To help me make it through January, this week’s nonsense finds itself back in that 70s and 80s cultural comfort zone of mine. Enjoy!
First Word
When the more succinct new blogging year began, I actually made a second resolution which was to try to focus less on musical anniversaries and make more of those famously tenuous links to the week gone by as a reason for including tracks. I mean, since it’s me that sets the ‘rules’, I might as well bend them as far as I can.
Lady Day and John Coltrane – Gil Scott-Heron (1971)
The is a delayed piece about the evening of Sunday 5 Jan being a first for me when Lynn and I visited the Jazz Bar in Edinburgh, in the company of our friends and seasoned jazzers Marion and John. Braving the wind and the sleet, we went along to the basement bar in Chamber St to see a couple of terrific local musicians play their stripped-back interpretations of songs from the Gil Scott-Heron songbook. Aki Remally was centre stage on his shiny new snowcrest white semi-acoustic guitar and he was joined by Fraser Urquhart alternating between electric and acoustic piano. Scott-Heron’s work has featured a couple of times on WIS and my route to him came more through his lyrics/poetry than the jazz chords his words were caressed by – see WIS 13Oct23. While Remally sang in Scott-Herons’ style, it was his fretwork on those jazz chords that really stood out – he is a remarkable guitarist, playing riffs and rhythm with consummate ease. Urquart is an equally remarkable musician and his role in filling out the sound of the duo on his keys was perfectly delivered, a deft light touch when appropriate but stepping forward to deliver some full-on bass-heavy parts when required.
Given the weather outside, I might have chosen to playlist their glorious opening number Winter In America, one of Scott-Heron’s most powerful songs. But given they were performing under the Jazz Bar sign, I’ve picked Lady Day and John Coltrane from Scott-Heron’s 1971 debut LP Pieces Of A Man. It was written by Scott-Heron as an homage to influential jazz musicians Billie Holiday and John Coltrane. His lyric lauds the ability of music to help people through their personal problems, particularly related to alienation: “It’s all because they’re so afraid to say that they’re alone/Until our hero rides in, rides in on his saxophone”. Remally and Urquart’s marvellous interpretation gave the song the necessary swing it requires.
Police Car – Larry Wallis (1977)
Taking that tenuous link resolution I talked of above and running with it, I am playlisting this terrific single from 1977 by Larry Wallis. The reason for this is that those nice people at Cherry Red Records are offering a 20% January discount on a range of their superlative releases, including all their carefully curated and beautifully packaged box-sets from off-the-beaten-track of music. As I was scrolling through the options and reading all the track-listings in the way I do, I realised that there is not enough time left in my life to listen to everything available on these many great collections.
As I was browsing, my eye fell on this Larry Wallis tune from a 1977 boxset and it’s been in my head all week. It was recorded at the wonderfully named Electric Landlady studios in Islington and released on Stiff Records (Cat No BUY 22). The former Pink Fairies and Motorhead guitarist Wallis was a house producer at the label alongside Nick Lowe and was showing everyone that sporting unfashionably long hair didn’t mean he was a boring old fart. The hired-in rhythm section on the recording was the Eddie & the Hot Rods duo of bassist Paul Gray and drummer Steve Nicol. It is their fantastic playing, particularly on the outro, that makes the record so memorable. And what a pay-off line: “OK sucker, let’s you and me go for a ride!”.
Last Great American Whale – Lou Reed (1989)
At this time of year, those of us lucky enough to live on the banks of the Forth Estuary often get the chance to see whales. The Estuary is home to several pods of dolphins but it is when the big cetaceans arrive for a visit that things get exciting. Three years ago on 1 January, a humpback whale breached within sight of the traditional new year cold water swimmers – the Loony Dookers – and then stayed around putting on a show for a few days, relatively close in to the north shore. And in December 23, I was lucky enough to be with a group of watchers when a humpback and a sei whale were feeding in the same area, close enough together that their (different shaped) blows were visible virtually side by side – at least through a set of binoculars. Sadly this winter, there has been very little evidence of whales and even the dolphins have been keeping a low profile, apart from a lone bottlenose who seems live under the Forth Bridge and keeps regular company with the local rowers. But there is still time…
This all might seem like a strained link to playlist this track by Lou Reed but, actually, the lyrically-strong New York album that the song appears on was released this week in 1989. So it is an anniversary post! At the time it was praised by the critics as a return to form for Reed whose 20 year solo career since the end of the Velvet Underground had been a bit up and down. The singles Romeo Had Juliette and Dirty Blvd. were as catchy as anything he had written but it is Last Great American Whale‘ s spoken word commentary on American society and culture through a mythical whale parable which hit the spot for me when I bought the LP. A song only Lou Reed could have written and recorded.
Velocity Girl – Primal Scream (1986)
And back to the tenuous links – this probably being the most strained. The reason for dropping this into this week’s playlist is that I read about it on another blog recently. How rubbish is that, eh? Well, as I said, it’s my rules. The other blog was the excellent The (New) Vinyl Villain, run with incredible tenacity by a guy called JC – no, I don’t think it’s that one but he is God-like in his online vinyl omnipresence. Incredibly, he posts every day and he has been running his blog for a long time – his original title The Vinyl Villain began in 2006 but was lost when the Blogger software pulled the plug on their system without warning. He is a vinyl obsessive and rigidly refuses to blog about any music he doesn’t own on vinyl and has ripped to MP3 format for posting. He must have a second house somewhere to store his millions of records! It is pretty much late 70s onwards, indie-dominated stuff but not entirely – he recently ran an exhaustively detailed series documenting and analysing every Pet Shop Boys single release in every format over their 40-year history. Published weekly, it took over a year to complete it. So I am a bloody amateur in comparison to JC!
