music about music, songs about songs (1 of ?)

 

via this (Dego Macfarlane of 4 Hero's selection in Jockey Slut (via Test Pressing)) 

Subject of meta-music and pop-on-pop delved into deeper here

rock songs I loved before my taste formed (1 of ??)

Which doesn't mean things I'm embarrassed about - not at all... just things that caught my ear before I was seriously following pop 'n' rock... not formative loves but pre-formative loves, maybe

This one, for instance, still sounds amazing to me

The dazzle of the sound enacts the title. It's like the "Digital Love' of its time, but without any irony, or nostalgia. Everything phased 'n' philtered, even the vocal (which is apparently why "wrapped up like a deuce" is heard by everyone as "wrapped up like a douche")

That Moog tremolo-ing a rocket streak up into the sky  - might that have been a formative electronic-thrill for young me?  A very different  deployment of Moog to, say, "I Feel Love" from that same year - much more rock, flashy rather than mechanistic-futuristic.

The face and look of the singer makes it all even more perfect.

The lines that leap out to me now - more than the "douche"  or the calliope crashing to the ground -  are:

"She said, 'I'll turn you on sonny to something strong / Play the song with the funky break'"

Written in '73, or even '72, by Springsteen - I'm surprised that the term "funky breaks" was in parlance then. 

(Update: another lyric I only just noticed - "Go-Kart Mozart" - clearly Lawrence of Felt / Denim was a fan of this single, or dug the echt-70sness of it).

Those lyrics felt like a frothing fountain of imagistic frolic to me then - and still override any kind of sequential mental picturing that would form them into a scenario / mise en scene / storyline. The language-romp approaches peak-Costello self-enraptured wordplay levels - the lyrics just become another element of the totality's shimmer-dazzle.

A classic example of radio rock - live-rocking energy, fed through a ton of production, oriented around HOOKS. 

It works through what I call asignifying craft  - tension and release, build up and breakdown - such that the single is ultimately "about" nothing but its own splendor, the structural thrill-ride of its movement through time. 

The full track / album version -  at once more epic in its extended form - yet slightly less majestic,  through being less concentrated. 

You know what, I am not sure I have ever listened to the Brooce original before 

'S okay...  lollops along amiably... somewhere between Dylan and KC & the Sunshine Band!

Utterly eclipsed by the cover version.

I have been meaning to check out the album discography of Manfred Mann's Earth Band

Greil Marcus reps for the debut in the back bit of Stranded, says it's progressive rock redeemed by a sense of humour... (is this really what progressive rock lacks?  After all A/ there's a fair amount of goofy, whimsical, plain daft prog...  but equally B/ the solemnity is the point, surely. Would Magma be improved by gags?)  

Another renowned critic who's a fan of Manfred Mann's Earth Band - Kodwo Eshun!

The band took one of the more interesting career paths

As Manfred Mann - no Earth Band yet -  they were one of the massive UK Beat Group era hit-makers, smash after smash after smash....   

One of those archetypal-Sixties, Carnaby-Street type groops that have been evacuated from memory to very large extent - like the Dave Clark Five, or the Move.

They carried on having large hits right through psychedelia....

I do like these two, indeed have a tendency to annoy family members by breaking out into an Alan Partridge style version of  the "ha, ha, said the clown" chorus

"The Mighty Quinn" (another cover - Dylan this time) surely has some relation to the Anthony Quinn film in which he plays an Inuit. 

Original singer Paul Jones was such a star (and being well-spoken and articulate, a frequent figure on chat shows as Representative of the Young Generation) that he got the lead role in the dystopian pop-culture-gone-totalitarian movie Privilege. 

He also starred in this "experimental satire"

Arthur Brown appearance at 35 minutes in !

Then, sans Jones and sans his replacement, the disconcertingly named Mike D'Abo, they reinvent themselves as a progressive rock group, adding Earth Band to the end of the name - and in accordance with that moniker,  doing eco-themed concept albums like The Good Earth.

Holst and roll!

Finally Manfred Mann's Earth Band have One Last Huge Hit with "Blinded By the Light"  -  a smash on both sides of the Atlantic - and even bigger in the States, where it got to #1.

D'Abo postscript: Phil points out he wrote this song, aka the Office theme tune albeit in Rod Stewart's version. 

The physical resemblance between Paul Jones and Mike D'Abo was commented upon at the time. 

Both went to Oxbridge - but neither completed their studies. D'Abo came away with a "first class jazz collection" but no degree. 

Jones (as Phil points out) did this Sex Pistols cover

the hoodoo voodoo boogie (liner notes - slight return)

"My group consists of Dr. Poo Pah Doo of Destine Tambourine and Dr. Ditmus of Conga, Dr. Boudreaux of Funky Knuckle Skins and Dr. Battiste of Scorpio in Bass Clef, Dr. McLean of Mandolin Comp. School, Dr. Mann of Bottleneck Learning, Dr. Bolden of The Immortal Flute Fleet, The Baron of Ronyards, Dido, China, Goncy O'Leary, Shirley Marie Laveaux, Dr. Durden, Governor Plas Johnson, Senator Bob West Bowing, Croaker Jean Freunx, Sister Stephanie and St. Theresa, John Gumbo, Cecilia La Favorite, Karla Le Jean who were all dreged up from The Rigolets by the Zombie of the Second Line. Under the eight visions of Professor Longhair reincannted the charts of now."

"I will mash my special faix deaux-deaux on all you who buy my charts, the rites of Coco Robicheaux who, invisible to all but me, will act as a second guardian angel until you over-work him. All who attend our rites will receive kites from the second tier of Tit Alberto who brought the Saute Chapeau. To Chieu Va Bruler up to us from the Antilles to the bayou St. John. Aunt Francis who told me the epic of Jump Sturdy and Apricot Glow. Mimi, who in silence, says the lyrics to Mamma Roux in Chipacka the Chopatoulis Chocktaws without teepees on Magnolia Street and wise to the Zulu parade and the golden blade the sun-up to sun-down second liners who dig Fat Tuesday more than anybody and that's plenty. I have also dug up the old Danse Kalinda to remind you we have not chopped out the old chants and the new Croaker Courtbuillion to serve Battiste style of Phyco-Delphia. We did the snake a la gris-gris calimbo to frame our thing into the medium of down under yonder fire. We walked on gilded splinters to shove my point across to you whom I will communicate with shortly through the smoke of deaux-deaux the rattlesnake whose forked tongue hisses pig Latin in silk and satin da-zaw-ig-day may the gilded splinters of Aunte Andre spew forth in your path to light and guide your way through the bayous of life on your pirougue of heartaches and good times... Push and the shove that you need to get your point across no matter what the cost."

Triggered by this Toop-treatise out soon on Strange Attractor 

Two-Headed Doctor

Listening For Ghosts in Dr. John's Gris-Gris

By David Toop

Two-Headed Doctor is a forensic investigation into a single LP: Dr. John, the night tripper's Gris-gris. Though released in 1968 to poor sales and a minimum of critical attention, Gris-gris has accumulated legendary status over subsequent decades for its strangeness, hybridity, and innovative production. It formed the launch pad for Dr. John's image and lengthy career and the ghostly presence of its so-called voodoo atmosphere hovers over numerous cover versions, samples, and re-invocations. Despite the respect given to the record, its making is shrouded in mystery, misunderstandings, and false conclusions. The persona of Dr. John, loosely based on dubious literary accounts of a notorious voodooist and freed slave, a nineteenth-century New Orleans resident known as Doctor John, provided Malcolm "Mac" Rebennack with a lifelong mask through which to transform himself from session musician in order to construct a solo career.puzzle, experimental rhythm, blues disguised as rock, and elaborate hoax, Gris-gris was a collaborative project between Rebennack and producer/arranger Harold Battiste (at the time musical director for Sonny & Cher). A few brief sessions held at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles brought together many of New Orleans' finest musicians, including Shirley Goodman, John Boudreaux, Plas Johnson, Jessie Hill, Ernest McLean, and Tami Lynn. Along with their complex histories, the cast of characters implicated in the story includes Ornette Coleman, Lafcadio Hearn, Zora Neale Hurston, Cher, Sonny Bono, Sam Cooke, Ishmael Reed, Black Herman, Prince La La, and many others. The story details in discursive style the historical context of the music, how it came together, its literary sources, production and arrangements, and the nature of the recording studio as dream state, but also examines as a disturbing undercurrent the volatile issue of race in twentieth-century music, the way in which it doomed relationships and ambitious projects, exploited great talents, and distorted the cultural landscape.

David Toop discussing the book (and much else) on the Rock's Back Pages podcast

An album I've never really got with, despite owning a vinyl copy for decades now...  initially lured by the fab cover version / UK near-hit by Marsha Hunt of the Dr's most famous tune "I Walk on Gilded Splinters", the last track on Gris-Gris

Toop-treatise does sound intriguing....  tad hauntological, even

Still there is something that niggles a bit about these records which seem soaked in a kind of erudition...  and that then demand an equally erudite response ("forensic" as the jacket copy puts it)

(Digressing slightly - I am sure I read some prominent American rockcrit - one of the really big beasts - having serious issues with Dr. John's stage shtick at this time... the witch-doctor robes and the hoodoo hocus hokum... feeling that it was more than a tad suspect.... perhaps this is some of what Toop is picking over in his monograph) 

But maybe it's time to plunge again into the phantasmagoria... attuned to its made-in-LA fabrication aspect (c.f. Little Feat)... a fantasy from afar.

Talking of fantasies from afar and studio-concoctions

Guess which unlikely Brit pop star was influenced by Dr. John? 

This fellow!

Highly unlikely on the pretty-boy-face of it - but the good Doctor was an avowed inspiration to David Essex and producer-partner Jeff Wayne when they made these peculiar pop-not-pop records

While researching Shock and Awe, learning about the Dr. John connection drove me to check out some of the amorphous sequel records he made after Gris-Gris  - like Babylon and Remedies

Now I think about it, if I recall right Mike Leander - just prior to making "Rock and Roll, Pt 1 + 2" -  had also been listening to Dr. John and similar bayou-gumbo swamp-rock things like Exuma - as well as to the Afro-rock drum-looped boogie of  John Kongos, as in "He's Gonna Step On You Again".

Another glam intersection with Dr John: the Marsha Hunt cover version of "Splinters" was produced by Tony Visconti ....  Indeed Hunt was Marc Bolan's girlfriend (this is during Tyrannosaurus Rex days rather than T. Rex)

Cher also covered "Splinters" back in 1969 (Gris-Gris's producer-arranger Harold Battiste was Sonny & Cher's music director)

Out of many other covers, this "Splinters" by Paul Weller from 1995 sticks out. 

I guess here the Modfather is retracing a certain evolutionary path once taken by Steve Winwood (with Traffic) and Mighty Baby (once The Action). Or indeed the Small Faces>>>Humble Pie trajectory. 

Mod into proggish sophisto-rock with roots flavors.  Southern fantasies from afar (very afar in this case). 

(Perhaps Weller influenced a little by the Primal Scream Dixie-Narco move?). 

Speak of the devil, here's Humble Pie covering "Splinters"

"Splinters"-aside...  

Mostly with Dr. John / Mac Rebennack, I remember hearing these much more straightforward New Orleansy records that John Peel would play now and then -  contemporary releases but sounding like mystifying musty quaintness when nestled next to the Fall and the Undertones.

