with Bill Berry and Mike Mills from R.E.M, Buck formed the brilliantly named Hindu Love Gods with Warren Zevon when R.E.M. were working him on his 1987 LP Sentimental Hygiene. They released a self-titled LP in 1990 and their uncompromising cover of Raspberry Beret is worth a listen if you haven’t heard it – there are no trademark jangling chords whatsoever! He played in the Minus 5 with R.E.M. sideman Scott McCaughey and they were both part of the Venus 3 who recorded three LPs and toured with the great Robyn Hitchcock.
Tempted though I was to use Buck’s birthday as an excuse to playlist something from Robyn Hitchcock, he will have to wait a little longer for his WIS debut as I am going back to Buck’s day job to select a tune. And, despite all this talk about his folk-rock-influenced ringing guitar style, I am not going pick from the period that produced the likes of Orange Crush (from 1988’s Green) or Strange Currencies (from 1994’s Monster and the only time I saw him play live). Although, I was tempted by the all-out weirdness of E-Bow The Letter from the much underrated New Adventures in Hi-Fi in 1996. Perversely, as ever, I am heading for R.E.M.’s penultimate album when, after 10 years or so dabbling with adding electronics to their sound and losing their fanbase, they dug the guitars out again and recorded Accelerate in 2007.
Supernatural Superserious was the lead single from the album released in February 2008 but did very little business, charting at No54 in the UK and No85 in the US. Buck’s guitar is far from jangling although you do hear some arpeggios behind the garage-rock power chords during the chorus. Mike Mills has expressed his love for the song and Michael Stipe considers the story of a teenage seance going wrong at a summer camp to be ‘one of the best things we ever wrote’. It is certainly the stand-out track from the album for me due to the melody winding its way around the simple chord structure and how the chorus fills out with backing vocals. It was to be a last hurrah as R.E.M. called it a day after one more LP in 2011.
Low Rider – War (1975)
You have an article in last Saturday’s Guardian to thank for this slice of 70s funk and soul appearing on this week’s blog. The piece was instigated by the release of a 5 CD box set compiling the work of Californian band War and was an interesting read about a band I had pretty much forgotten about but I felt were worth a WeekInSound outing.
Originally an African American R’n’B group from Long Beach in the mid-60s, they went under the name of The Creators and then Nightshift before deciding that War was a name that lived up to the turbulent times they were living through. Civil rights conflicts at home, Vietnam abroad – this War was for peace. By 1969 their sound had got funkier and they were spotted by producer Jerry Goldstein who linked them with Eric Burdon, the former lead singer of Geordie R’n’B band The Animals. This grouping produced two albums and had a US top five single with a track called Spill The Wine. Famously, Jimi Hendrix’s last live performance was when he joined Burdon and War on stage at Ronnie Scott’s in Soho on 16 September 1970 to jam for half an hour – the next day, he was dead.
Burdon and War split in 1971 and keyboard player Lonnie Jordan took on vocals and leadership of the band. They blended soul and jazz with their core funk sound and had a series of US top ten US hits like The Cisco Kid and The World Is a Ghetto. They gained a reputation as a fearsome live act, regularly upstaging headline artists they were supporting – Elton John was one who was non-plussed by his crowd’s reaction to them, apparently. It was 1975 before they had a UK hit when their hymn to customised cars Low Rider went to No12 in the singles chart. I have to confess I was unaware that the title, which is repeated frequently in the sparse innuendo-filled lyric, was a reference to the Chicano culture in south east LA where car suspensions were chopped down to allow them to run ‘slow and low’. The bass line is terrific and the mix of saxophone and harmonica on the riff is unusual and ear-catching.
Fun Fact: For some bizarre reason, the makers of Marmite yeast spread adopted the song in their UK TV advertising campaign in the late 90s which used the slogan ‘Love it or hate it’. Go figure.
The Bluebells – I’m Falling (1984)
On a very cold Thursday night this week, we made our way to PJ Molloys in Dunfermline to see Glasgow pop legends The Bluebells perform. Although their heyday was the early 80s when they released a series of killer singles pop singles, the band has reformed and played live on several occasions in the last 15 years. In 2023, they finally got round to following up their debut LP Sisters released in 1984 with a second album of new tunes appropriately called In The 21st Century. This came on the back of the esteemed Last Night From Glasgow record label giving Sisters a wash and a brush up with a vinyl re-issue/re-package release in 2020.
The live core of the Bluebells remains the McCluskey brothers (David on drums and Ken on vocals and harmonica) and, of course, the erstwhile Bobby Bluebell aka Robert Hodgens on guitar. They were joined on the boards by Douglas MacIntyre of the Creeping Bent Organisation looking effortlessly cool on his red 12-string Baldwin guitar and Michael Slaven, formerly of Bourgie Bourgie and The Leopards, throwing out the lead guitar licks. To complete a line-up of Glasgow music royalty, original Aztec Camera bassist Campbell Owens anchored the whole thing with his instinctive playing.
The set was split between the all-out joy of those early singles, including several key b-sides, and tracks from the second album, that impressed on vinyl but really came alive on stage. The small but hugely appreciative crowd fed off the fun that was obviously being had on stage to create a great atmosphere. The between-song patter among the brothers and Bobby was highly entertaining – one off-the-cuff gag about a well-known pop star in the introduction to the great Orienteering had the crowd and the band themselves in hysterics. In a set full of highlights, the new songs that really stood out for me were Gone Tomorrow, Stonehouse Violets (an ode to Junior Football) and Blue Train. The style of latter two tracks reminded me a bit of Campbell Owens’ old band. There were covers – including Todd Rundgren’s I Saw The Light and an excellent run-out for Buffalo Srpingfield’s For What It’s Worth before the band left the stage with a thundering version of the Velvet’s What Goes On.
But as a fanboy who goes back to seeing The Bluebells support future producer Elvis Costello and his Attractions at Tiffany’s in Glasgow in September 1982, I’m going to select one of their first wave of recordings. Way back in WIS 5May23, I playlisted Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool, the glorious 12″ only b-side of debut single Forevermore – both of which were on the setlist. I was tempted to go for another b-side this time when David McCluskey stepped out from behind his drums to sing the beautiful Tender Mercy with his brother during the encore. But I’m going to choose an a-side this time. The band’s live performance made the deceptively simple Cath soar and even breathed new life into what I previously called their wedding disco staple Young At Heart.
But I’m going for the joyful sound of their fourth single I’m Falling, released in February 1984. The hook chorus suggests simplicity but the arrangement of this song is terrific, from the opening build to the short “So I asked her” bridge, it keeps changing direction. And then after some chorus repetition, there is that brilliant outro. After Bobby and David sing the first refrain of “I should have known better then/These things just happen I guess” ,Ken then joins in an octave higher and starts riffing on the melody line. All great stuff, particularly when performed in a venue where the band join you for a pint and a blether in the bar afterwards.
Last Word
We went along to the Bluebells gig with our friends Stuart and Marion, who were in the Useful Shoes with me – see WIS 4Oct24. The last time we were in PJ Molloys together was when we were playing a graveyard mid-week late-night slot on stage – let’s just say they sold significantly less beer at the bar that night than they sold on Thursday!
Since the Shoes split, my friend Stuart has been writing his own songs and last year spent some time on a songwriter’s workshop project called Secret Coast Songwriters. It was led by James Grant (Friends Again, Love & Money), Grahame Skinner (Jazzateers, Hipsway) and none other than Mr Bobby Bluebell himself. Following a live gig at the Glad Cafe in Glasgow last winter, the songs developed by the project have been released as a compilation album by the aforementioned Last Night In Glasgow label. Stuart’s great track Hometown can be streamed by clicking the link – go on give it a spin!
And don’t forget (as if you ever could) that this week’s tunes have dropped into the leviathan of musical taste that is the Master Playlist, available at the link below.
AR
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