The slow morph from weekly to monthly blogging continues with six songs inspired by events during the month of August. Enjoy!
First Word
A quick back analysis shows that since my gradual return from the sabbatical I took last year from writing this nonsense, I’ve managed a single blog each month since March, with this one making it six in a row. So this maybe tells me that monthly blogging is more achievable and less pressured than the weekly epistles I started out with and I might well work this way in future. However, changing the name to MonthInSound is a non-starter as it would need a whole new web domain and who could be arsed with that? So, WIS it stays.
Wishin’ and Hopin’ – Dusty Springfield (1964)
I’m a sucker for a good obituary and not one but two obituaries sent me down a musical rabbit hole this month. Back at the start of July, I found myself reading the obituary of Diane Shadwell who was a pioneering TV programme maker and director in the early days of British commercial television. She was one of the studio directors with Associated Rediffusion when they launched a live pop show on an August Friday evening in 1963, with the memorable Mod catchphrase “the weekend starts here!”. Unlike other directors, she didn’t count down to zero when programmes started – she used to end her countdown with Ready Steady Go and this was adopted as the name of the show.
I was reminded of this when another obituary appeared at the start of this month for Vicki Wickham. I had never heard of her but she appeared to have been a bit of a force of nature in sixties pop music, being a journalist, a songwriter, a manager and a TV producer. Having left her job as a BBC radio production assistant in 1963 to get into television, she took a secretarial role in the team developing Ready Steady Go for broadcast. She became very involved in the pilot and by the time the first show went on air, she had blagged her way into producing it. As she worked on the show over the next few years, she started to manage regular performer Dusty Springfield, going on to co-write You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me for her in 1966. The two women became friends and Springfield introduced Wickham to black music and singers who she then booked for the show. It was Springfield who pushed Wickham to produce the special Motown edition of RSG which aired in the spring of 1965.
Springfield was keen to promote Motown music to a wider audience as she was aware the label’s first UK tour in March 1965 had played to half-empty theatres. Black music was rarely heard on British radio in these days, and Motown fans were confined to club hipsters and record collectors. Wickham had to work hard to sell the idea to her sceptical bosses at Rediffusion, and it was Springfield’s inclusion as presenter and performer that got it over the line to being broadcast. The show featured Dusty introducing the Miracles, the Supremes, the Temptations, Stevie Wonder and Martha Reeves & the Vandellas. It was a huge success and helped normalise the broadcasting of black music in the UK in the 1960s. As can be seen on this grainy video, Springfield performed Wishin’ and Thinkin’, her 1964 hit written by Bacharach and David, in a duet with Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. As one comment on YouTube puts it, the Vandellas sound like angels.
A Song From Under The Floorboards – Magazine (1980)
My son and his partner recently bought their first property in Edinburgh. A top-floor flat in a traditional Victorian tenement, it’s fair to say it’s seen a few owners over the last 125 years or so and the most recent had relocated the kitchen, put in a new shower-room and installed a new central heating system. When the pair of them viewed it, there were rugs over all the floors with the original floorboards visible around the edges. However, when they walked in the door for the first time as owners, the rugs had obviously gone along with all the rest of the furniture and they were quite taken aback by the state of the floors. I went over the next day and assured them that the butchering on display was typical in an Edinburgh flat and returned over the weekend armed with my toolbox. I set about lifting the worst boards and tracing all the services to avoid soaking the neighbours below. I then screwed all the boards back down, extending the joists where necessary and filling the gaps created by plumber’s crowbars.
As I worked away, there was only one song going through my head. A Song From Under The Floorboards was a 1980 single lifted from Magazine’s third album The Correct Use of Soap. Back in WIS 22Mar24, I wrote a post which contained a fairly comprehensive history of the band and the two occasions I saw them, thirty years apart – click the link above for that particular pleasure. Guitarist John McGeoch left the band after the release of the third album and joined Siouxsie and the Banshees. Although Howard Devoto and the remaining members toured the record with Robin Simon replacing McGeoch, the writing was on the wall and the band split after the release of their fourth LP in 1981. Like all their releases, the LP sleeve for The Correct Use of Soap was designed by Malcolm Garrett and the various singles came in similar artwork, using distinctive printed cardboard sleeves with different coloured labels to differentiate them. Floorboards is a typical Devoto intellectual song, in this case inspired by Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground for all you Russian existentialist literature fans out there. It opens with McGeogh’s guitar chiming through the synths before one of Devoto’s most arresting opening couplets is intoned over a brilliant burbling Barry Adamson bass line.