A Dr John interview from 1982

x

Old Wave / New Wave

 the cusp of a changeover, dramatised in same-page juxtapositions in this June 4 1977 issue of Melody Maker

The band on the right is UFO

A cover of the Love song! 1967-in-1977!

Astonishingly faithful cover, in fact.

Interestingly. in the same issue, Caroline Coon, doing the singles, more or less says that punk is over already - it's become a cliche, something the industry will be churning out as product by the yard

Coon herself had been through several revolutions of the fashion cycle by this point... 

UFO, a few years earlier, put out a record, Force It, whose cover tangles up Old Wave and New Wave

The design is by Hipgnosis, which in this case probably means Peter Christopherson, because the naughty couple in the bathtub are Genesis P (ghastly ponytail!) and Cosey FT - this must be just as TG are getting started 

Dry Your Fears M8 (sadsack UKpop of the 2000s)

An interesting piece on The Streets's A Grand Don't Come For Free by Fergal Kinney at The Quietus... 

.... it got me thinking about "Dry Your Eyes" and a certain strain of emotionally-frayed post-Britpop... loosely-speaking in the New Wave tradition: observational realism... ordinary blokes and blokettes singing about workaday worries and mundane luvlife miseries...  one of those phases when the weak become heroes, or at least the protagonists, in pop. 

Despite the blokey-ness, or geezer-ness, of The Streets, the bulk of  Mike Skinner's progeny, or fellow-travelers, are women. 

The very first time I heard this it struck me as a post-"Dry Your Eyes" move, and a calculated one most likely (if not by the artist, then the record company). 

 But in the Wiki entry, Mike Skinner doesn't appear in the long, large list of Kate Nash's avowed influences.  

One of those avowed influences is John Cooper Clarke - which I can't quite see but it would bolster this notion of the 2000s wave as New Wave flashback, the reactivation of a tradition of tragicomic verse and grubby realism. 

I can't think of another vocal delivery that is so glottal-stoppy.

Mind you, rather than a female Mike Skinner, Kate Nash could be seen as a post-Lily Allen artist.

In recovery from an amorous setback: 

"See, you messed up my mental health

I was quite unwell

I was so lost back then

But with a little help from my friends

I found the light in the tunnel at the end"

Now right as rain but revenge-minded

"You left me in such a state"  - the emotional bruises still yet to fully fade.

My favorite on the album, "Everything's Just Wonderful" - the title is ironic. 

Distraught and insomniac from the pressures on the modern metropolitan girl - fashion-implanted weight-worries, mortgage-impossibilities

"Do you think, think

Everything, everyone is going mental?

It seems to me we're spiraling

Out of control and it's inevitable

"...It seems to me, we're on all fours

Crawling on our knees, someone help us please

Oh, Jesus Christ, Almighty

Do I feel alright? No, not slightly

Lyrics shift from the personal (worrying about that spag bol for "days and days and days" after eating it) to an existential-political register: 

"Don't you want something else

Something new, than what we got here?

And don't you feel it's all the same

Some sick game, and it's so insincere?

I wish I could change the ways of the world

Make it a nice place

Until that day, I guess we stay

Doing what we do, screwing who we screw

By "The Fear", even Mark Fisher noticed and approved.  

"I don't know what's right and what's real anymore

And I don't know how I'm meant to feel anymore

And when do you think it will all become clear?

'Cause I'm being taken over by the fear

Life's about film stars and less about mothers...

But it doesn't matter 'cause I'm packing plastic

And that's what makes my life so fucking fantastic

And I am a weapon of massive consumption

And it's not my fault, it's how I'm programmed to function"

Lily Allen is addressing the same kind of malaises (personal-amorous and small "p" political) as Florence Shaw,  but in a more pop-forward and lyrically more direct, less artfully fractured, way. (It's one reason - along with his Sleaford Mods admiration - that I have argued that almost alone of contemporary groups, K-punk might have rated Dry Cleaning).

While he had his canon, Mark could always surprise us with a taste swerve - e,g, his fondness for Dido (for similar reasons). Who belongs in this company, I think. 

'White Flag' was one of my favourite pop singles of last year.... Belying her reputation for AOR confectionery, 'White Flag' is a song of desperate love, coming from the thin line between loving dedication and stalker-obsession..... Dido's delivery - almost stilted, lacking in the throaty passion de rigeur in these r and b dominated -times - is refreshingly cool. 'White Flag' forms a neat contrast with 'Life for Rent', the title track of the LP, which sings of the opposite condition: a dissolute inability to commit. It's like Jean Paul Sartre meets Sex and the City. Wandering aimlessly through the hypermarket of the postmodern, fingering all the options but never settling on any one of them, Dido castigates herself for her failure to really engage, to stick at or believe in anything for very long, to make meaningful choices. She concludes that, if this is the case, she 'deserves' nothing, because nothing is really hers"

Probably my favorite bit in the Kinney piece on A Grand Don't Come For Free is when he quotes Skinner discussing "Dry Your Eyes" with his record company and telling them "this is the song that's going to put me on regional radio" 

I actually heard this next song on a regional radio station - indeed, not living in the UK I might never have heard it otherwise. We were driving to Dorset after my brother's funeral, to visit one of his favorite places on Earth, Swanage, scene of our boyhood holidays. Perhaps my state of mind  made me vulnerable to its AOR charms? But no - t's a gorgeous song - I love the curling melody of the chorus, the way KT Tunstall's voice seems to shift and catch the light.

 

It's not actually as melancholic as other songs in this selection - the stance is resilience...  battered a bit by life, getting older but with nothing figured out as yet. 

It's that wistful whistle that places it in this company! 

(Somehow I have never got it together to listen to anything else by KT). 

I suppose we ought to have some Skinner... 

This, and "Blinded By the Lights", were my favorites on A Grand

But overall, I wasn't taken with the concept / narrative. And the sound seemed Happy Shopper cheapo  - shabby and spindly - compared to Original Pirate Material. 

Probably that very flimsiness is what enabled "Dry Your Eyes" to cross over so massively: its Jona Lewie-ness  put it across on Chiltern Radio and the like. Radio 2-ready from the off.  

As opposed to the first album which rhythmically and sonically was closer to the sound of the, well, streets, rather than the sound of the suburbs. 

This is probably the bleakest song on Original Pirate Material, because it has a memory of better days, a higher way of life, taunting at it.

The prototype for "Dry Your Eyes" in some ways, much better though

Winding up my selection  -  mostly stuff I like or love -  here is my favorite album of whatever year it was: the s/t debut of The Good, the Bad and The Queen. 

I described all this stuff as post-Britpop... and Lily Allen and Damon Albarn's supergroop fit that in two senses:

1. It's Britpop corrected - multi-racialised in sound, with Jamaica at its core (lover's rock in Allen's case, dub and roots with TGTBaTQ) and Africa too through Tony Allen's contributions to the latter.

2. I always like to contrast Damon's affect in TGTBaTQ with Blur - how he carried himself.  The perky,  perpendicular cheeky-chap persona of "Parklife" is replaced by a slumped bleariness. There's a documentary from around this time in which Damon appears - he's unshaven, he mumbles, seems vaguely downcast,  and is clad in a drab-colored hoodie. You can practically smell the stale weedsmoke.  This album likewise captures a man sagging into middle age, looking out at a crumbling and stagnant society, an England that's no longer Swinging Again... where the NuLab initial excitement has long since soured... 

"A stroppy little island of mixed-up people" 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Bearing in mind that I didn't live in not-so-Great Britain for the entirety of the 2000s (well, except for the summer of 2002, when I came over to do Rip It Up research), I must have missed a LOT of Sadsack UKpop of that era.,,, 

Nominations please!

