Celebrating Lynn’s significant birthday with the last edition of WIS in a six-song format. Enjoy!
First Word
When I began this unfashionable long-form blog over two years ago, I set myself the task of writing about six tunes every week. It has become part of my life now and I really enjoy doing it, but it has come to dominate my time in comparison to other leisure pursuits. So, after 114 issues, over 650 songs and something approaching 300,000 words(!), I am planning to step back to a less demanding format, both for readers to consume and for me to produce.
From next Friday, WIS is going to publish separate single-song posts. These will contain my usual witterings about a tune, but the song will not necessarily be related to the week gone by, although it might well be. While I’m keeping the Week In Sound brand, it may be more of a Wander In Sound on some posts. As a minimum, a post will be published every Friday at 5pm as normal, but my plan is to publish single-song posts at 5pm on other days of the week, pretty much when I have them ready to go. I suspect some weeks I could crank out three or four posts but other weeks might just have the one. The Master Playlist will remain in …erm… play and I have decided to keep using the WordPress publishing software, despite my huge frustration with the difficulty readers have with commenting or even just liking the posts.
I hope regular readers will continue to enjoy this nonsense in its new format and those who occasionally dropped in might consider dropping in more often given the significant drop in words per post! Any new readers this week will be wondering what all the fuss is about.
And a warning – this last one’s gonna be a long one!
Sixty Years On (Live) – Brandi Carlile (2005)
So on Tuesday Lynn reached the significant age milestone that I reached back in the first few weeks of the Covid lockdown. And while my celebrations were muted (although I loved the many video messages the family persuaded friends to send me), Lynn has had several opportunities to eat cake and drink cocktails with her pals this week. And we have a short break away with the family in the near future to continue marking the occasion.
As a loyal supporter and reader of the blog (someone has to be!), I wanted WIS to mark this special birthday in an appropriate way. Lynn has been a huge Brandi Carlile fan for a few years now and there is great excitement at WIS HQ that she will get to see her live for the first time in Glasgow at the end of June. Although well-known in the US for her country rock music, the singer-songwriter, producer and activist has been a pretty niche artist in this country. Over the last few months, that has all changed due to her collaboration with Elton John on the Who Believes In Angels? album which charted at No1 on the week of its release. She has been all over the UK media promoting it, so the tickets for her reasonably rare dates in the summer sold very quickly.
Although it would be easy to see Elton’s album with Carlile as the latest in his series of ‘new’ artist anointments, Carlile has already won 11 Grammys and is a frequent collaborator herself. Willie Nelson, Alicia Keys, Lucius, Brandy Clark and Hozier are a few of the many artists she has worked with. Her recent pairing with Elton focuses on classic melody-driven songwriting and there is no doubt that this is a partnership built on mutual respect. Carlile has talked of being a lifelong fan of Reg Dwight and looking back at her early recordings I found a terrific live cover of his Sixty Years On on the extended version of her self-titled debut LP in 2005. Appearing on his eponymous second album in 1970, the song is apparently about a blind war veteran and Bernie Taupin’s lyric is seen as a metaphor for growing old and unwanted. Possibly not the correct vibe to wish Lynn a happy 60th birthday (as she is clearly neither of these things!) but Carlile’s vocal performance on her version is electric. In addition, on his own sixtieth birthday, Elton John played Madison Sq Gardens for the sixtieth time in his career and he opened with this song. That might be my get out of jail card…
I Found That Essence Rare – Gang of Four (1979)
Over the last couple of weeks the blog has included early recordings by the Human League and The Mekons. On both occasions, my ramblings mentioned their link to Gang of Four through their debut recording label and, in the case of The Mekons, the Leeds University art student music scene in the late 1970s. It was actually Andy Corrigan of The Mekons who suggested the band adopt the name of the Maoist political faction who were tried for treason during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. What I’ve only discovered this week is that the band’s original bass player Dave Allen passed away on 5 April aged 69. So it seems appropriate that WIS bids a slightly belated farewell to Allen by playlisting a Gang of Four track.
Born in Kendall in 1955, Allen joined Gang of Four just after they formed in 1976 with Jon King, Hugo Burnham and Andy Gill. This classic line-up recorded their mould-breaking Damaged Goods EP for Fast (see WIS 20Oct23) and then the acclaimed Entertainment! debut LP for EMI. Allen left in 1981 after their second LP Solid Gold and formed Shriekback with former XTC keyboard player Barry Andrews. I have a particular affinity for their great single My Spine Is The Bassline, which not surprisingly features Allen’s liquid bass playing. Allen then went on to play with other bands before moving to work in the music technology field with the likes of Intel and Beats, which became part of Apple Music.
