Something from several years ago

Over the weekend, I got obsessed with ‘Reaching Out From Here’ by The Boo Radleys, off their Wake Up! album. It was kind of an antidote to the other songs that were sat inside my head all weekend (pray I never write about Gollbetty’s ‘Fighting Girls’ – I’ll spare you the YouTube link if nothing else), but there’s a kind of undeniable loveliness to it that I’ve not come close to putting my finger on yet.

I’m tempted to say there’s not much to it. It’s mostly acoustic, till one of those big Britpop electric guitar noises comes crashing in towards the end, and it gets its forward momentum from percussive noises – the drummer wavers between thumping and tinkling, while the acoustics seem peculiarly defiant in their repetition and stolidness, clanging with the syllables of the chorus: “And it LOOKS like a-NOTH-er RAIN-Y DAY…” That should get on your wick, shouldn’t it? Constant clang and clashing of acoustic bloody guitars, by Britpop people, on Creation, in the mid-90s. Sensitive sodding boys from Liver-sodding-pool.

It never even gets close to annoying, though. That electric swathe sounds so very alone, a half-hearted attempt at defying the sofa – kind of a counterpoint to the bit in ‘Can U Dig It?’ where A Mock Turtle treads on the REALLY FUCKING BIG PEDAL and lo, they doth transcend by doubling the distortion and having to play at half the speed because there is no other humanly-possible way of harnessing such INTENSE ROCK POWER.

Here, though, it’s pathos, a crushing blow – the tones get harshed up, a glide into ordinariness, that British tendency to step on the pedal to emphasise just how great things are, just how well this song fits into Your Modern Life. Here, as the buzz dies, Sice is left whispering “If you say it’s alright, and they say it’s alright, then I can be alright too.” The reassurance of the electric guitar becomes this squidging of the individual into that British pigeonhole, convention’s triumph pushing you back into the box where discontent simply will not be brooked. Isolation and loneliness are necessary facets of the modern, vibrant British existence.

Here’s the Jools Holland version. You may notice bits of the sonics are slightly different from those specified earlier.

Dear god but this is a raggedy-ass excuse for a Cornish pasty.

When times get rough, remember nothing’s for free

Christ, nowt for a fortnight. This is kind of what happens when there’s lots of things from last year to write about and you forgot what you actually had to say about any of them. Let’s try and ease ourselves back in gently, then.

BELLE & SEBASTIAN – Seeing Other People

Why, after a several-year absence, am I back to wanting to hear this again? Particularly given that I did think it was Me & The Major initially.

This may well all stem back to a blinding realisation I had on the toilet earlier – if there’s one thing the English language excels at, it’s mild profanity. Not the strong stuff – ‘fuck’ is alright, but so much better in Welsh – but stuff like ‘bollocks’, ‘crap’, ‘arse’, that sort of thing. Expressions of mild frustration. Stubbed toes. Feeling a bit gassy for no apparent reason. Failure to find a comfortable arrangement of pillows. Trying to gob some chewing gum into a bin.

And so I identify with this song particularly today. The constant burble, the mild guitar breaks. I’ve just spent a good minute attempting to decide whether to microwave a Cornish pasty or not. And I decided against it.

And that’s why Britain invented indie. No other country’s failings are quite mediocre enough.

Things from last year, episode 4

OK, Sunday’s posts were just a bit gloomy, so today – chirpy! Cheerful!

SLOAN!!!

Oh, it’s a bugger that there’s nowhere to hear this properly on the net – well, actually, there’s this, but you have to fiddle a little bit – the one we’re talking about is down near the bottom.

I’m willing to contemplate that the lyrics are in some way about something, but that’s not really any of my concern at the present. The joy of “Ill Placed Trust” comes in just how very clean it all sounds. Clean, clear, crisp. It’s like listening through 3D glasses – each instrument occupies a different plane, and you can actually feel/see/hear the air in between them all. The drums, it could be argued, don’t do anything interesting, but they sound absolutely fantastic – such snap, such pop, such clarity. Distorted guitar is applied liberally to the patient, big fuzzy swathes go whooshing across the atmosphere.

The chorus is glam itself, big, stompy, sung in utter unison, with no syllable left behind: “Ill! Placed! Trust! Prom-Is-Es Rust! Ill! Placed! Trust! Illl! Placed! Trust! YEAH!” All about the YEAH!, so it is - “Ill Placed Trust” is full-on fizziness, a bolt of pure, raw catchiness. Imagine a world where your enjoyment of the New Pornographers didn’t have to be tempered by wishing they would stop being such a wordy bunch of pricks and just have Neko do all the singing. Sloan don’t have Neko doing any of their singing, admittedly; then again, they don’t have Dan Bejar, either.

Alternatively, just imagine Slade came back from the grave and decided not to worry about any of that modernity bollocks.

Things from last year, episode 3

Token thing I first heard about on Pitchfork last year:

 

In case you don’t know, that man there is Bitty McLean. He’s had seven UK top 40 hits, the most recent being in June 1995.  He is not generally remembered by pop fans with a great deal of reverence – his biggest hit was his first, a cover of ‘It Keeps Rainin’ (Tears From My Eyes)’ , which reached #2 in 1993.  I had more or less forgotten him, as, I suspect, had most people.

However, Bitty has been carrying on making reggae records. This year, he released a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Lately” (do you like how I said that as if I’d heard the original? I was impressed too, aye), produced by Sly and Robbie, as a single. It is for this reason we are here today.

Maybe the original is this good. Maybe it is better. Probably it is. It is by Stevie Wonder, after all. Not a man who got famous with the help of UB40.

That’s all immaterial. Bitty’s “Lately” is exquisite loneliness. I picture him at the bathroom sink, half-shaven, just staring back at his reflection, trying to figure out if his woman is messing him around. The loop is key. It never changes, that’s Bitty’s duty, to ponder and soar atop it. And oh, does he ever soar.

My eyes won’t let me hide,
Cos they aaaaalwayyyyys starrrrt to cry
And this tiiiime coooould meeeean good-bye

I’ve listened to some of his other stuff, and it’s not quite as impressive, really – it meanders too much. There, the endless looping is rather numbing, pedestrian. Bitty never quite gets out of first gear.

Here, however, when he hits the chorus, he opens up, expands, grows ten, fifteen feet tall. The terror of the truth becomes evident with his contemplation, and suddenly he is plunged into what he presumes the consequence might be – only he has no idea what that is. All that stretches out before the feller is this void, this nothing. The horror that comes with looking into your future and not seeing a single thing. Oblivion rises out of nowhere. He becomes a changed man and you hardly see it coming.

And all the time he tries to stay nice, tries to stay clean, tries not to betray his fears, tries to tell himself that he might be wrong, tries to tell himself he’s OK really. The transformation to doomed man is breathtaking, but for that transformation to occur, feller has to transform from something. Bitty’s essential niceness could well be the key here – it’s because he comes across as a nice bloke who can’t face up to the prospect of action, who thinks dramatic changes are things that happen to other people, that this change acquires such power. He looks into the mirror and starts to realise that he might not have any options. This is going to be out of his hands. And it’s fucking scary.

Don’t knock him till you’ve tried him, ladies and gents.

Things from last year, episode 2

 

‘I Wish’, Rachel Unthank & The Winterset (if I could find a version on the internet, I would, but the songs on the page are all grand anyhow). It sounds like teeth coming out, like when milk teeth come lose and you twist them, and you can feel the little hitches tear off your gum… except this isn’t milk teeth, this is quite, quite serious. Get the pliers out, twist, yank, pull the little bugger, harder, harder…

I…hee-eye… wiishhhh…

I have difficulty imagining the sun being out on this one. Permanently cloudy, overcast, waiting for rain to come loose itself… but always waiting.

That girl has more gold than I… More gold than I… more beauty… more fame…

Jealousy is a dank and miserable thing. It gets everywhere and it smells like fecundity.

OH GRIEF! OH-HO-OH – GUHRRRR-EEEEFFFFFE…

It goes like Cocorosie in the middle, a little bit. And this song has much middle. Much beginning, much end. Magic, no. Magic is meant to be fireworks and bright lights. Rachel and friends are stuck in constant wretched torpor (here, anyhow). Winds blow strong but silent. Constantly overcast. Constantly waiting for the real rain to come. It never comes.