After all that build up, the TNVV post on this track was not by JC but came from one of his regular guest bloggers, Dirk, who has a series called One Hundred And Eleven Singles. At No78 on his list was this b-side to the second Primal Scream single back in their jangly indie-pop Creation days, before the trippy drugs really kicked in. I knew the song as it was the opening track on the era-defining NME C86 cassette (NME022) and I have always loved its fey simplicity. It will be, by some measure, the shortest song that has ever made it on to WIS and I’ll shamelessly use Dirk’s great sign-off from his post to finish this one. “Someone once said about this song, in pop music, 82 seconds can be an eternity. Well, I’m all for that!”
Two Sevens Clash – Culture (1977)
I am going for a final questionable link to the week gone by, which is actually just an extension of what I used to playlist the Larry Wallis track above. In my browsing of the Cherry Red Records website, I did come across a box-set compilation that I had seen people talking about on Bluesky over the festive holidays. Roots Rock Rebels – When Punk Met Reggae 1975-1982 is a 54 track 3CD boxset featuring key tracks from the bands you might expect, as well as a host of more obscure gems from this period of cultural crossover. It was a time when the two genres inspired and influenced each other to break free of the self-imposed constraints in each type of music. I was already hooked at the “obscure gems” comment in the blurb online but, when I read there was a “28-page fully illustrated booklet containing a foreword sleevenote by Don Letts, plus notes on each track with relevant sleeve illustrations”, I was already typing in my card details.
The box arrived this week and it is a superb collection, beautifully presented with its cover image taken by legendary Rock Against Racism photographer Syd Shelton. The booklet is class and the sleeve illustrations and text for each track look quite a lot like this blog but with many less words! The box-set is a labour of love, developed and compiled by Mike O’Connor, better known as “Scottish Post-Punk” on Bluesky. I’m playlisting the brilliant Two Sevens Clash by Culture which boomed out of many a PA system at gigs I was at back then. As Mike’s notes state: “Arguably the Two Sevens Clash album is one of the most important of this reggae/punk crossover period. Young punks were, by this time, being exposed to roots reggae and dub records at punk gigs and this song (predicting the apocalypse on 7 July 1977) became an anthem of the times.” True dat!
Pool Hall Richard – Faces (1973)
Returning to the anniversary waltz, the last track on the blog this week relates to Rod Stewart’s 80th birthday last Friday. My relationship with the music of Rod the Mod began in my Gran’s sitting room on a Sunday night listening to the charts. Maggie May was actually the b-side of Stewart’s single covering Tim Hardin’s great Reason To Believe, but extensive radio airplay caused the record to be “flipped” soon after it’s release in July 1971. In those days it took time for records to rise up the charts and it wasn’t until an October Sunday evening that I heard Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman announce that Maggie May was No1. Stewart had already released two solo albums (An Old Raincoat Won’t Ever Let You Down and Gasoline Alley) and two LPs with the Faces (First Step and Long Player) full of great songs, but Maggie May was his first hit record. He never looked back. While I liked the song, I really sat up and took notice when the incredible racket of Stay With Me was released as a Faces single in November 1971 – as discussed in WIS 7Apr23, watching them perform it on TOTP, they just looked like they were having such a great time.
For a short but glorious period of record releases, the band could do no wrong. You Wear It Well, Cindy Incidentally, (I Know) I’m Losing You, Ooh La La – it was hard to tell a Faces record from a Stewart solo record as they performed on them all. But things began falling apart. Stewart’s desire to be the centre of attention led to Ronnie Lane leaving the group in 1973 and by early 1974 it was done. In my humble opinion, Stewart only made one more good record in the next 50 years – The Killing Of Georgie in 1976. So, to mark the old geezer’s birthday, I’m playlisting Pool Hall Richard, the storming, penultimate Faces single which you rarely hear these days. Opening with a Ronnie Wood guitar blast, the band fall in behind him, thumping away as Stewart hollers and chuckles his way through a daft lyric – listen to those cymbal crashes as his rival pots the balls: “bam goes the green”. Key changes and whoops abound as Ian McLagan’s bar-room piano rolls. Stewart signs off with a typical Stewart lyric “You’re breakin’ my heart/But you’re stealin’ my tart, no no no” before the song collapses with shouting and beer bottles smashing off the floor. Glorious early 70s stuff, but I’ll lay you money he doesn’t play it at Glastonbury.
Last Word
While maybe less anniversary-focused, the nonsense this time round was not quite so succinct as last week – but it’s still some way from the marathons of December so let’s be thankful for small mercies. Next week is going to be a theme week, very loosely based around the destination of our upcoming travels. During that period of absence, there will be a series of guest blogs to entertain you, commencing on 31 January – what larks, Pip!
Another six songs tumble into the deep underground storage vault we know and love as the Master Playlist. International datelines mean the addition of the tunes from the guest blogs might be a bit less timely – please bear with…
AR
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