Back in 1979, I was obsessed with the Entertainment! album and it was rarely far from the record deck in my bedroom. This obsession grew when my mate Mark and I saw them perform the songs from it live that year in the Glasgow Tech. Mark and I were also together when the original line-up of the band (including Dave Allen) reformed and played a ‘hometown’ gig in a packed Leeds University in January 2005. The explosive I Found That Essence Rare was a live favourite from the first gig and they finished their encore with it in Leeds. Dave Allen’s bouncing bass is all over the mix and can be heard on its own, driving the short stripped-back bridge section after about two minutes, before Gill’s guitar feedback overwhelms it and the chorus crashes back in. And what’s more, the song has a great finish!
Bonus Playlist! In writing this piece, I remembered that this Gang of Four track was the first on a compilation CD that I burned in 2005 which I named Essence Rare: Oddities and Obscurities. I’ve dug it out of the vaults and re-created it as an (incomplete) playlist at this link, along with its amateurish cover design. Similar to the Aztec Camera compilation CD in WIS 20Dec24, you can find a scan of my unusually concise sleeve notes at the Essence Rare link at the top of the page. Three of the nineteen tracks have appeared on WIS to date and I imagine some of the others could well make an appearance in the future.
Navigator – Kris Drever (2006)
Having written to the sounds of our roof being re-tiled a couple of weeks back, this blog has been accompanied by more hammering and sawing as the work has moved to the rear of the house where we are getting some alterations done. The builder who built our house in the sixties thought it was a good idea to create a small balcony over the lower rooms but the flat roof area has been a constant source of problems with leaks, allowing rainwater into the house. We are getting the flat roof replaced with a modern waterproofing membrane with a 20 year warranty which should solve these issues and see me out!
Having worked in the construction industry all my life, I am always in awe of the men (and it is mostly men) who spend their lives physically toiling in all weathers. Although I am more used to major civil engineering works, these guys are no different – strong, fit guys working really hard all day. I am reminded of Navigator, the great song written by Phil Gaston for the Pogues who recorded it for their brilliant (and wonderfully titled) second LP Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. Gaston had previously been the manager of Shane McGowan’s punk band The Nips. His song celebrates the building of the railways in the UK in the mid 1800s by huge teams of mostly Irish navvies, living and working in harsh and dangerous conditions. It reminds us how these systems were the basis of huge economic success that rarely trickled down to the workers, many of whom died during their construction. The song title refers to the name given to labourers who build Britain’s canals in the 1700s but the term ‘navvy’ later became synonymous with all those who laboured on large civil engineering projects.
Until now I was unaware of the cover of the song which appeared on Orkney-born folk musician Kris Drever’s debut solo LP Black Water in 2006. While I love the Pogues emotional, bar-room version, Drever’s acoustic take on the tune steers it into a more sparse arrangement and allows the starkness of the lyric to shine through: “The canals and the bridges, the embankments and cuts/They blasted and dug with their sweat and their guts”. It’s powerful stuff.
The Tunnel of Love – Fun Boy Three (1983)
It was Neville Staples’ 70th birthday last week. He arrived on these shores from Jamaica aged five as part of the Windrush generation and grew up in Coventry. He was known around the town’s dancehalls as a ‘toaster’ for various reggae sound systems that operated in the town. He was then hired as a roadie for the Special AKA just when they had changed their name from the Coventry Automatics. An impressed Joe Strummer got them a support slot on The Clash’s On Parole tour in 1978 and Staples started to join the band on stage to perform their cover of Toots & the Maytals song Monkey Man. On a side note, I saw the band on that tour when it rolled into the Glasgow Apollo where Suicide, their fellow support act from New York, were bottled off stage by a Clash audience with a low tolerance to their minimalist electronic art-rock! ,
Staples joined The Specials permanently and became a key part of the band, singing backing vocals, occasional lead vocals and toasting when playing live. He went on to form the Fun Boy Three when he, singer Terry Hall and guitarist Lynval Golding left The Specials in 1981. Their early work moved away from the ska beat, adopting a sparser vocal and percussion-driven sound, epitomised by their debut single The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum – a song even more relevant today than in the Reagan-era when it was released. But to mark Staple’s birthday, I’m playlisting the band’s excellent penultimate single from 1983 by which time their arrangements had filled out a bit with frequent cello and trombone parts and the tone of their writing became more pop-orientated. Much of this was to do with the presence of David Byrne in the producer’s chair for their second LP Waiting. Tunnel of Love is a wistful song of doomed relationships set in a minor key with Hall singing a great falling melody line in the verse, which is brilliantly contrasted by a rising backing vocal line from Staples and Golding. And it’s got a great key change. I love Hall’s vocal delivery and, listening to this much under-rated song again now, I am reminded of the work which he went on to do with The Colourfield. Interested parties can read all about that in WIS 9Aug24!
Do You Remember? – The Scaffold (1968)
In what is going to turn out to be one of the lamest connections ever on WIS, I am returning to the subject of our building work for this penultimate selection. Our house is built down a steep slope, facing towards the Forth Estuary meaning the back of the house is high and requires a significant scaffold platform for the builder to access the area they are working on. I hadn’t really made the connection with the 1960s comedy, poetry and music trio from Liverpool until the esteemed Mickey Bradley played a couple of tracks from The Scaffold on his Friday night radio show recently. Mickey was doing so as he was a fan of the band and found out that Cherry Red Records were about to release a 5CD box set of the band’s work. Five CDs of The Scaffold had my mind boggling a bit but Mickey played this great tune on his show and my primary school memories came flooding back.
The band comprised Mike McGear (musician), Roger McGough (poet) and John Gorman (comedian) and they were more of an act than a band, performing comic songs, sketches and poetry. They had a recording contract with Parlophone and released a few very successful singles in the late 1960s. They are best known for the infectious (to an 8-year-old like me at any rate) Lily the Pink which got to No1 in November 1968. It was about a medical discovery which apparently cured sticky-out ears, annorexia, stammering and they even suggested it could change the gender of The Hollies’ Jennifer Eccles. The year before they reached No4 with Thank You Very Much, another catchy to a 7-year-old tune inspired by McGear (real name McCartney) calling to thank his more famous big brother Paul for the camera he gave him for his birthday. These were huge records in our primary school and, although it only got to No34, when I heard their other 1968 single Do You Remember? on the radio for the first time in nearly 60 years, the words of the chorus came straight back to me! With it’s delicate whimsy and slightly trippy Beatles-like bridge sections, I felt it was worth a spin – particularly since McGear’s brother is sat at the piano and I could convince myself he’s doing the backing vocal at about 1:10 into the song.
The group’s success carried on into the 70s where they even had their own kid’s TV series, a quiz called Score with the Scaffold. The also wrote and performed the theme tune and other incidental songs for the BBC programme Decimal Five, helping poor confused people work out what happened to the half-crown and the ten bob note in 1971. Not quite as good as Max Bygraves’ hysterical Decimalisation single but older readers can enjoy a wee clip of the programme here.
All Your Favourite Bands – Dawes (2015)
The six-song blog began back in the dark, cold days of February 2023 with the opening track on the first playlist being a live rendition of Somewhere Along The Way by Los Angeles band Dawes. I had been watching a recording of them performing it on a LA rooftop on a warm August evening as the Californian sun set behind them – conditions significantly contrasting with the Scottish winter in which I was sat. Somewhat pretentiously (some things never change!), I wrote this about the band:
“Dawes are one of those bands that make me sit up and take notice every track I hear. Drenched in the sound of Laurel Canyon, their outstanding musicianship and beautiful harmonies raise the spirit.”
So it seems appropriate to invite Dawes back to close the last six-song blog and I am playlisting the fabulous title track from their 2015 album All Your Favourite Bands. It was the first Dawes song I heard and something about its sentimental valedictory tone really struck a chord with me. It’s a simple song – so simple even I can play it on the guitar – based on a gentle electric piano riff and a slightly over-driven guitar part. The drums don’t even kick in until the guitar solo two-thirds of the way through. Somehow, the wonderful melody of the vocal part seems instantly familiar. Every time I hear it, its intimacy feels like a live recording put on tape while the band are sat right there next to me. A bit like this Last.fm session filmed here.
And then there is the lyric. I read a slightly gushing online review which said: “This isn’t just a song. It’s a graduation speech. It’s a toast at last orders. It’s the closing credits of a coming-of-age movie. It’s an end-of-summer anthem.” You’ll hopefully know what the reviewer was getting at when you hear the chorus:
“I hope that life without a chaperone is what you thought it’d be
I hope your brother’s El Camino runs forever
I hope the world sees the same person that you always were to me
And may all your favourite bands stay together”
Last Word
I realise that this format change could be the catalyst for some of you ‘unsubscribing’ from the blog and going on your way. If that is the case, then I’d like to say thanks for being along for some of the ride and hope “all your favourite bands stay together” too.
To those that remain, please be assured that in the move to the single-song format I intend to stick to the blog’s agenda of great music from across multiple genres. Although I must admit I will miss the fun of playlisting The Mekons and Melba Moore together in one issue – or even Gang of Four and The Scaffold!
Watch out for intermittent non-Friday blog drops during the weeks ahead and if anyone is interested in contributing a single-song guest post to share their love for a particular tune, then get in touch via the blog’s new dedicated email address which is weekinsound@hotmail.com . It should be a less daunting task now! And, if like nearly everyone, you can’t access the comments on WordPress, then pop me a note using this email address and I’ll stick your thoughts in the comments myself, giving you the credit!
As well as catching up with the last couple of week’s songs, this final group of six have been dropped into the Master Playlist. You know what to do.
AR
If you enjoyed this, there is plenty more where that came from. Subscribers receive a link in their inbox every Friday evening at 5pm UK time. You can’t start the weekend without it.
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