“I am angry, I am ill and I’m as ugly as sin
My irritability keeps me alive and kicking”
The Trash Can Sinatras – Obscurity Knocks (1990)
I was saddened this month to read of the death of Scottish musician John Douglas at the much too young age of 62. Douglas was the songwriter and guitarist with the Trash Can Sinatras, arguably the finest band to have come out of Ayrshire. Having formed in Irvine in 1986, they were signed to the Go Discs label in 1988, but it took until 1990 before they released their first record. Delays between releases was to become a feature of the band’s six-album career, mostly due to label issues and financial challenges. However, the band were a resilient unit – John’s brother Stephen played drums and singer Frank Reader became John’s brother-in-law when he married Frank’s singing sister Eddi in 2013. With their fifth album released back in 2016 and an EP in 2022, the band had been back recording again at the end of last year. Four singles appeared in the first half of this year and in June the band played live for the first time in 8 years to an invited audience in Irvine Harbour’s Art Centre. They hadn’t played in their home town for 40 years. All accounts suggest it was a triumphant homecoming but there was to be a terrible aftermath. Two weeks later Douglas was diagnosed with inoperable oesophageal cancer and by the time the band’s sixth LP was released on 31 July, he was already receiving end-of-life care. He died three days later.
To celebrate his life, I would direct the curious reader to the new album – the ironically titled Ever The Optimist is a terrific listen. I would also recommend the band’s 2004 album Weightlifting and its sublime title track. A further tip would be to listen to Douglas’ self-titled solo album from 2023 – the track Lost is just beautiful, as is his cover of Prefab Sprout’s We Let The Stars Go. But WIS is going to mark his passing with where it all began – the debut album Cake and its fantastic lead single Obscurity Knocks which I bought on 12″ in February 1991. It’s a track that regularly features in the impossible-to-nail-down top ten singles listing that I keep in my head and it should have been on the blog long before now. With its plaintive, wistful pop melody, there is a lot going on in the production but the guitars jangle and chime gloriously throughout. Reader’s resolutely Scottish vocal is fabulous and, despite some occasionally strained wordplay, the lyrics reflecting young disillusionment and self-doubt really struck a chord with me – even though I was slightly beyond “sighing at the sight of the first quarter of life”. I also loved the way the song’s coda builds in musical intensity, twisting that line into extracts from the chorus. “Calendars crumble, I’m knee deep in numbers/I’ve turned 21, I’ve twist, I’m bust and wrong again”. It’s definitely back in my top ten again.
She’s Got You – Patsy Cline (1962)
Living in Scotland, we are lucky not to have been subject to the extreme temperatures suffered by those in the south of the UK this summer. Temperatures have been reasonably normal for a summer north of the border, generally in the low twenties with an ever-present breeze. And while we are far from drought conditions, it has also been reasonably dry. So the nervousness about attending one of the open-air gigs at the Kelvingrove Park Bandstand was, for once, misplaced. In my defence, my pal Ken and I got soaked to the skin in a biblical rainstorm a few years back watching The National at the Bandstand. This time round, Lynn and I were sat in our t-shirts on a balmy, still August evening as darkness fell, enjoying John Grant performing the songs of Patsy Cline backed by an incredible band of musicians led by Richard Hawley. Grant is a huge fan of the country icon and it seems he had asked Hawley to help him put the show together back in 2023 for the Manchester International Music Festival.
Grant told us that Patsy’s music entered his world via Jessica Lange’s portrayal of her in the 1985 bio-pic Sweet Dreams, named after one of her biggest songs. Her music had entered my world four years earlier via Elvis Costello’s Almost Blue album, where he covered the same tune, written by Don Gibson in 1955. Patsy recorded her version with Almost Blue producer Owen Bradley in February 1963, just four weeks before she was killed in a plane crash, and its posthumous release gave her a huge crossover hit.
Grant’s glorious baritone was perfect for the songs which he sang as he strolled the stage in a star-spangled black suit, sunglasses and white brothel creepers. The band played with beautiful restraint behind him, where the reverb-heavy twang of Hawley’s guitar did not overwhelm the gentle wail of Shez Sheridan’s lap steel and some terrific piano from Jon Trier. Grant’s song introductions betrayed his fandom, noting the dates and locations of Patsy’s recordings as well as namechecks for all the writers – I must confess I never knew Willie Nelson had written Crazy. I did know that Hank Cochran had written the wonderful She’s Got You for Patsy and, as it is my favourite song of hers, this heart-breaking tale of lost love was a stick-on for this blog.
Ashes of American Flags (Live) – Wilco (2005)
Regular readers will not have to be picked back up from the floor, weak from shock and surprise, to find a Wilco track on this edition of WIS. Over the course of the last three years or so publishing this nonsense, Wilco tracks have featured on WIS eight (count’em, 8!) times. To say I am a fan is a bit of an understatement and the 22nd of August saw myself and fellow Wilco (and St Mirren!) fans Ken and Norrie catch their show at the Glasgow Concert Hall. Occasional WIS guest-blogger Fraser Maxwell was in the audience too. It made me think of how many times I had now seen them after belatedly catching them live for the first time in Leeds at the 02 Academy in 2009 (that time with Norrie and my then Yorkshire-based pal Mark). The back analysis showed that this month’s gig brought the total to nine live appearances covering Leeds, London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Black Deer Festival in Kent. So it seems appropriate to add a ninth song to the WIS Master Playlist to mark the occasion.
While Wilco studio recordings are a joy, anyone who has seen the band on stage will agree that their live performances take their music to a completely new level. So this week’s playlist includes a live version of one of the standout tracks from their acclaimed 2001 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot which they opened their three-song encore with in Glasgow. Like most Wilco songs, I can’t begin to explain what Ashes of American Flags is about. All I know is that the combination of the melancholic music and the bittersweet, vulnerable vocal leaves a feeling of world-weariness in me – in a good way, if you see what I mean?
“I would like to salute
The ashes of American flags
And all the fallen leaves
Filling up shopping bags”
During their 2008 tour, a film was made of the band performing in a number of smaller “quintessentially American venues” like Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa and Tipitina’s in New Orleans. Directors Brendan Canty and Christoph Green blended live footage with film of the band passing through the urban wasteland of a disappearing America. Not surprisingly, the movie took Ashes of American Flags as its title and the video below is the opening sequence of the movie, with the nostalgia-ridden song filmed during a soundcheck in an empty hall.
Lost Weekend – Phoebe Bridgers (2026)
Given the excess of words elsewhere in this edition of WIS, you will be relieved to see this final playlist choice comes with a (very) slightly shorter narrative.
When I resurrected WIS at the turn of the year, I did an end of 2025 edition featuring a very long playlist of new music from the year that I’d been listening to when I wasn’t banging away on a keyboard writing too much. I haven’t been as diligent on my new music listening this year – I think it’s an age thing – but this final track is as on-trend as I can get. I discovered Phoebe Bridgers as one third of the band boygenius, whose terrific single Not Strong Enough had caught my ear – see my rave review of it in WIS 28Apr23.
This month saw the release of Lost Weekend, Bridgers’ first album of solo recordings since her acclaimed second LP Punisher appeared in the middle of Covid in 2020. Her stellar rise since then meant she has been subject to wide media scrutiny (particularly through her doomed relationship with actor Paul Mescal), so a lot was expected of this record. When I read a five-star review which claimed she “deploys electronics and unsettling sound design to brilliantly evoke emotional turmoil”, I felt the need to investigate further.
I’ve only managed to listen to it properly a few times but I have been intrigued with what I have heard. Recent single Lost Boys leans back into boygenius pop-hook territory, but elsewhere there is sound aplenty. I Can’t Wait feels like the next single and there is plenty of reverse guitar samples cutting across its Americana strum to its sudden finish. The vocoder on opener The Outside is suitably disconcerting but it is the rush of ambient fragments and samples in the title track coda that struck me most. I am sure I will find much more to enjoy as I listen further but for now I’ll share Lost Weekend and finally stop writing!
Last Word
Now that this is starting to look like a monthly broadcast, I can confidently predict that any September offering I might pull together will bring something by those fine people at Public Service Broadcasting. My son and I are travelling down to that old London town for the band’s big Race For Space 10(+1)th anniversary show at the Alexandra Palace on Saturday 22nd. And this 66-year-old nerd is absurdly excited by the prospect.
This week’s six tunes have been tipped unceremoniously into the Master Playlist at the link below, which has also been updated with the missing songs from the preceding couple of months…
AR
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