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: