Who remembers Borders? An outbreak of civilisation, it always seemed to me: books, music, movies, coffee shop. Joy! The Leeds branch was actually in the same premises as Virgin Records had occupied when I worked there. So it was amusing to sit in the first floor cafe and sip my large Americano while looking out of the window, down onto busy Briggate, in what used to be the (always chaotically untidy) stock room of the record shop.

Anyway about twenty years ago I was sitting in the basement at Borders on a boiling hot Saturday afternoon; ostensibly so my then-infant son could play in the little ball pool they had down there, and then choose him a new book. However I lingered because the air conditioning was such a divine relief. In this semi-stoned state I sat on one of the little chairs next to the play area and over the sound system came a beautiful noise. Bit of slide guitar, very sweet, then a faintly familiar melody cleanly picked out on a banjo. What was that toon? I was sure it was an instrumental piece and then all of a sudden, a high, dulcet voice came in. Of course! It’s ‘I Will’ one of Paul McCartney’s bucolic acoustic tunes from 1968’s The Beatles double LP aka ‘The White Album’. But who is singing it? Sounds a bit like Dolly Parton from the early 70’s – maybe it’s an oldie? So I go and ask the girl on the till; she doesn’t know, as the music is controlled from upstairs. This is before the days of streaming of course but there’s an in-store playlist; it’s ‘I Will’ by Alison Krauss. By now my investment of time and energy had reached a certain pitch of engagement from which there was no return: is it on an album? Yes, it’s a compilation called Now That I’ve Found You. You know how this story ends. That’ll be £11.99, sir, thank you.

Turns out this was already a very popular album, a combination of recordings from her career as a solo country and bluegrass singer, tracks with the band Union Station, and a few oddities and one-off collaborations, the category into which ‘I Will’ fits snugly. Of course if you are a ‘genre’ act looking to broaden your appeal and break into a mainstream, poppier market then covering a Beatles tune is a very smart move. As we noted in the previous Pete Sounds on covers, the song is doing a great deal of work for you and it will likely be widely heard and recognised in a way an original tune would rarely be. It’s a tried and tested technique, going right back to the 60’s, when people would have hits with Beatle album tracks that didn’t make it onto 45’s (off the bat I’m thinking of The Overlanders, Marmalade, Apple hopefuls Trash, and many more). The ‘White Album’ has a number of these well-covered tunes on it – ‘Blackbird’ seems a particular favourite, especially in more recent times: again just sitting here I am thinking of Zac Brown, Julie Fowlis (who recorded the song translated into Scots Gallic) and Jacob Collier who, as ever with him, took it off into jazz-pop-prog-superspace. I recently discovered a cache of Czech language covers of White Album era tracks from 1968 which of course coincides exactly with the Dubcek era, the brief and beautiful ‘Prague Spring’ that ended on August 20^th 1968 with the Soviet invasion. (More on this in our next Covers blog.) So it’s a gesture of aspiration, defiance, as well as being business savvy and – lest we forget! – an opportunity to try on a great song for size.

So, the Alison Krauss album Now That I’ve Found You proved an unlikely hit partly due (in the UK anyway) to the title tune becoming a favourite with the country’s most-listened to DJ at the time, Terry Wogan, who played it frequently on his BBC Radio 2 Breakfast Show– the song fits into our cover-as-calling-card model too, being a slowed, modulated remake of the hit by The Foundations from the Summer of Love 1967.

The album also contained the original of ‘When You Say Nothing At All’, itself covered by Ronan Keating as the theme to the hugely successful Richard Curtis film Notting Hill in 1999. All in all this was a sleeper of an album which, by accident as well as design, delivered slap-bang-centre mainstream presence to La Krauss. It accomplished this while also carefully remaining true to her roots: most of it is at the Bluegrass end of Country, and all of it is blessed with her fabulous voice.

Sticking with her A1 superfine band Union Station she ambitiously embarked on a ‘dual career’, recording more traditional material with Union Station on albums like New Favorite (American spelling) but also venturing deeper into pop with her 1999 album Forget About It, assembled to prise open the market further in the wake of this success: its title track was a near-hit single and she covers Todd Rundgren and Michael McDonald. She and Union Station were also involved in the zillion-selling soundtrack to Joel Coen’s O Brother Where Art Thou (2000), put together under the auspices of T. Bone Burnett. You can hear Alison on ‘Down To The River To Pray’ and ‘I’ll Fly Away’ with Gillian Welch. Union Station guitar player Dan Tyminski sang and played on ‘Man Of Constant Sorrow’, lip-synched by George Clooney in the film, the song which provides the plot’s impetus by becoming a hit record for the escaped prisoners.

Her most successful record in the mainstream market under her own name was the 2007 collaboration with Robert Plant on Raising Sand. Massive sales worldwide and global touring of the album really introduced her to a wider audience and led to the stellar success she has now – there is certainly no other Nashville-approved act who hasn’t flipped completely to pop (such as the blessed Taylor Swift)  who can fill venues in the UK like Alison Krauss.

Now: if you know me, you’ll know I have never been a fan of Led Zeppelin. As a kid they seemed to represent everything I didn’t like about ‘rock’ pre-punk, with all that strutting, private plane trashing, curly mane tossing carry on. And I was made (by my pal and his Elder Brother who scoffed at my Lovin’ Spoonful and Monkees records) to sit through the film The Song Remains The Same at a special screening at the old ABC cinema in Leeds (North Street end of Vicar Lane, cinema demolished years ago, site still ugly and undeveloped). Awful. Turned me right on to The Damned. Anyway despite this impediment I really adore and recommend that album. Here’s my favourite track, ‘Please Read The Letter’, which was actually written by Messrs. Plant and Page, so fair do’s.

Back to ‘I Will’. The ‘White Album’ version is deceptively simple: it is actually a ‘Threetles’ recording with McCartney on vocal and guitar, Lennon and Ringo on assorted percussive tik-toks. It is a light acoustic number, almost childlike in its apparent directness – the lyric is very sweet and matches the melody perfectly. It’s the sort of song people who want to criticise him point to:

Love you forever and forever

Love you with all my heart

Love you whenever we’re together

Love you when we’re apart

Yet this is to miss the point entirely: it’s a song about what Thomas Hardy called ‘The Well-Beloved’, the person we have not met yet but that we somehow sense is out there, living and moving and slowly, surely, making their way toward us.

Who knows how long I’ve loved you

You know I love you still

Will I wait a lonely lifetime

If you want me to, I will

So far from being a saccharine love song, I’d say this song is tapping into something very primal and humane, something which makes people feel connected and better about their lives . Maybe only love and music can do this.

Retrospectively we can hear that Paul is discovering his early 70’s, immediately post-Beatle voice: try this next to ‘The Lovely Linda’ or (yes!) ‘Ram On’.  See? It is also of course a brilliant example of his way with a tune, so simple it feel-flows as natural as a fish in a stream. Yet labour had gone into it, as with all effortless sounding creation: begun in Rishikesh where the band had gone to study with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in February 1968, it apparently started out with some help from Donovan which I can just about buy. Returned to now and then in the intervening months it was recorded at Abbey Road in September ’68 , five months after they had come home, somewhat disillusioned, from India : check Lennon’s ‘Sexy Sadie’, a put down of the Mia-Farrow-fancying Guru.

Mark Lewisohn tells me that ‘I Will’ took 67 takes and who am I to say otherwise: that’s a lot of takes for something that sounds like it simply dropped from McCartney’s tree. What a craftsman he is! Here you go.

So we finally get to our cover version! It may have been on Krauss’s breakthrough album but actually the source of the song is more obscure– it was a vocal guest spot on an album called Within Reach by ace Californian guitar and banjo player Tony Furtado (no relation to Nelly as far as I know) which was issued in 1992, a whole eight years before I heard it on that boiling hot summer’s afternoon in downtown LS1.

This may be a heresy – in fact, I am certain it is – but I’d place this in a very select subset of covers that I like more than the ‘originals’. Where the ‘White Album’ version is 1.45 (and what a world is there in those 105 seconds!) the Furtado/Krauss version allows the song 4.05 to stretch out. Now clearly the longer version isn’t necessarily the better version but the extra space lets the melody really blossom and surround the listener; it is taken at a slower pace too, and there is none of the clippity-clop pantomime horse percussion that somewhat striates the Beatles version, just a relaxed marking of the beat. Curiously there is a bit of steelpan which sneaks unexpectedly into the arrangement and then ghosts away again; it gently sails alongside the melody for a while, like a pod of dolphins swimming alongside a schooner just for the pleasure of it.

The opening 95 seconds of the track are instrumental; Furtado’s dobro opens with a mellifluous noodle around the home notes and then at 0.17 the banjo ushers in the unmistakable melody, picked clearly and cleanly, note by note – no flash, frailing or fistfuls of chords here, just exquisite melodicism. You’d swear this was going to be a highly agreeable mellow bluegrass instrumental take on the song well into the second minute of the recording: it’s not until 1.35 (a mere ten seconds short of the entire duration of the original) that the vocal begins.

I’ll tell you something; the moment Alison Krauss begins to sing is one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard. In fact, I’m not sure I have in fact ever heard the exact moment; her voice seems to gently push forward out of the melody as if it were simply another part of the natural growth of this delicate blossom. This may be perfect pitch or somesuch; I just feel the effect of it. Have a listen for yourself; I can never quite distinguish where she starts. Maybe I just refuse to notice. It wouldn’t be the first time. Funnily enough there are a couple of flaws in the vocal – it’s clearly not a single take (check the Impossible Overlap at 1.52 making an edit plain) and toward the close, where Furtado joins her for a very low level harmony, she nearly tips over into the almost-shrill.

But this is like saying Van Gogh could have used less yellow.

At a time where we need music to provide a free and clear space to bask in and nourish our souls, here’s one that can do it for you.

What do you think about cover versions? A few years ago, when I first started really being able to develop dedicated music modules for the degree I teach on I took an idea that had occurred to me on a course I’d taught at a university in Hungary. The module’s topic was recording technologies, and I’d sort of stumbled across the realisation (obvious once you think about it) that the idea of a ‘cover version’ is related to technology and there being what is accepted as a ‘definitive’ or ‘original’ recorded version of a song, one which is circulated so widely that the song becomes very strongly associated with one voice, or one artist. This notion of primary originality might be attributed to songs sung by their composers, or songs closely connected with a single performer, even if they didn’t write them: think  ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ or ‘Marquee Moon’ for the first category, ‘’Heartbreak Hotel’ or ‘My Way’ for the second.

Authorship, ownership: original sheet music editions for ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and ‘My Way’

But this doesn’t mean the cover is always a secondary or even a redundant exercise. The oft-repeated platitude of the Saturday evening talent shows is ‘You made that your own’ after some future cruise ship singer has merely duplicated Stevie Wonder’s ad libs, but sometimes a cover can change or at least temporarily destabilise the certainties of a familiar original. After all songs have been shared and sung by people long before recording technologies emerged that could catch or even create  a ‘definitive’ version. So, I like a cover. I even like a karaoke cover sometimes: see the famous scene in Lost In Translation. Just brilliant.

So I thought it was time to do something here on cover versions. Now I’m not saying The Beatles are where you MUST start when discussing covers but it was hearing George Benson’s ‘full album’ cover of Abbey Road recently that put this idea into my head as a topic for Pete Sounds and, now we are housebound, I thought I’d pick a few favourite Beatle covers and see what we find. I meant to do all four in one post but, as anyone who knows me will find easy to believe, I found so much to say about each I’ll drag it out/give due attention to each…

Now generally speaking I’m hard to amuse. I mean, I’m happy and laugh a great deal of the time and in one unsolicited endorsement online a former student very sweetly recalled that I was ‘always in a really good mood’ in classes and that made learning much more fun. But when  it comes to ‘comedy’ my problem is that often it just ain’t funny, old son.

However, THIS is funny.

In the first rush of Beatlemania with ‘serious’ cultural critics falling over themselves to lavish praise on Lennon and McCartney’s compositions, Peter Sellers – a cultural catalyst from the previous decade – had the idea of matching the Fabs with another Great Briton, William Shakespeare, via another very well known public figure, Laurence Olivier. His portrayal of Richard III in the 1955 film of Shakespeare’s part History play/ part Tragedy of (approximately) 1593 would still have been very fresh in the audience’s mind – in fact it was so successful a performance that it still has a firm grip on the public imagining of the King and dominates any effort to represent him, a totemic reference point to be negotiated one way or another by any actor taking on the role. Today it’s a curious watch: Oliver’s hyperreal performance is both ridiculous and endlessly brilliant, often in exactly the same moment. The combination of look and sound was so distinctive as to have characterised a whole style of delivery in itself and it is this that Sellers borrows so successfully.

To demonstrate, here is Olivier’s legendary performance of Richard III‘s opening scene aka ‘Now is the winter of our discontent…’ : you’ll have to keep reading to get to Mr. Sellers!

Both portrayals are of course based on the only evidence of what Richard looked like; the portraits painted in his lifetime. The one below is purportedly the last painted from life. Doesn’t look too strong and stable does he. Note the hat which Olivier spruced up with a logo (!) and Sellers picks up on too.

Sellers’ cover of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was originally a sketch on a Granada TV programme called The Music of Lennon and McCartney recorded in Manchester and broadcast on ITV on Thursday 16 December 1965. Taped in early November, the show featured the band themselves and had an impressive line up with Henry Mancini and Esther Phillips alongside Cavern veterans Cilla Black and Billy J Kramer and The Dakotas, with French and Spanish stars being testament to the Fabs’ international appeal.  

Scouse humourist Fritz Spiegl conducted an orchestral version of ‘She Loves You’ a la Mozart (I knew a girl who lived in a house owned by Spiegl in Liverpool in the 80’s – but that’s another story) but by far the biggest hit of the show was Sellers’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. The song was nearly 18 months old by this point (an aeon in 60’s pop in general and Beatletime in particular) and the band had come so far so fast that it was already ripe for a nostalgic rip. They loved it. Sellers’ backed up his Olivier style hamming with garb unmistakably spoofing dear, dear Larry’s Richard. George Martin’s music and arrangement also artfully skitted conventions of Shakespearean/Elizabethan musical encodings and representations; florid and theatrical but not obstructive or in the way of the comedy.

It wouldn’t be the only time Sellers and the Beatles worked together: in some ways the Fabs were Children of the Goons (Lennon’s poetry owed much to Spike Milligan, Michael Bentine’s harmonica instrumentals added an easily accessible musical dimension to the show’s surrealist mix and there’s harmonica all over early Beatlemusic) and Sellers acted with Ringo in the oft derided but not-bad-really-for-a-period-piece film of Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian in 1969. Not forgetting they had a producer in common: the one and only Sir George Martin.

Here is George Harrison really insightfully recalling just how and why Sellers and The Beatles got on so well: the video is marked as ‘Bloopers’ but there is a great section preceding that stuff…

Sellers’ contribution was the show’s breakout success, something which had clearly been anticipated: it had already been released as a single on Parlophone, produced and arranged by George Martin, and thanks to the TV exposure was an instant Hit, reaching number 14 in the UK pop charts in early 1966. It was backed with a C of E Vicar version of ‘Help!’ which was just …. okay.

It wasn’t Sellers’ first hit record – his album which bore the Sinatra-spoofing title Songs For Swingin’ Sellers, complete with very dubious cover as can be seen above, was such a smash that even my Grandma had a copy, and in the world of the single his Goon-era had yielded a mildly droll Skiffle skit of ‘Any Old Iron’ and his duets with Sophia Loren (sighs…sits back…contemplates the Mystery of Life…) were Top 20 hits in the pre- Beatle early 60’s when Parlophone was still EMI’s outlier for comedy songs and had red labels.

He even made an album with Sophia Loren in 1960 which used a sleeve image from that year’s film in which they starred together, The Millionairess, an adaptation of Bernard Shaw’s play of that title. It’s a loose adaptation, we should say, and in a bit of early-doors synergy spawned an ‘in character’ hit single, ‘Goodness Gracious Me’, although it didn’t appear in the film. George Martin scored the film and produced both single and the album which followed in the wake of the single’s Top 20 success. Peter and Sophia. Now I LIKE that title…

Comedy and pop are uneasy bedfellows; skits can be funny – I’ll fight anyone who disses Philip Pope’s work for The HeeBeeGeeBees and Spitting Image – but often tire quickly, while British comedians’ records tended to fall into the ‘And this is me’ category where the song is sung straight with competent dullness (Ken Dodd, Mike Yarwood), or discs recorded ‘in character’ (Arthur Lowe, Harry Enfield, even John Inman )  which were often lightly amusing once or twice and then forgotten. Then you’d get novelties like Rory Bremner’s slew of ‘impressions’ records – his cricket commentator skit on Paul Hardcastle’s ‘Nineteen’ is still funny for those of a certain age. In the US too: ‘Weird’ Al Jankovic was hard-working but only intermittently successful with his skits while Steve Martin made comedy records at first, now he makes very splendid ‘real’ bluegrass stuff; banjo playing featuring centrally in both.  The rise of the Spoken Word market has put paid to singing comedians really; why bother when you can just record your act or yourself reading your memoirs?

Anyway I suspect this is another topic for another time. Cue Mr. Sellers!

After an interminable pause, far beyond the Beckettian and well ahead of the Pinteresque, here is Blog #5 from Pete Sounds. This time I have decided to get my musical muscles working again by reflecting on a song (and a musical form) which suggests pure relaxation. Which we could all do with just now. So come and sit down and we’ll discuss Bossa Nova in general and ‘Corcovado’ in particular.

You really can’t talk about Bossa Nova without talking about Brazil. Rarely has a musical style so profoundly influenced the way a nation sees itself or is seen by those outside it. The closest thing I can think of to it is the Viennese waltz, with Strauss’s paean to being ‘An der schönen, blauen Donau’ being the equivalent of Bossa Nova’s Greatest Hit, ‘The Girl From Ipanema’. The style of Bossa Nova, translating from the Portuguese as ‘new wave’, was born in Rio de Janiero in the late 1950’s out of a sublimation of the rhythms and melodic possibilities offered by samba and jazz. North and South America mingling together in a way which might explain the style’s tremendous and enduring international success. Gorgeously exotic, it is both realistic and dreamy, simple and sophisticated; hearing it somehow instantly suggests the kiss of a cool breeze from the sea, or glass of a smooth, warming and highly intoxicating liquor. Gimme!

As you can see from this quickly produced UK compilation album from 1964, the connection between place and rhythm, sight and sound was there from the very beginning once the secret was out and in the marketplace.

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Yet despite the exoticism and glamorous images, it’s very definitely a simple and entirely acoustic music – the guitar is always fitted with nylon strings and amplified only (if at all) with an external mike. Percussion is light but essential, adding that feeling of sensual buoyancy to the song. Maybe some airy flute dancing around the melody, a little simple piano tinkling too…as for the voice, well, we must knock on the door of the Gilberto house for that.

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Joao and Astrud Gilberto absolutely set the tone in every sense for the way Bossa Nova vocals should sound; the disarmingly ‘unperformed’ vocal, technically possibly even occasionally flat, intimate, close miked breathiness but without a hint of force to its sensuality. Joao had been recording for over ten years before the fateful trip to New York in March 1963 to record with Stan Getz, while Astrud, according to legend, was only there to accompany her husband and got roped in to sing what was intended as a guide vocal on ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ as she was the only member of the Brazilian party who could speak English fluently. Despite the fact that she only took two short vocals on the album as a whole, the instant global success of the album was in many ways actually Astrud’s success and within months she had eclipsed her husband’s career – and it proved to be the beginning of the end of their marriage.

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But don’t get me started on the greatness and perfection of Astrud Gilberto. Back to our subject!

There’s a missing ingredient here though; and his name was Antonio Carlos Jobim. He was a writer and arranger in Rio, employed by Odeon Records but busy everywhere and linked up with very popular poet Vinicius de Moraes on a musical adaptation of the Orpheus legend for Brazilian TV and film in the late 50’s.

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Living la dolce vita in a bar adjacent to the beach at Ipanema in Rio the pair noticed a young woman walking past the cafe every morning to swim and sunbathe. This girl – Heloísa Pinheiro, a real person, who is still alive and still beautiful – provided the inspiration for a tune the pair lightly concocted between swooning and drooling and going ‘ahhhh‘. ‘Garôta de Ipanema’ was first recorded in 1962 but, with English lyrics by Norman Gimbel, made it on to Getz-Gilberto in 1963 as ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ sung by Astrud and that was that.

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But today we are thinking about another of Jobim’s tunes which the Gilbertos took to the world. ‘Corcovado’ actually predates that Girl from Ipanema by a couple of years and sprang early from the well of Bossa Nova, in 1960. The title refers to the mountain above Rio which is crowned by the city’s most famous man-made landmark, the statue known as Christ The Redeemer. The word ‘corcovado’ actually means ‘humped back’ and the shape of the mountain shows this to be a good name for it: see the beautiful image at the top of the page. The song is also sometimes known by the first line of its anglophone translation (by Gene Lees), ‘Quiet Nights Of Quiet Stars’. Joao Gilberto was the first to record the song, in 1960, and since it arrived in the world at large in 1963 via Getz-Gilberto there have been scores of versions.

Here is Joao Gilberto’s 1960 original recording of Jobim’s song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROIOeSHLUmc

You want Bossa Nova? You got it right here.

It was a huge hit in Brazil and no Bossa player could afford to not know it. After ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ this is the song that lit the touchpaper of the Bossa craze that went worldwide in the era of Beatlemania. For that elevation, Jobim had Astrud to thank. Here is the Getz-Gilberto version recorded in New York in March 1963, very cannily leading with Astrud in English and then following it with Joao singing the original Portuguese lyric, followed up with Stan Getz’s typically smoky sax variations on the melody. Jobim on piano, perfectly complimenting Astrud at the opening.

Selling zillions might be good news financially but not always so good for a marriage – ask ABBA or Fleetwood Mac – and Joao and Astrud split very soon after the album took off. Astrud even had a brief fling with Getz himself, something of a mismatch given Stan’s appetite for narcotics. How did those old jazz guys do it? Incredible. Anyway she went on to build her own career but ‘Corcovado’ was always part of the deal.

Here she is on Dutch TV in 1966 with the Pim Jacobs Quintet.

The songs of Bossa Nova were easily nudged into MOR if the touch wasn’t deft, or maybe just not Brazilian, and so the multiple covers have often leaned that way. Sinatra did a whole album with Jobim, trying to shoehorn some of that charm and style into his performances but he didn’t quite make it: he was always ‘just visiting’ the feeling.

Here’s Frank’s go at climbing the mountain…unusual to hear him struggling to get on point…see what you think.

Actually we could go on listening to versions of the song all day but my favourite is distinctive in its own way – it was the very last recording ever made by Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn as Everything But The Girl, issued on Red Hot & Rio, an AIDS awareness charity album in 1996. It was track two on the album and rather splendidly track three was a remake of another Jobim tune made famous by Getz-Gilberto, ‘Desifinado’, performed as a duet between Astrud and George Michael.

I think of the EBTG version as the ‘Omega’ to the ‘Alpha’ of their first recording together, a Bossa’d guitar/vocal take on Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ issued on a Cherry Red 45 in 1983 when they were still undergraduates at Hull. In fact I asked Ben about whether there was a ‘full circle’ thing here, going back to a Bossa tune for their final recording as EBTG and he said that that was precisely the idea. It is in their late style of course – the twanging, poinging electro beats mixing with their fidelity to the art of song – but the song swims beautifully. As does Tracey’s Portuguese, as she finally gets to sing one of Astrud’s signature songs. Early EBTG resonated with Getz-Gilberto a lot so the circle is indeed unbroken.

‘And a window that looks out on Corcovado, oh how lovely…’

Sorry for that terrible pun-of-a-kind in the title of Blog #4. It just seems appropriate. And we like being ‘appropriate’, don’t we? So there it is. This one is about looking more than listening, I must confess; it’s about the infinite beauty and variety of record sleeve design. In this case all LPs but I’ll get round to the 45s don’t you worry. So the other day I just had a skim through the spines of a rack or two of my long-suffering long-players and plucked out just a few that appealed to me on that afternoon – had I done it today there would have been others, no doubt, as although I love a list, I am also aware of their mutability. So these aren’t my Desert Island Designs, they are just ones I liked reconnecting with. Shall we begin?

Buzzcocks: A Different Kind Of Tension (United Artists 1979)

This was the third and final LP by the original iteration of the band. Everything happened so fast at that time that this was issued less than 18 months after their debut. It seemed like ages at the time but feels like nothing now. Buzzcocks records, albums and singles, always had great sleeve designs, and this one is by Malcolm Garrett who also designed the covers for 1978’s Another Music In A Different Kitchen and Love Bites .

This one has more of the anxiety of the first album than the poppy confidence of the second, this time working with lurid, faintly nauseating colours as opposed to the steely industrial greys and chromes of the debut album’s cover. This queasy colour scheme was appropriate to the musical material which even at the time clearly had a ‘success sucks and we’re just about to break down’ quality. Garrett went on to more mainstream acclaim, designing covers for huge selling albums by Simple Minds and Peter Gabriel amongst others. He’s now the CEO of a massive design agency in London with an international reputation. Nicely done, Sir.

The band’s raised profile is doubly registered here by the cover shot of the band in silhouette being by Jill Furmanovsky, the pointing of whose lens at a band meant they had Made It. We saw Buzzcocks promoting this LP at Leeds University (supported by a powerful if rough-as-old-boots debutante band called Joy Division) and Pete Shelley sang the last two songs with a towel over his head. He clearly wanted to get off the roundabout. And shortly afterwards, he did: this was the last Buzzcocks album for a decade, and arguably the last ‘real’ one, as none of the later records featured this original quartet.

Bob Dylan : Slow Train Coming (1979) (Russian ‘samizdat’ version)

I think this is a record people either adore or which they run screaming from. It’s the first of Dylan’s ‘Born Again Christian’ albums, from 1979. It was his best produced record ever, with a very FM-friendly sound and made substantial use of Mark Knopfler and Pick Withers, guitarist and drummer from then pub-rockers but by ’79 newly emerging stadium conquerers to be, Dire Straits. The idea being, we suppose, to make the record sound so good on the radio that the ‘message’ would permeate and spread.

As I say, it’s Love or Loathe. I happen to Love, so when I saw this copy on a street market in Baja in southern Hungary in the early mid 90’s I willingly coughed up the 100 forints asking price. To quote Nigel Tufnel, however, if you can see, this is very special…not only are Dylan’s name and the album title rendered in the Russian (ie the Cyrillic) alphabet but also if you compare this sleeve to the CBS original you will, on close-ish inspection, see that it is not the same drawing. That is because this is a ‘samizdat’ copy of the album – due to state control of music distribution, a kind of ‘grey market’ existed for western music in the old ‘Eastern Bloc’, and great efforts would be gone to to recreate the original sleeves as well as make the record sound as good as was possible using the copies and resources available to ‘independent’ producers. Samizdat records like this one were effectively bootlegs in a market where the original didn’t officially exist.

Plenty of ‘controlled’ releases were made available in the East to satisfy the markets and also to demonstrate to the West that, hey, we have NO censorship here!, but appetites were whetted and so much lay beyond the reach of the everyday music listener that strategies of copying, sharing, duplicating and so on arose. Most of these methods- covert tape to tape copying, wide circulation of single copies of a third generation tape -were much more discreet than actual physical albums with recreated covers like this one, but this is a great example of this odd little corner of record production history that I am very pleased to own.

Gabriel Yared: Music from Betty Blue (1986)

It was this movie, along with Paris, Texas around the same time in the mid-80s, that first got me taking notice of ‘music in film’. ‘This movie’ being the epochal Betty Blue which was the English language title of the French film 37° 2 le matin – the sleeve as you can see above retains that title on the main image, and adds the English version in a floaty scrawl next to Beatrice Dalle’s left hand. It was one of those films which were somehow markers of identity and personality, and I felt about it in a way not unlike how Kenneth Tynan felt about Beckett’s Waiting For Godot in his famous review of the play’s London debut for The Observer in 1956: if you didn’t like it, we couldn’t be friends.

Back I went to the Bluecoat Chambers cinema in Liverpool, as often as I could afford to, in order to try and soak up some more of what mystified and delighted me about the film. I didn’t even notice the music first time around; the girl I was with when I first saw it said ‘Wasn’t the music great?’ after we came out and I said, gasping for air in The Old Post Office pub opposite the Bluecoat, ‘Music? What music? There was no music‘. So I went back the next evening to listen as well as look. But, I mean, Beatrice Dalle. BEATRICE DALLE. No wonder I didn’t hear the music. But once I did, I was off.

Anyway, the sleeve; beautiful intense blue and streaks of sunrise (or is it sunset) over the beach house which is a key part of the ‘happy’, earlier section of the story. And Mlle. Dalle, looking off into the uncertainty of the new day, her gaze a plea for tenderness and also a marvellous Fuck You to fate. Hardyesque, certainly – oh all right then, Tess-esque, certainly – but living so faithfully in the belief of good and right and natural justice in life eventually costs her everything. That’s why so much of the music in Gabriel Yared’s score has an uneasy undertow, even when the top line is bright and clear. And, come to that, the music is actually the same colour as the sleeve.

In fact one of my favourite pieces of music of any and every kind is on this album, the famous ‘theme’ ‘C’est Le Vent, Betty’, an exquisite thing which exemplifies the musical embodiment of Betty’s own fragile psyche. I always fancied working it up as encore for Innocents Abroad – we had the big drum, the languid rolling bass, the harmonica, the accordion, the mile-wide guitar strokes – but we never quite made it that far. C’est Le Vent, Pete.

XTC: GO 2 (1978)

Some covers are just great images to look at. Some are, ‘ow you zay, High Concept. This one is both. XTC’s second album cover keeps the monochrome aesthetic of their debut White Music (also 1978) but abandons the idea of showing you the artist in a pleasing way or even making clear what the record is inside the sleeve, or giving you a clue as to what the music might be like. Instead, there is a densely worded block of text about the psychology of advertising and design. The conceit was extended to the adverts placed in the music press to promote the album, and also to the cover of the cassette and, later, the compact disc editions.

It’s doubly revealing (as well as being obscure – a great and characteristic XTC trick) in that this design was actually a ‘ready-made’ or ‘dummy’ cover, not made specifically for the album. The band found it after rejecting other more bespoke designs (I wonder if they survive somewhere) at the studios of Hipgnosis, probably the most famous sleeve design agency of their day – run by old friend of Pink Floyd Storm Thorgerson, they were de rigeur in the 70’s, chiefly because of the work they did for ‘The Floyd’. Hipgnosis designed all their album covers from Saucerful Of Secrets up to Animals, as well as providing cover art for many, many other artists. You could spot their work a mile off. If you’ve read this far, you’ll have several in your collection, I guarantee it. Anyway this one was atypical because it was a kind of ‘in house’ spoof revealing a humorously cynical insight into what they were actually doing in creating their ‘artworks’ for a commercial product. It’s the classic Art vs Commerce dilemma, there in living black and white.

This faintly itchy mood was accidentally appropriate to the music inside the wrapper too; a year and a bit in to their recording career they were no longer debutantes and, in addition to mounting commercial pressure from their employers Virgin to deliver hits, growing internal stresses built as keyboardist Barry Andrews began writing and ‘singing’ his own songs and pushing for their inclusion. This all ruffled feathers, and those of Andy Partridge in particular. Something had to give. And it did. Andrews was Out before this record had really been given the chance to succeed or fail. That tension is right there in the sound – you can hear the music about to burst a blood vessel on ‘Red’.

In early ’79 Dave Gregory joined and XTC were reborn, remade, became a different animal altogether. But that’s another story. And this is the RECORD COVER.

Fleetwood Mac: Tusk (1979)

This was the 1979 follow up to Rumours, which had conquered the world in the previous two years. Everybody expected more of the same but Lindsey Buckingham had other ideas.

He had become a big fan of so-called New Wave acts, particularly Talking Heads and The Clash, and wanted the new music to walk in that direction. His songs on the record do exactly that, in a very pared back, home-demo style. He even shaved off his King Of California Soft Rock curls and beard! The rest of the band, including former paramour Stevie Nicks, stayed resolutely where they were, writing-wise, but met him partway by scaling back the dreaminess and left their tunes with a few rougher edges than they might have otherwise had. The pictures taken by legendary LA rock photographer Norman Seeff (see Joni Mitchell’s Hejira, Van Morrison’s Wavelength) on the inner sleeves of this double-album-in-a single-slipcase show off this dichotomy beautifully: Fleetwood, Nicks and both McVies look as they had done before but are gazing at the newly shorn Buckingham, part in admiration, part in concern.

The front cover does its best to illustrate the change too. Sandpapery textures, suggesting spotty abrasion, encapsulate the faintly schizophrenic mood of the 20 track, two record set. The cover image is not of the band but of the album’s producer/engineer Ken Calliat’s dog, Scooter, who was always around at the sessions and was by all accounts best approached with caution; this may well have been a subliminal message about the musical contents therein. It’s a very beautiful record, and a weighty musical package, often smooth and caramel creamy, but one which, like Scooter, sometimes bites. It’s also one of my very favourite albums, capable somehow of being, like life, love and matters arising, multiple things at once.

Tusk!

A while ago Pat Thomas asked me if he could look at the material I was obliged to leave out of my book Hymns To The Silence: Inside the Words and Music of Van Morrison. Pat has been a great friend to the book (and although we have never actually met, to me) and I hold his book LISTEN, WHITEY!: The Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 in high esteem so I was delighted to revisit the files, and was startled by how much had been left on the cutting room floor. Overwriting is clearly a habit of mine as the same holds true for my book The Monkees, Head and the 60s. So I will probably dip into both deep wells now and then for you to have a read.

First from the Monkee vault is a short excerpt from a long chapter on the music of Michael Nesmith, all of which we set aside. It’s a little book on its own, really, and this section reflects on his role in the ‘creation’, or otherwise, of country rock . Anyway this extract is based on an interview I did with Iain Matthews – brokered by the aforementioned Mr. Thomas- to discuss his memories of  making the album Valley Hi, produced by Nesmith and recorded at his Countryside Studios  in California.

In early October I got to see Iain play live for the first time ever despite being a fan of his since I was a kid and broke my ‘no hassling the act’ rule by buttonholing him in the bar of the little venue in Otley, Yorkshire; I was glad I did as he was very friendly and was kind enough to say he remembered our discussion.

To conclude the bookish theme, I thoroughly enjoyed his memoir Thro’ My Eyes – if you are at all interested in pop music, there’ll be something in it for you.

So here are just a few pages from the archive…but now with added pictures and music!

‘Valley Hi Countryside‘

Iain Matthews had been recruited by Ashley Hutchings into the early line up of Fairport Convention, appearing on their first three albums, Fairport Convention (1968), What We Did On Our Holidays (1969) and Unhalfbricking (1969).

Jumping ship before the band made a full-on turn toward folk- rock with 1969’s Liege And Lief he recorded a solo set Matthews’ Southern Comfort (1970) before convening a band of that name, notable in our story in that it featured a pedal-steel player not unlike Red Rhodes, Gordon Huntley. They had a number one single in the UK with their standalone 45 version of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’ and 1970 saw the ensemble issue two albums of what now sounds like a unique mix of English acoustic folk, r’n’b and country-rock.

It’s perfectly arguable that what Nesmith was doing in California, Matthews was doing in England at the same time – that is, experimenting with and juxtaposing aspects of the styles and genres that appealed and came naturally to him. He left this band – who continued as ‘Southern Comfort’ and made three more albums of very agreeable country-rock for Harvest Records in Britain – and signed to Elektra as part of Plainsong, who delivered their album In Search Of Amelia Earhart in 1971 (as is so often the case, overlooked at the time, a cult item now) before running out of steam –and picking it up again some years down the line.

Post Plainsong he recorded two albums in 1972 under his own name for Vertigo (swirl label and all), If You Saw Thro’ My Eyes (featuring a fabulous cameo by Sandy Denny on the title song) and Tigers Will Survive, both of which were full of a folk-country-rock blend he was making his own. Both albums have aged very well indeed and have gained substantial cult reputations since. Given the fields in which they were working it now seems entirely foreseeable that his and Nesmith’s paths would cross, and when they did, the result was an album called Valley Hi issued by Elektra in 1973.

I asked Iain Matthews for his memories of how the relationship began:

“We’d just finished the second Plainsong album and Jac Holzman, at Elektra, rejected it. He then asked me how I felt about a solo career. I told him Plainsong was faltering and that I was open to it. He said he had an idea and would I fly out to LA and meet someone. He was negotiating a label deal with Michael Nesmith’s Countryside Records. Michael and I met at his studio deep in the San Fernando valley and talked over what my expectations were. This was in late 1972. We hit it off and agreed to begin recording in January 1973. It was that simple.”

Were you familiar with his albums up to that point, Magnetic South et al?

“Yes, of course. That was the kind of music I’d been listening to during the formation of Southern Comfort. I had all of his albums. He was very inspirational.

But by the time we met, although I had total respect for him as an artist, I’d moved on and was listening to more of the Southern California songwriters. Which is why I wanted to make the kind of album I had in mind. I felt I had the goods to compete with those guys. As it turned out, I became close friends with some of the influential ones. They loved Valley Hi and ended up emulating some of it. You know who I mean!!”

We may surmise that Matthews is referring to the scene that produced The Eagles amongst many other bands around the time he was recording Valley Hi; case in point, the version of Steve Young’s  ‘Seven Bridges Road ‘ on Eagles Live (1980) is a near-duplicate of the arrangement of the same song on Valley Hi (1973). In this he certainly ‘had the goods to compete’ and, it would seem, strongly influence into the bargain.

The album features one song from its producer’s catalogue:

What led you to choose the Nesmith song ‘Propinquity’ to record for the album ?

“I wanted Michael to know how much respect I had for him, as a writer and to record someone’s composition, says that. He tried to talk me out of it, but I was resolute. It’s a great song. I played it live for several years.”

Matthews does a beautiful job on the song, its literate articulation of a complex, adult sentiment suiting his thoughtful and precise and very English singing style. That ‘he tried to talk me out of it’ is interesting – ‘Propinquity’ had been with Nesmith for a long time, and was the first tune he attempted at the Nashville sessions in May ’68. He had first demo’d the tune way back in 1966, and it was part of the group of songs under consideration for his side on the projected ‘one-side-each’ double album version of what became The Monkees Present and while it is musically straight- ahead country, the lyric is unusually winding and reflective for the form.

Even the title sets it apart from the everyday, being an archaic term for closeness to another– at the very least it’s an unusual word for a 23 year old to be using for a song title. Needless to say the word doesn’t turn up in the lyric, while its ‘alternate title’ ‘I’ve Just Begun To Care’ provides part of the hook. Nesmith recorded it again in 1970 with the First National Band – a country band trimmed down to the size of a rock band, guitar, bass and drum allied to Red Rhodes’ unmistakable pedal-steel sound – and it appeared on side one of Nevada Fighter issued in 1971 and it was from here that Matthews knew the song.

By the time Valley Hi was made, Nesmith had moved away from the definitive country-rock sound of the red white and blue trilogy and had made the more avant-garde Tantamount To Treason Vol. One which was in some ways his first true solo album, featuring no songs left over from the Monkee phase. That album was recorded with ‘The Second National Band’ which existed for the purposes of this album only –  he retained Red Rhodes and hired Michael Cohen to play piano, ex-Gene Vincent bassist Johnny Meeks, jazz drummer and big-band leader Jack Ranelli and, most improbably, fellow RCA artist Jose Feliciano on percussion.

The album was still-born commercially but is among my favourites in his catalogue, unique in its trippy, edgy ambience, sometimes hard rock, sometimes proto-electronica, sometimes both at once. The tracks seem to slide into and involve each other creating a soundscape you can find only in its grooves. In contrast to the high-concept design of the previous trio of album sleeves, this one is housed in a jacket depicting an ecological dystopia, with the Statue Of Liberty very nearly sunk in a sea of man-made waste and debris; this vision of a possible future and the overwhelming use of green in the image emphasises the environmental message – and maybe this careless wasting of the Earth’s ecosystem is the treasonable act referred to in the album’s title.

In place of the purposeful sleevenote we might expect to find accompanying and reinforcing this visual message, Nesmith instead gives us a recipe for beer, ‘Papa Nes’s Home Brew’. I got my Dad to help me make the recipe; the bottles exploded in the pantry. We also learn that ‘autoclaving turns this line brown’. He was clearly feeling perverse at the time and restlessly seeking a way forward.

In the period around and after this album, he had begun to set up Countryside Records, establish the recording studio that went with it and started to move into other areas of the music business, which would eventually lead on to the establishment of his Pacific Arts company, and the innovations in music video and film that would come after. So when Iain Matthews arrived at Countryside Studios he soon noticed that Nesmith was a very busy man:

“For the recording, Michael was 100% there. He had great musical ideas, he had a terrific rapport with him musicians and the actual recording went sell. But when it came to mixing, he was at a crucial stage in his label negotiations and terribly distracted by it. As I recall, I was basically left to mix the album myself. Michael would pop in from time to time, with comments and ideas. Fortunately, we’d secured the services of an Elektra house engineer, Terry Dunavan and he and I got on like a house on fire and between us, we managed to do some pretty good mixes.”

How was it working at his Countryside Studios, with Red Rhodes and the assembled musicians?

“They were absolute professionals and a wonderful group of people. In fact, Jay Lacy (the guitar player ) and I hit it off so well, we ended up writing and playing together for several years after that. Red…he was simply an icon and I was in awe of what he’d done and honoured to work in the same studio as him. Red and I became good friends. I’m still in touch with Dana, his widow.”

So although Iain Matthews has some reservations about how the album turned out, the experience seems to have been a significant one and strikes me as a meeting of two highly original and highly musical talents who were keen to work with and innovate around root-traditional musical languages – this is, in my view, best heard on a tune like the trad. ‘Old Man At The Mill’ which blends British and American folk rhythms adding in a dash of that California country. It also swings hard and two-step steady – beautiful.

So as Iain Matthews infers, by the time the Asylum label was assembling its corral of future country-rock big-sellers, Nesmith had already moved on – as One Of These Nights was about to launch The Eagles into stellar territory, Nesmith was out solo trying to promote his ‘book with a soundtrack’, The Prison. He didn’t ‘bail out’ of the form he’d helped create, rather he was led by what he wanted from and wished for his music. Matthews did something similar – setting off down the road toward English folk-rock with Fairport Convention before changing direction, following his interests and his instincts.

Michael Nesmith certainly made a major contribution to the creation of country-rock as a genre, and as a musical vocabulary other people could employ; if we return to his comments on the  original vision for his trip to Tennessee we couldn’t ask for a clearer description of the sound he was wishing to realise:  ‘When I went to Nashville to record, one of the things I wanted to do was to experiment with pure Nashville players playing a type of rock’n’roll sensibility’. (Sandoval p.194)

‘Country Rock’ was probably a style or an idea whose time had come as a certain generation of musicians came of age, explored and drew upon the musics of their youth and mixed them with the sounds of their now; but if we want some kind of definite answer to our original journalist style question (‘Did Michael Nesmith ‘invent country rock’?’) then I’d argue that he probably did contribute at least as much as, say, Gram Parsons, who is routinely credited with creating the style,  in the creation of a new musical sound, and a space in which elements of country and r’n’b derived pop and rock could cross-pollenate.

My point would be however that this didn’t start in May 1968 – his songs on the first two Monkee albums such as ‘Papa Gene’s Blues’ or ‘The Kind Of Girl I Could Love’ feature great examples of country rock, realised via the cream of LA’s session men, but unmistakably country in their flavours. So he may or may not have ‘invented’ country rock through his experiments in form but the signature country vibe of so many of his Monkee tunes, which became ever more so as the time passed, and the clarity and innovation on his first three solo albums gave the genre an almighty shove forward out into the world, and into the marketplace, where others picked up the ball and ran with it, over the Hollywood hills and far away.

• A personal note: I used to get ribbed at school for liking Nesmith’s funny old country records whilst also lapping up punk and new wave in the late 70’s and when we found ‘propinquity’ popping up in our A-level set text of Shakespeare’s King Lear we were full of incredulous glee. I have always wondered if this is where the young Michael Nesmith encountered the word. If you know another example of the word being used in popular culture drop me a line, please!

Lear is disowning Cordelia who has disappointed him by being unwilling to praise him after the manner of her sisters:

Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity, and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee, from this, for ever. ( King Lear Act 1, Scene 1 l.124-128)

Earlier this week fell the birthday of one Andrew John Partridge of Swindon, aka Andy Partridge of the band XTC. Or should I say, with some sadness, formerly of the band XTC. Yet being an optimistic sort, I hold that caveat to possibly be a temporary one because not only are all former members of the group still alive, they all seem to be living in Swindon. This may well be incorrect – and someone will correct me if it is – but I rather think that, at least some of the time, Messrs. Partridge, Moulding, Chambers, Gregory and Andrews are all to be found within the town boundary. A most curious situation. But then, XTC were…are…will remain…a beautifully curious proposition.

As noted, I wasn’t going to write about this song this week, until I spotted that last Monday, the 11th of November, was Andy Partridge’s birthday. It seemed to be an ideal moment to praise him – or one of his songs, at least. I haven’t asked him, but it’s seemed to me over the years that he’s never determinedly pursued stadium-sized success – in fact he has just as often run from it. I don’t know whether he now regrets having done so, but my guess is ‘maybe sometimes, but not often’. In this he reminds me of another great favourite of mine (who will no doubt feature here eventually) Kevin Rowland – every time he had a commercial success or breakthrough, rather than capitalise on it he would turn and walk the other way. Now their music could hardly be more different but I like their shared integrity and willingness – or is it need- to stick to their own creative path.

I’ve already written a fair bit about my favourite Andy Partridge song. It’s in a chapter called ‘Fallen From The Garden’ in the estimable Mark Fisher’s first XTC compendium, The XTC Bumper Book Of Fun and the song is ‘Ladybird’, which dwells amongst the groves of my favourite XTC album, Mummer (1983). So in the spirit of Mr. Partridge himself, let’s not repeat ourselves and, instead, let’s see who occupies the Silver Medal position on Pete’s Partridgean Podium. It’s a close thing between two wildly unalike tunes: 1980 b-side ‘The Somnambulist’ (a fuzzy warble for a five minute Samuel Beckett play) and – just edging it, by a beautifully turned nose captured in profile via a photo finish – today’s subject, 1992’s sublime ‘Then She Appeared’ from their final album for Virgin (and thereby hang many tales), Nonsuch.

This album always reminds me of Weymouth because it was in that bonny Dorset seaside town that I bought it in April 1992, from a newsagents shop on the front called Austin’s – as Marty Di Bergi once said, don’t look for it, it’s not there anymore – but equally in the spirit of This Is Spinal Tap here is the CD, and it’s still got the little tagger on it, see?

Unlike Nigel Tufnell’s untouched guitar however I have played this disc. Many, many times. It was years later that I discovered that Weymouth was once nicknamed ‘Swindon-on-Sea’ due to the number of families from XTC’s home town that took their annual holidays there in the post-War era. I now wish in fact that I’d bought the double vinyl LP version of Nonsuch, although I doubt whether Austin’s stocked actual albums alongside the sweets and newspapers; not just because of the sinew-stiffening prices it now fetches but because the music is so good that it just feels like it should be heard four songs a side…but whichever format you equip yourself with, you have chosen well, my friend.

My longing look falls upon Track Three, Side Three, or Track Twelve as we mere CD owners call it. Track Eleven (one lesser) is possibly Partridge’s stormiest and gnarliest contribution to the album – ‘That Wave’ is like a bank of black nimbostratus cloud, glowering down on a boiling sea. Initially I would often be impatient for ‘That Wave’ to crest and break, its unresolved tension making me anxious – I’ve changed my mind in recent years, which tells you more about me than the music of course, but that shift was capably assisted by Fassine’s startling cover which made me recalibrate my whole view of the song. But in the transition between the two songs on the original album – the storm passed and the mountainous seas survived – a safe harbour is reached and a bright new morning seemed to emerge from the deep, summoned up by the circling Byrds of Dave Gregory’s 12-string take on Andy’s riff and Colin Moulding’s exquisitely empathetic Revolveresque bassline. And, lest we forget, the languid insistence of Dave Mattacks’ drumming. All of them bring much to Andy’s songtable – a real ensemble sound, far more than the sum of its parts.

Andy Partridge has often spoken of how his synaesthesia has helped or influenced his songwriting and, in my mind’s ear at least, the opening moments of this song are a sublime example of this, gifting us a musical rendering of Botticelli’s Birth Of Venus. I see and hear it clear: the moment she rises free, fully formed, from the breaking waves. It’s almost like one of those rearrangements of art classics Terry Gilliam would provide between the sketches in the original television episodes of Monty Python, a kind of reverent irreverence: surreal and beautiful, entirely extraordinary and utterly natural. The painting must have been on Andy’s mind at some level : after all, the song’s first line is ‘Then she appeared…Apple Venus on a half-open shell’.

Sandro Botticelli The Birth Of Venus (approx 1480s)

As is often the case with Andy’s songs, the demo of the song which crops up on Fuzzy Warbles Volume 2 is remarkably close to the finished recording, right down to the backing vocals and the shoofy little hints at backward-tapery which belie the song’s roots in one of his compositions for imaginary 60’s groups – this group were called ‘The Golden’. One of Todd Bernhardt’s chats with Andy that didn’t make the invaluable Complicated Game goes deep into the song’s biography, so walk this way.

http://chalkhills.org/articles/XTCFans20070930.html

In that exchange Andy calls the lyrics ‘psychedelically daft’, and I suppose you could say they are, as well as being full of the characteristic AP tumble of pun and extrapolated metaphor, but in common with all his other songs for his imaginary groups, from The Dukes Of Stratosphear onward, he has so fully assimilated and understood the musical shapes and lyrical lexica which define the styles that they end up being, in someone else’s phrase, even better than the real thing. It’s analogous to what someone like Kate Rusby does in folk music – internalising the music to such an extent that you’d swear the ‘new’ song is an unheard ‘old’ one. Beyond all that I think the words are beautiful:

Then she appeared
Brittle shooting star that dropped in my lap
Then she appeared
Dressed in tricolour and phrygian cap

These give us the picture direct: that hinge point in one’s life, the moment in which everything is changed. We see it feelingly. Here the agent of that instant of revolution is rendered truly romantic, ready to both defend and charge across the barricades of life and make the change. Andy has mentioned that he had Marianne – the tricolour-draped embodiment of the French Republic since the 1830 Revolution – in mind here and I wasn’t surprised to hear that. In the song’s second nod to the European art gallery, Delacroix’s famous painting of Marianne leading the charge shows this connection clearly. Tricolour, phrygian cap. As he had already suggested in 1989’s ‘The Loving’, love is the strongest revolutionary force. There’s a link to his own life too, but we each have our own brittle shooting star to think of. If we are lucky.

Eugène Delacroix Liberty Leading The People (1830)

The song remains an obscurity, but has its admirers, aside from me – it popped up on a 2002 episode of American TV show The Gilmore Girls, finding a nice and unexpected little niche for the song’s rapturous mood and unashamed faith in the lightning-bolt of love.

So far so harmonious: but I have A Grievance. This is Angry of Leeds calling, hello, hello? On the 1992 original album, the crossfade transition from the torrid marine turbulence of the final throes of ‘That Wave’ to the clean, new day rising rays of ‘Then She Appeared’ s opening 12-string riff is a contender for one of my favourite moments in all pop music. Not only is it rhetorically effective on the album as a whole, it makes all sorts of sense across the two songs, building a mind’s-eye bridge between them , showing how intuitively XTC understood the significance of sequencing on a record and the adaptive logic of a thrilling segue. Furthermore, your Honour, it is just brilliant. This makes what happened on the 2013 remould of Nonsuch all the more egregious; Steven Wilson’s remake/remodel of the album sacrificed the cross fade. In fairness, he consciously uncoupled all of the crossfades across the album, so wasn’t uniquely persecuting this one. But does that make it all right now? I think not. Those extra details on a canvas that make the difference between a great work and a genius one may well be obscure or opaque but take them away and something is lost. So, like digital enhancements of Van Gogh or colourised versions of Laurel & Hardy, they are nice places to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. The original is where the revolutionary spirit resides.

I’m very grateful to Nonsuch producer, the late Gus Dudgeon, as he loved this song and saved it from the Fuzzy Warble pile, even identifying it as a single. The LP spawned two singles (well, three, sort of , but that’s another story) but not this one. So as it turned out it remains a deep cut tucked away on the last album completed by the three-man XTC. I adore it.

In the spirit of the original album, here’s a trio pertinent to our little chat, giving us ‘Omnibus’ by way of an hors d’oeuvre, with the ‘That Wave’/’Then She Appeared’ segue arriving at around 6 minutes and 40 seconds. You may now Dig It. And a Very Merry Unbirthday, Andy Partridge.

Choosing the first song to write about on here should probably have been a difficult choice to make. But it wasn’t. In fact it came to me while walking around the supermarket. Probably uncoincidental.

‘Pinball’ by Brian Protheroe was a hit in 1974 during a period when , for strange and asbestos-related reasons, our school was sharing premises with the local rivals – we were there 7.30am-12.30pm, they were there 1pm-6pm. So this left the afternoons open, continental education style, for mooching about, walks and talks with friends, record playing and daytime radio listening. This song always seemed to be on the air and although it takes me back to that far off autumn it’s not merely nostalgic. It’s too weird for that and still seems very mysterious and powerful – I must have heard it a thousand times but hear something different in it every time. A reflective acoustic opening, not a million miles from Nick Drake territory, leads into a fuller, fatter mid section topped off by a very London-fog sax solo before spinning slowly away in a dream like swirl of echo, fade and repetition, sounds attracting and flying from each other. Lyrically it’s undoubtedly an assemblage of bedsitter images, and feels like a farewell to youthful icons – The Beatles, Marilyn Monroe – and an effort to get a focus on where we are going, looking forward once we’ve said goodbye to looking back. Yet once the landmarks are gone, which direction is the right one? It’s a dull yet acute sensation, that feeling of energy without clear objective, movement apparently without purpose. Sex, booze, money, quick thrills, frustration, the ennui of the restless malcontent…it’s all in here, all weighed in the scales yet floating free and unconnected from all moorings. All very adult emotions, reflecting on a lost past with the future pathway as yet unclear: Soho existentialism, revolving at 45 RPM.

What makes all this doubly remarkable is that Brian Protheroe didn’t really consider himself a musician at all – he was (and is) a fine actor and thought of his music as a secondary, if related, pursuit. The early mid-70’s was however the era of a collision of theatre and pop, and not just in the way David Bowie had brought the performative strategies of the avant garde into the charts; David Essex, Yvonne Elliman and even Paul Nicholas had made a move from musical theatre into the pop world, each with considerable success. In fact ‘Pinball’ shares some of the cool urban nerviness of David Essex’s breakthrough hit ‘Rock On’. While pin-up Essex was signed to pop mainstream label CBS, Protheroe was signed by Chrysalis, very definitely a ‘denim’ label, perhaps in the hope that artist and label could together score a more credible slice of this action. And they did. ‘Pinball’ was a hit and Brian Protheroe appeared on Top Of The Pops, although the performance seems to have been wiped. It was his only hit but the label kept faith with him and released four albums between 74 and ’76, Pinball, Pick Up, I/You and a collection of 50’s covers he’d sung in a stage musical called called Leave Him To Heaven. They’re all good, but nothing on any of them beats this song, the enigma of which spoke to me musically as a kid yet as I’ve grown older feels ever more faithful to adult experience. And I feel like a pinball…

By way of a postscript I have An Anecdote: in the late 80’s a friend of mine had one of her plays produced by the RSC, no less, at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon, a sort of tin-roof’d, rustin’ shack of the kind the B52s later sang about. Brian Protheroe was cast in the play and by this time (1988?) I’d pretty much forgotten about him if not the song so was amazed and amused to see his name in the programme – is it the Brian Protheroe? I asked. Heidi shrugged and introduced me – and it was indeed ‘the’ Brian Protheroe. ‘There’s always one who remembers my failed pop career’ he smiled, attempting self-deprecation, but I think he was quite pleased. This was at the height of my own musical endeavours with the blessed Innocents Abroad so later that evening, post-performance, out came his acoustic guitar and I got to sing ‘Pinball’ with its composer in the ‘Dirty Duck’ aka The Black Swan pub in Stratford-upon-Avon. I even wrote some lyrics about what transpired that hot August evening, which ended up in an Innocents Abroad song called ‘Sundial’. But that’s another story.