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Ed suggests Adele's "Chasing Pavements", pointing to the Anglicism of the title. 

Can't really hear it as being part of this company  - the song seems too dramatic, retro-soul, pop-classicist. Sonically there's not that sense of exact-same-size-as-life.  But I remember my mum really liked Adele at this point, i.e. before she lost all the weight, partly because she seemed like an ordinary person plopped in the middle of pop. 

Anonymous suggests this by Jamie T, an artist I have never heard (not living in the UK) and only very faintly heard of

The frail vocal tones reminded me of Calvin Harris's "I'm Not Alone" which feels like it kinda belongs in this zone while not having the mundane mise en scene particularly 

It also has the glottal-stop chorus, which creates a sort of just chatting not singing feeling, and a gulped emotionality. 

"I Wanna Be Your Dog" - translated into English

 

"(I Wanna Love You Like A) Mad Dog" was actually released in 1969, the same year as The Stooges's debut. 

One-man band vibes even though it's not a one-man band

Flipside - extraordinarily pithy, just 37 seconds long - "Greasy Haired Woman"

Like this title of the B-side of the follow up single - "Rampant on the Rage"

Staveley Makepeace and Lieutenant Pigeon - the Parliament-Funkadelic of Brit novelty-pop and sub-glam tat

Did they intend to out-oldtimey Mungo Jerry? 

Actually appears they were on this tradjazz-skiffle-ragtime-oompah-whathaveyou meets music-hall-novelty-act vibe before "In the Summertime" annexed the number one spot for months. 

Seems like something World of Twist and Denim would have made a talisman and totem out of. 

Ah well, of course, this retrospective was compiled by Bob Stanley. 

 

Getting quite... not experimental exactly, more studio-shenanigans-y

The missing link between United States of America and Darts. 

Like if Hotlegs had never become 10cc but had tried to do the 10cc-ish studio-wizzardry within Hotlegs and recording in their front living room.

Also reminds me a bit of The Scaffold 

Lieutenant Pigeon was the side-project, but scored vastly in comparison  - "Mouldy Old Dough" reached #1 in the UK, Belgium, New Zealand, and Ireland. 

Not just a one-hit wonder either - this was a smaller chart success. 

"Written by Nigel Fletcher and Rob Woodward and first produced by them under the name of their other band, Stavely Makepeace, "Mouldy Old Dough" was recorded in the front room of Woodward's semi-detached house in Coventry, and featured his mother Hilda Woodward on piano, in a boogie-woogie, honky-tonk, ragtime style. The only lyrics, 'sung' by Fletcher, are the growled title "Mouldy Old Dough" and "Dirty Old Man". When asked by Fletcher what those words meant, their author, Woodward, said he had no idea.

It is the only British number one single to feature a mother and son.

Originally released in early 1972, it flopped initially. But picked up in Belgium and used on a current affairs programme, it became a hit there, reaching number one in the Belgian singles chart. Decca Records, encouraged by this success, re-released it in the UK, and with the backing of then BBC Radio 1 DJ Noel Edmonds, it became a hit there, and spent four weeks at the top of the UK Singles Chart in October 1972, selling 790,000 copies. 

"Mouldy Old Dough" (the title being an adaptation of the 1920s jazz phrase, "vo-de-o-do") became the second biggest selling UK single of the year, behind The Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards' bagpipe version of "Amazing Grace"."

Fascinating interview with Lieutenant Pigen (including the mum), conducted with quite cutting hardness -  cruelty almost  - by a young Chris Tarrant, and revealing the bathetic fruits of pop fame. 

As recommended by Doug Keeley in comments, a stompy fuzzer of a B-side (flip to "Mouldy Old Dough"

It's rather short, though!

Stretched out to 10 minutes it might been a West Midlands twin tune to Faust's "It's A Rainy Day" 

mouth music (vout to lunch)

 

Non-vout but a lot of fun: