None more Old Wavier

 

Fascinated by this particular performance of a song that was among the select group of pre-punk songs to cut through to me, a child then not paying that much attention to the hit parade beyond a weekly watch of Top of the Pops. 

"Wide Eyed and Legless" is a harrowing confession of inadequacy and failure - "this world is full of my shame" - from a man beaten by the bottle ("the rhythm of the glass is stronger than the rhythm of life") and who sees no prospect of ever getting "free of these chains". He's been here before, so many times, and remains locked in a cycle of sorrow that cannot be drowned. 

And here's the singer grinning through the performance, laughing and larking about, and the band too all smiley affability - while an audience of children (the show is Supersonic) bob balloons about and treat Fairweather-Low and crew as if  they're a boy-band like Slik or Flintlock. 

Incongruous!

Musically, it's true, the laidback, easy-going sound is at odds with the lyric - it sounds more lighthearted than the subject matter..   

That Old Wave musicianship also feels equally at odds with Supersonic. It's like if John Martyn popped up in the teatime slot for kids programs 

Packed with pre-punk pleasures: the smokey yet somehow also icy electric piano (on the record it's played by Rabbit aka John Bundrick.... here it is Georgie Fame)... the pedal steel from B.J. Cole....  Maudlin countrypolitan strings add sweetness that only brings out the sourness more sharply.... and a great aching edge-of-strained vocal from Andy Fairweather-Low. 

For sure, pop history has had its fair share of "heavy" hit singles, dealing with death and other grim stuff...  

(I mean, "Copacabana" is tragedy.... "D.IV.O.R.C.E." is gritted-teeth behind the jokey framing... Country specifically is full of this kind of thing: "If Drinkin' Don't Kill Me (Her Memory Will)", "He Stopped Loving Her Today"... I once tried to persuade a girlfriend that "Hello Walls" was as harrowing as Joy Division). 

But "Wide Eyed and Legless" - it's like The Lost Weekend or Leaving Las Vegas fed through Billy Sherrill... 

"Wide Eyed and Legless" got to Number 6 in the winter of 1975. 

You couldn't get much more Old Wave than the title and cover of the album on which "Wide Eyed" appears. The washed-out colour palette alone... 

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"Legless" I get.... "wide eyed", though?  It works in the song - but on reflection  I'm not sure what he means...  so drunk you've lost control of your vision as well as your limbs? 

Did Andy F-L actually create an idiom here, by combining two existing idiomatic type words? 

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Presumably it's the semi-inspiration for this made-for-TV film I never heard of before, and which seems to be trying to out-do the song for grimness.  

Wide-Eyed and Legless (known in the US as The Wedding Gift) is a 1993 made-for-TV British drama film, directed by Richard Loncraine starring Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, Sian Thomas and Thora Hird.

It is based on the 1989 book Diana's Story by the writer Deric Longden, who co-wrote the script with Jack Rosenthal.] The film tells the story of the final years of Deric's (played by Broadbent) marriage to his wife, Diana (Walters), who contracted a degenerative illness which left her unable to walk and in almost constant pain and which medical officials were unable to understand at the time, though now believed to be a form of chronic fatigue syndrome or myalgic encephalomyelitis. As Diana's health deteriorated, she encourages him to spend time with another woman whom Longden has met (the partially-sighted and legally blind novelist Aileen Armitage (Thomas)), to help ease his pain over her eventual death.

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It's been borrowed at least a couple of times as the title for a book, including this one, where the "wide eyed" fits the idea perhaps of an innocent thrown into the decadence and madness of the rock biz: 

Wide Eyed & Legless: The memoirs of a music biz journalist & pr 

by Brian Anthony Harrigan 

The story of a music journalist in the UK in the 1970s and early Eighties in which our hero is fished out of a freezing swimming pool by Ozzy Osbourne, is terrified by the older brother of the Kray Twins, inadvertently inspires a hit record for Lindisfarne, gets his best friend a smack in the mouth from Tony Iommi, helps launch a brand new music paper in ten days, co-writes the Encyclopedia Metallica, is horrified by Jimmy Saville, spends an afternoon in a pub with Genesis P. Orridge and an elephant's vagina, faints after meeting a Beach Boy, cruises the bomb-ravaged streets of Belfast with the Bay City Rollers and is at a complete loss as to what to do with Dee D. Jackson

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Looking for any info on the real-life inspiration for the Andy Fairweather-Low song, I came across a borrowing of the title by latterday singer-songwriter Laura Veirs

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In a mysteriously deleted post, a commenter notes what I had clean forgot: Talking Heads's "Cross Eyed and Painless" is clearly a nod to "Wide Eyed and Legless". So it must have got some radio play in the USA.... 

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A detailed interview with Andy Fairweather-Low, going from his pop star days in Amen Corner through the solo career and onto his long latterday career as a journeyman playing with figures like Eric Clapton and Roger Waters. Presumably his amiability and reliability have put him good stead... 

Cale versus Cale

Flicked past this mellow fellow's elpees in the racks so many times over the years, always faintly intrigued, but never enough to listen 

This is moderately exciting (if you can push the thought of Eric Clapton out of your mind)

An influence on Jason of Spacemen 3 / Spiritualized, probably because it legimitized having a pale, murmured, barely-there singing mode in a genre that usually favors the biting and rough-edged

This is a cover of the first song on the first J.J. Cale album -  but given a different title. 

Is that actually a drum machine, or even a preset on a keyboard? Mouse-kiss soft, as rhythmic pulses go. 

The cover of the debut is evocative of that era - I'm getting a Leon Russell whiff maybe, or America

Anything else worth bothering with? 

The other Cale couldn't be more different - John Cale's much more harsh-toned as a singer, with zero blues influence. 

(I say the other Cale but it is really the other "John Cale" because J.J.'s first J stands for John. Oddly the second J doesn't stand for anything, as his actual second name is Weldon.) 

People say of John Cale's solo albums of the early-to-mid  '70s that they were among the only punk-anticipating excitements around. I've never really got to grips with them

Vintage Violence certainly sounds punky as titles go, but my - admittedly faint - memory was of something rather baroque and fussily-arranged. Or is that Paris 1919 I'm thinking of... 

It's the three Island albums that were influential on the likes of Howard Devoto

Actually that one is slightly bluesy. 

I liked that one - odd gnarly sounds swirling around in the mix. Maybe it's time to take the plunge, properly. 

Other stuff, though... it's got that mid-70s stodge rock quality....  not a real band sound, a bunch of session players and famous friends...   like a Welsh Warren Zevon maybe. 

Rock critics love this kind of thing, of course

Talking of famous friends, I'll tell you something - this is a big heap o' nothin'

Talking proto-punk - the image here is certainly quite Lou Reed-y 

Didn't he kill a chicken onstage or something? 

Apparently it was already dead. 

(Rock's mini-tradition of fowl play onstage - and offstage - Alice Cooper, John Cale, Ozzy Osbourne)

Off his rocker

This is a disconcerting album cover 

As is this

Now I do love this album though, which reminds me of Peter Skellern - like if Skellern had undergone a transformation as stark as the leap from The Walker Brothers to Scott  4. 

Actually what it reminds me of, even more, is Richard Harris's "MacArthur Park" crossed with Nilsson 

Didn't realise this was his second take on this song

Now that really does sound like Peter Skellern

It also had a bit of the sad-sack quality of Andy Fairweather-Low (another Welshman) on "Wide-eyed and Legless"

Which I love - loved it even at the time

The soundscape on this is almost like Cale doing for himself what he did for Nico

Definite Scott Walker circa Tilt and the pounding-lumps-of-meat album vibes here. 

Hark at these lyrics:

She was so afraid

Since her mother, white with time

Told her, she was a failure

She was so ashamed

Of everything she said

And everything she did for her mother, white with time

Everything around her mother, white with time

And dirty

Her mother was greedy with dirt

Greedy

Then she heard choir of angels

Singing choirs of angels

Greedy angels

Spitting glory on her failure

That stardust of failure

As if it was medicine that didn't work, anyway

Anyway

The windows they were closed

And the midwives had locked their doors

They didn't understand

And after all what was there to understand?

But the angels, cheer choirs of angels

In a friendship

No, more than a friendship

It was a marriage, a marriage made in the grave

The shivering night

The searching of the river continued

The bullet of searchlight

That searchlight found her so cockleshell and sure

Sick and tired of what she saw

But cockleshell and sure

Sure of what the world had offered a tired soul

From Istanbul to Madrid

To Reykjavik, to Bonn

To Leipzig, to Leningrad

To Shanghai, Pnonm Penh

All so that it would be a stronger world

A strong though loving world 

To die in

Fuck me, where was his head at? What was he on? 

Actually, lyrics-wise, that reminds me more of Climate of Hunter

More tortured poet bizniz

The children are all leaving school today

Mama said, don't worry, I'll be back one day

The blue men in uniform smiled and waved goodbye

She was hiding those tears in her eyes

Roll up the history books, burn the chairs

Set fire to anything, set fire to the air...

Cancel the day, cancel the night

Cancel the day, cancel the night

'Cause who could be watching when she steals and runs away

Full of hysterical laughter, and say

Mama, mama

I've left school today

I hope I get to see you in that funny school far away

But those gentlemen in blue, and those in grey

Say I'll never, never see mama again

'Cause she took those lives in her hands

Yes, she took all those lives in her hands....

Bajeezus

Wiki provides context:

Cale described his mood while making Music for a New Society as "grotesque." In an interview with Melody Maker shortly after the album's release, Cale said, "That album was agony. It was like method acting. Madness. Excruciating. I just let myself go. It became a kind of therapy, a personal exorcism. The songs are mostly about regret and misplaced faith." 

In What's Welsh for Zen? (1999), Cale further commented that "There were some examples where songs ended up so emaciated they weren't songs any more. What I was most interested in was the terror of the moment... It was a bleak record all right, but it wasn't made to make people jump out of windows."

The bright lights in the eyes of the ones you love will tell us nothing

Like the scars of imagination

The scars of imagination

The bright lights in the eyes of the ones you love will tell us nothing

Except that we're the thoughtless kind

 

Ooh looky here - another version of "Close Watch", for the 2016 M.FANS project, which as Gutterplekz in Comments informs was a remake of Music for A New Society. 

Here's Cale on how the project was triggered - or rather, disrupted and redirected -  by the death of Lou Reed

"Losing Lou [too painful to understand] forced me to upend the entire recording process and begin again...a different perspective - a new sense of urgency to tell a story from a completely opposite point of view - what was once sorrow, was now a form of rage. A fertile ground for exorcism of things gone wrong and the realization they are unchangeable. From sadness came the strength of fire!!!"

All this burning torturedness.... doesn't serenity, or at least stolidity, come with age? 

Actually listening, rather than "strength of fire" I'm getting more a kind of ashen exhaustion...  dying-but-still-faintly-glowing embers. 

Using various voice-processing technologies - Auto-Tune, Melodyne, Harmony Engine? 

I rather like it. And you have to admire his attempts to stay modern. 

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Talking of staying modern... one of my favorite tidbits about John Cale is that in the early 2000s he got really into LA gangsta rap and the Dre-style G-funk sound, 50 Cent, that kind of thing. He did an album influenced by the rap and R&B sounds of that time.

I always chuckle over a quote he gave to Uncut, something like: "speaking as a man, I like Snoop Dogg's style"

You can just hear the "speaking as a man" in the gravelly Welsh accent. 

He would have been 60-plus then.

Before Stylo brings it up, yes, he produced Happy Mondays. 

Also Patti Smith's Horses - it wasn't a happy experience. 

Nico, the Stooges obviously. Modern Lovers too.

And he was lined up as a potential producer for the debut Pop Group album - a meeting took place,  but the clean-livin' Bristol boys were a bit taken aback by his habits.

Come to think of it, John Cale ought to have covered J.J. Cale's most famous song.  

Actually he didn't need to, did he? 

Interesting to ponder what Y might have sounded like if Dennis Bovell hadn't got his hands on it... 

I suppose Spacemen 3 / Jason must be unique in being influenced by both Cales (via Velvets)

Well that's a funny coincidence - I had no idea when embarking on this blogpost that John Cale has a new album out soon, POPtical Illusion

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Ah I misremembered the Cale-on-Snoop quote. This is from something Uncut did with Cale in 2006:

Desert Island Disc

Tha Dogg Pound--Call Iz Active

This record is different from all Snoop's others, it's got more personalities in there. He doesn't sing all the time, there are different characters that pop up. They work in crews, four or five people involved at one time. It's a discussion group, in a funny kind of way. I saw him the other day on TV, and he was talking about his sponsorship of football teams; he had 2000 members already. It's funny because Al Sharpton was complaining about how rappers should contribute more to the community. I like Snoop's style, as a man. He's the one that got away. the one that did something.

Album of the Year

Kokane--Back 2 Tha Clap

One of the originators of G-Unit finally gets his turn. His take on the whole West Coast Gangsta Hop is much more soulful than gangsta, especially the track "When It Rains, It Pours", a heartbreaking song that most uncharacteristically ends with a comment about his mother.

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We end as we started - with "Cocaine" / Kokane.