Instead, many voices, all alone they wail. Her and her head, her heads, her voices. The ones you have to talk to to make sure you’re still there, except that’s not here. You no longer care if you’re there, because you’re too busy with the insane fucking hurt of seeing other people and knowing their joys shall never be yours. Pure, blazing jealousy, all-consuming, all destroying, all-devouring. No guilt, no shame, just boiling, scorching, corroding envy.

We used to love ourselves, what happened to us?

I should have said that the next thing from last year will follow eventually. I swear I had momentum about ten minutes ago. But, y’know, fuck that. Society is proper disenfranchising me with every second of every minute of every hour.

Thank god I don’t write poetry.

Working here, with vast expanses of not much happening and not really having anything to say to anyone now we don’t watch the football anymore (the telly’s too small and it does my eyes in), messes with your time perception skills. Life just sort of seems to be sliding like a glacier towards an inevitable, rubbish demise. Those of you who have listened to a Bluetones album may be familiar with the sensation.

And the line in my head:

We used to love ourselves, what happened to us?

It’s from ‘Party For The People Of The Open Wound’ by Knife In The Water, a song from a good six or seven years ago. I have no idea what happened to them and no compulsion to find out. They kind of get knotted in my head with Okkervil River (nearly typed Knife In The Water again there, that’s how weird it’s getting). More men, more plaid, more hunching. With sometime female voice to add back up to a man too young for crags. You are not unfamiliar.

If we don’t look like them right now, you know we will real soon.

Am I lost? I really can’t tell. But the train is slowing down as it approaches Cheddington station. A station en route to Birmingham, or Northampton, or Bletchley (with its big sign, announcing BLETCHLEY in white-on-black with no accompanying slogans because the inevitability is that bit too crushing – simply, it is BLETCHLEY, and it is assumed that you can guess the meaning of that), which for some reason is in a field. I remember getting the train to Brum from London and seeing Cheddington station – always deserted, always in a field, possibly cos I was looking out of the wrong side of the train – and never being able to figure out what it was for.

‘Party For The People Of The Open Wound’ is this drifting feeling – slow, inertia-led movement that isn’t actually going to take you to anywhere you could ever possibly want to go. Not anywhere you’d actively not want to go (at least, not till you’d stayed there for a bit), but Cheddington station. Life happens all around you. People come and people go and people want to die. You sit at the party and for whatever bloody reason you cannot say a word. You sit and fondle your cider waiting for someone to find you interesting. Or for you to find someone interesting – you’re sure they all are, they all have their stories, but none of them are quite enough to crack yr shell. You examine the wall hangings and do not leave the sofa, because sitting on the floor makes your arse go numb. You wonder why you don’t have wall hangings. They’re like rugs, except they go on walls, and they don’t make your feet warm.

The speed wasn’t fast enough to wash the blues away.

If we don’t look like them right now you know we will real soon.

And so you find yourself getting jealous. In time, you’ll realise it’s like the dog-walkers said: they’re more afraid of you than you are of them. Or just as afraid. One of the two. Which makes you wonder why they’re afraid of you, and you start to wonder what in the hell this has to do with Knife In The Water or Cheddington station anymore.

Watch the sky get darker around the office building and ‘You Must Create’ by Add N To (X) buzzes into your head, or it would if you could remember any of it beyond the robot voice going “YOU MUST CRE-AAAAATE”. You suspect a vintage synth was involved. You remember that you may have found her out of Add N To (X) attractive once, but then again you may not. Can you really find anyone who talks about sex that bloody much attractive? No, not Prince. Prince is a dwarf. And he’s spindly. And he can’t shave properly.

He understands, mind, understands things quite deeply sometimes. This is the weird thing about pop, and certainly one’s childhood relationship to it. (One of the things I got jealous about was Morley and his interviewees talking like they could tell genius when they were kids, which is as may be. I bloody couldn’t! Jive Bunny had a cartoon rabbit, The Firm were made out of clay, Doop had that feller with the hat, Oceanic… well, they were on TOTP and the girl took her polo shirt off, but eight-year-old me really would not have found that impressive at all.) The pop of your childhood, when you’re a kid, you take as furniture. You don’t really know what it’s doing, you just assume this is what happens all the time. Only later, you listen to, say, ‘When Doves Cry’, you realise that it is extremely bloody difficult to put together something that sounds so very sure. You don’t doubt Prince. Too often these days, I just do not believe pop – I don’t think they’re lying, I just don’t think they know what they’re doing. ‘When Doves Cry’, the bit I can remember, sounds like authority. Prince is in control. Prince is not trying to impress you. Prince has gotta tell you what he knows to be true.

And you watch the city slowly enevelop itself in darkness. You wonder if they ever actually turn the lights off in that bloody office building. There may be apartments. They kind of look like it from here, like they’ve chosen 60W so the lounge retains a calm, relaxed, docile atmosphere. Like Cheddington station. Like ‘Party For The People Of The Open Wound’. You just want to be comfortable, to be eased into the bath nicely and soak for a bit, to have a nice, co-operative duvet that you don’t have to chase the corners of all the bloody time. Football Manager 2008, followed by 2009, 2010 and so on. Lie in your bed with your nice cosy duvet, some Belgian chocolates, and admire the updates for the new season. Full 3D rendering of Danny North’s face, the option to boycott the BBC because Alan Green is a dick, Steve Claridge comes out of retirement every six months to play for Walton & Hersham or whoever, and every time you lose you have to watch Alan Shearer say that Jamie Brown should really be hitting the target from there. And then Alan Hansen pretends to be controversial, and Mark Lawrenson does that thing where he confuses thinking deeply with being miserable about everything all the time.

It’s still a new beginning, and I know I got it in me

SLEATER-KINNEY – Entertain

It’s the drums. I want more words, better words, adjectives that go further. I’ve bought the NME this week, the people in there seem terrified of Plan B. Slashing and burning their previous recommendations – who can you trust anymore? It’s perhaps lucky for them that people seem to spend that much time being irritated by The Guardian’s music coverage that no-one really notices them anymore. The need to try and spin the words so they agree with me persists. ‘Death of the Author’, innit? Not only is Barthes French, he’s also dead, so double points there.

WUH-UH-UH!

Gorgeous noises – Corin Tucker (insufficent verb)s “join the rank ‘n fiiiiiii-ull!” She would follow it up with “on your Teevee dial!”, though. I have grown to loath the use of the word “TV” in pop songs – always sneering, always Americanised, always with this tiny pause about it – those two strained vowel noises shunted next to each other makes it sound like the singer’s eaten something really nasty and they’re about to be ill. Really, has there ever been a good example of it?

Those drums! “Wun! Tuh! Thray!” They rattle, they pursue furiously, they stomp imperiously, they they they… primal forces at work. At work. In Leeds. On Sunday. Chewing gum and ignoring the Observer Review’s opinion of British Sea Power.

Something needs to be more right with this picture, possibly. Watching the Paul Morley programme the other week, talking about his primal experiences of pop, set me thinking.

First single: Erm, ‘The Art of Driving’, Black Box Recorder. Yeah, that whole Top of The Pops then rushing down to HMV the next day thing didn’t really happen with that. It had the video, them dressed as crash test dummies in skintight Lycra suits. Made Nixey look gorgeous. Made Haines look like some kind of pus-white alien lizard subordinate. 16-year-old me was right up for that, oh yes.

First experiences of pop as liberating imaginative force:  Oh dear. This is where things get really tricky. Most of the pop I liked back then I have come to realise as being… well, it’s not exactly canon. It is exactly ‘Star Trekkin” by The Firm. Or ‘Swing The Mood’ by Jive Bunny. Or ‘Do The Bartman’ by The Simpsons. Or ‘Doop’. I was not the most skilly of cultural analysts when I was a child. Jive Bunny – pretty much exactly as pish as everyone other than me remembers them being.

Oh my, but if you wanna talk about retrospective disappointment: ‘Insanity’ by Oceanic. Research reveals I was eight at the time. I used to be completely all over this when I was a kid. What on earth was wrong with me? It’s piano house that puts me in mind of the incidental music for GamesMaster. This said, they herald the coming of the chorus with massed crowd noise, which is a nice change from Italian acts saving it for the inevitable breakdown bit. Whoever is on this piano seems to have an awful lot of trouble staying in time. Shit me, mid-chorus key change! OK, this is better than I remember it maybe oh no here comes the breakdown and she’s got the full-on Kelly Llorenna grunts going. The piano here sounds quite, quite crap, I feel I should reiterate. Never have I heard a record that sounds more like it was made in a bedroom, and I include the Moldy Peaches in that statement. But that chorus is fairly grand, I will concede.

WHEZZTHA BLACKIN’ BLUE?!?!

SALOON – Bicycle Thieves

Ah, now this is Sunday music alright. Also known as The Saloon Song I Can Remember That Isn’t “Boys Are The New Girls”, this is them being slow, delicate, drums tickled, and I think a cello is in there somewhere.

No, actually, I’m thinking of another one. Oh, hello trumpet! More British indie-girl whispers (would that I could pretend my enjoyment of that was some kind of phase…), and those are tickled drums, with guitars getting plucked with such quiet intensity in the background you can hear the brows furrowing in the studio. I imagine a man hunched over himself in plaid.

This goes on a while, but I don’t mind so much. I feel time being filled and look outside to see if the sky’s changing colour. It is. Slightly darker shade of grey.

SAINT ETIENNE – People Get Real

“Lose yourself in circles of sound…”

I am jealous of people who can write huge chunks about songs and not be boring or desperate. I get my flashes of light every now and then, feels incredible. Then I go back to describing how the drum sounds and trying to figure out if anyone will notice me not knowing which one the snare is.

This is solid blinding light. Translation: AIRPLANE NOISE! Infinite coast. No-one holds your hand the way they do. “Keep on, keep on, keep on believing: it’s here…” Oh, girls who can extend their “e” sounds, what you have done to me. Sorry, meeee… Always with the ellipsis.

The lights come on in the office block down the road. I’m in the mood for songs that stop time. Her from New Young Pony Club in the Morley thing seemed very impressed that ‘Like A Prayer’ can take you back in time. Is that necessarily a good thing? Excite with possibility – does that involve looking back? Perhaps everything does. Never cut and run – you can be wrong, but you can be right too, and you should never write off that possibility.

Our next one is a Thing From Last Year, and follows shortly.

The week ahead in television

Your viewing planned using the most enticing programme descriptions from the Observer’s TV Supplement.

 SUNDAY

8PM, Sky One: The Simpsons. Homer is injured.

11PM, Sky One: 50 Terrible Predictions. The worst predictions ever made.

MONDAY

4.30PM, ITV1: Wish You Were Here: Now And Then. Mark Durden-Smith explores popular holiday resorts. 

9.00PM, Paramount 1: Two And A Half Men. Evelyn is upset.

10.35PM, BBC One: Lenny Henry.TV. Patrick Kielty joins the presenter for a look at humorous internet video clips, including a piano-playing cat, finger football and sheep racing.

TUESDAY

6.30PM, Paramount 1: Frasier. Martin suffers a mild heart attack. 

7.00PM, More4: Property Ladder. An Edwardian house in Streatham.

WEDNESDAY

9PM, Living: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. A man in an animal costume is killed. 

12.05AM, ITV1: Nightwatch with Steve Scott: Crime.

2.35AM, Sky Movies Modern Greats: Mississippi Burning. Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman are agents investigating race murder in the Deep South. Gripping.

THURSDAY

8PM, Paramount 1: Scrubs. Turk makes light of his diabetes.

8PM, UKTV Drama: Murder, She Wrote. Jessica is stranded in the middle of nowhere and forced to take a bus.

10PM, Channel 4: The Convention Crasher. New series. Justin Lee Collins joins professional magicians in Canton, Ohio. Will he be able to perform Houdini’s ‘Metamorphosis’ trick – in just four weeks?

FRIDAY

9PM, Paramount 1: Rules Of Engagement. Jeff is challenged. 

10PM, ITV1: Al Murray’s Happy Hour. Tonight’s main guest is fellow comedian and comic actor Ben ‘Armstrong &’ Miller, a meeting of minds bound to result in hilarity. Music is supplied by Scouting For Girls.

Things from last year, episode 1

The desire to do a big heffalumpin’ end-year round-up has coincided with me having a 4000-word essay in on Monday.

Shit.

So let’s start with a brief one. I never got round to hearing the Emma Pollock album for one reason or another (this will get rectified, dammit), but the other day I stumbled across the video for ‘Paper & Glue’. Concept: Emma is stood inside a Perspex box in various locales, looking rather moody at everyone else having fun. Is eventually liberated by going to the launderette. This is the kind of thing I think is brilliant. You have been warned.