Category: Get This!

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find, Sampled

Shack Up

Craig McAllister

Jimmy Smith is the bridge between jazz and soul, a colossus of his chosen instrument who had one well-tailored foot firmly planted in the camp marked ‘strictly no sell out’ and the other in the camp marked ‘unfortunately I’ve got bills to pay.’ A master of the Hammond B-3 organ, his playing was a deep influence on Deep Purple’s Jon Lord, The Charlatans’ Rob Collins and Mick Talbot in The Style Council (et al), to name but three great players who understood the value of the B3’s flavour to their particular sonic stew.

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Sampled by all manner of switched-on creatives from the Beastie Boys to DJ Shadow to The Orb, Smith’s indelible organ grind appears in the least likeliest of places at the most unexpected times. Would the Beasties’ Root Down be quite as funky without that requisite sample? Could Andrew Weatherall have borrowed from anyone other than Smith when twisting The Orb’s Perpetual Dawn inside out and upside down? Ask yr average music fan to compile a list of the ten most influential players in music and it’s unlikely that Jimmy Smith’s name would make that short list, but his influence lives long and large.

A few years ago, in the midst of a particularly heavy jazz phase, I noticed on leaving a Glasgow record shop a Japanese import of Jimmy Smith’s Back At The Chicken Shack album. A Blue Note original. A super duper Japanese pressing. And, given the pressing and its particular desirability, one that was relatively affordable. It was up high, so I couldn’t lift it down to look at it, but I wanted it. Problem was, I was properly spent out, and if I’d asked the guy at the counter to get it down for me, I’d have felt compelled to buy it with money I didn’t have. I hummed. I hawed. I left without it…but ten minutes later I’d done a U-turn down Argyle Street, flames burning from the heels of my desert boots as I hot-footed it back to the shop with the sole intention of bringing that record home with me. Of course, by the time I’d returned, some other unbelievably lucky jazz head had got there before me. We all know what buyer’s remorse is. This was not-buying remorse. Which, as you know full well, is very often worse. It’s undoubtedly good to be impulsive sometimes.

Back At The Chicken Shack is a terrific album, a proper heads-down, chin stroking melding of walking basslines, lazy drum shuffles and Smith’s smoky, croaky Hammond sound.

Jimmy Smith – Back At The Chicken Shack

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The title track is a heady amalgamation of early ’60s cool, finger-clickin’ jazz. There are just four musicians on board, and the quartet contributes to a positively swingin’ affair that, if possible, is even greater than the sum of its groovy parts. Chicken Shack is brought in on a ringing, trembling bed of Smith’s organ, but no sooner have you settled in than Blue Note’s tenor sax for hire Stanley Turrentine wafts his signature rasp across the top line. Kenny Burrell’s guitar vamps quietly in the background, biding it’s time, waiting for the opportunity to break free, the swinging cymbal splash of Donald Bailey’s drums keeping everything in place and orientating the listener.

As the track meanders, unwinds and eventually pulls itself back together over the course of eight heady minutes, Smith takes centre stage; he ripples here, hits heavy chords there, goes low and bassy in this part, flies high and reedy in that. He walks his fingers up, off and out into orbit before eventually stepping aside to allow Kenny Burrell the opportunity to showcase his exquisite guitar skills; bends, double stops, soulful scales up, down and (crucially) between the frets, playing on pure instinct with his fingers going to places in the merest of nanoseconds before his brain has thought of doing likewise. Turrentine blows a cool breeze in the catch-a-breath gaps left behind, freeform yet within the structure of the track – playing riffs really, as the rock fraternity would recognise them. There’s nothing too skronky or head-melting here, just good, honest music cooked up by good, honest jazz cats playing for no-one but themselves and anyone else with an ounce of rhythm and blues in their soul.

If it’s single-button, tonic suited mod jazz yr after, look no further than Back At The Chicken Shack, daddy-o.

 

Get This!

Silly Billy

Craig McAllister

Brian Epstein, in possibly one of the first genius music marketing moves, had The Beatles record a couple of vocal tracks in German, the idea being that the fans in the country where the group had served their musical apprenticeship would be rewarded with a Beatles hit or two in their native language. Abba did likewise, but in reverse. They opted to sing in the international pop language of English but re-recorded many of their vocals in Swedish. And Spanish. And German. And French. Ah-ha – la question c-est voulez-vous. Blur? They’ve had a go at French. Blondie? They did a verse of Sunday Girl in French too. Bowie? You’ll find his German version of ‘Heroes’ on these very pages. In more recent times, Charli XCX has seen the commercial value in dropping tracks recorded in Japanese. I’m pretty sure the K-Pop acts will be similarly bi/multi-lingual. It may be slightly novel, but it’s also very much cash-grab savvy.

And then there’s Billy Idol.

Yeah. Billy Idol. Fight me.

Billy Idol – Hot In The City

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Billy’s Hot In The City has long-been something of a guilty pleasure to these refined ears. For years I’d assumed it was a cover version; it’s got that three/four chord, major/minor thing going on, it’s got a melody that’s instantly whistleable, it’s got a chorus of Spector-ish, Supreme-ish girls singing and sashaying behind him – it’s simply just a bit of a banger, as they say. And something as timeless and upbeat and catchy couldn’t possibly be an Idol original.

Yet it was, as it turns out, written wholly by Idol. Nice one, Billy!

Producer Keith Forsey, the man with the golden touch when it comes to 1980s FM-friendly unit-shifters, helped realise oor Billy’s grand notions for his song. In comes a see-sawing, woozy and wheezing keyboard riff. a rubber band bass line with a hummable, nagging full stop after the first chorus, jarring and stabbing pianos, LA rock guitars and those fantastic swooning backing vocals. All Billy needs to do, really, is sing it in his tough guy goes transatlantic voice and wait for the money to roll in.

Billy Idol, one of the original Bromley punks, whose pals went on Bill Grundy and famously wound the host up, who found initial fame as the snarly, punked-up retro rocker fronting Generation X, upped and left for California and, ridin’ in on the considerable surf created by MTV, projected himself as a Hollywood version of a punk rocker and ended up selling enough records to keep him in bleach and strong-hold gel forever. Imagine that.

Gone were the scuzzy, scratchy Gen X guitar solos. In were rapid and slick hair-metal lightning blasts of shiny, hedge fund rock. Gone was the London drizzle, the British greyness. In came a perma tan and spanking new rock star teeth. Gone too were the t-shirts and unnecessary top half clothing. New look Bill loved a bare chest and he got it out at every opportunity. Sensibly, Bill kept a hold of the hair. He could’ve chosen to grown it out, rock star long, maybe mullety or even semi-permed. That must’ve been tempting in the days when he was competing with Motley Crue for airtime. But, no. In reverence to those punk roots (and punk, eh, roots) there it still was; platinum white, stiff and spiky, that just out of bed look that now took a team of studio stylists hours to get just-so. Still there too was the studded leather jacket. And the perma-Elvis lip curl. And the chains and rings and crucifixes and things dangling from the ear lobes, shinier and longer and more plentiful than before, a subtle symbol of his new-found status at the forefront of faux dangerous, highly scripted pop rock. There goes Billy Idol – the original punk who’d eventually become as plastic as the work on his face. White Wedding and Rebel Yell were his big two tickets to a house in the Hollywood hills and a decent retirement plan. But Hot In The City was the real ace in his deck.

In a move as calculated as a Beatles/Epstein masterstroke, Hot In The City features a line that was re-recorded for all the major US territories:

I’m a-walkin’ ’til my brain pops
I will move with the beat now
I’m a chain ’round an 8-ball
I’m gonna really fell the heat now…
…Noo York!

(or L.A.!)

(or Bos-ton!)

(or Cleve-land!)

(or Phi-lly!)

(or Sioux Falls!) 

or any other non two syllable Hot 100 town where Billy had a bit of traction:

(Minneapolis!)

(New Haven!)

(Chattanooga!)

DJs in those cities would play the relevant version and the locals would go nuts for it, record stores would be queued out the door as they lined up to buy the thing and the record would chart higher than the Saturday night clientele in the Viper Rooms.

The result? A number, er, 23, ‘smash’. What was wrong with those people?!

I know what was wrong. Hot In The City wasn’t pseudo-metal enough. In an era of long-form videos packed full of long-legged beauties with big hair and bigger bosoms, Hot In The City was just too polite, a Tiffany in a world of Madonnas. Too pop. Not enough metal. And the alternative/John Hughes-y scene of OMD and Flock Of Seagulls and Echo and the Bunnymen and so on was still far too edgy and credible compared to Billy soddin’ Idol. Even the Americans knew he was naff…even if they were deaf when it comes to the undeniability of Hot In The City.

Next week – why Eyes Without A Face is overdue for reappraisal. Don’t fight it, feel it.

 

 

 

Get This!, Live!

Silent Witness

Craig McAllister

To paraphrase a well-worn old cliché, there are two types of people; those who love the Trashcan Sinatras and those who haven’t yet heard them.

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The Trashcans are the epitome of the cult band. Look up the meaning and see for yourself:

A niche appeal that doesn’t conform to mainstream trends. In the late ’80s, their tight, studied Caledonian jangle was at odds with the more loose-limbed approach that seeped its way outwards from Manchester’s Oldham Street like a pair of Joe Bloggs bell bottoms. In the ’90s, their now-considered classic second album I’ve Seen Everything was lost to the blustery winds of grunge. Their third, 1996’s A Happy Pocket – an album packed full of tunes and melody and inventiveness – failed to make an impact in a musical landscape dominated by two mega-selling and zeitgeist-surfing guitar groups. And so it went on.

Longevity and influence, maintaining relevance over decades. The Trashcans have been making records for over 35 years. Rightly so, I’ve Seen Everything regularly crops up in lists of ‘Best Scottish Albums Ever’ – as should their fourth album Weightlifting, if yr askin’. A young Fran Healy popped up as a support act at one point, his demo tape making its way via the supportive headliners to the label which would sign him and the group that eventually became Travis. That’s longevity and influence right there.

A dedicated fanbase, with intensely loyal supporters. Fans of the Trashcans are well used to playing the long game. By the time their magnificent seventh album arrives at the end of July, it’ll be over a decade since their last album, 2016’s Wild Pendulum. A brief reissue period of their Go! Discs albums and a couple of stand alone singles aside, Ever The Optimist is a record that is eagerly anticipated. The group’s intensely loyal support has, for a few years now, subscribed monthly to the group’s Patreon page. Their subscription fees have gone a long way to financing the upcoming record and patrons of the group have been rewarded with a drip-feed of brand new material that suggests the Trashcans have lost none of their way with a melodic twist and a hooky guitar line (they haven’t – I’ve been lucky enough to have been living with the new record since October last year and it is indeed every bit as good as the released tracks suggest it will be.)

I’ve been doing a bit of writing around the new album too. As with previous publications The Perfect Reminder and The Full Pocket, this new book (?) will dig deep to uncover the inspirations and perspiration around the 11 songs that make up the new record. It’s about 80% finished and, even if I do say so myself, it’s a worthy companion to one of the records of the year. So, you can look out for that when it makes it into print.

It was during an interview with Francis around March when it was suggested that the Trashcans might want to film a video for the title track of the new album. Could I find availability in Irvine’s Harbour Arts Centre around the middle of June? The Trashcans had a small window of opportunity – both Francis and Paul would be home to visit relatives around the 18th of the month and if possible, they’d be looking to film the video then. They were keeping their options open though – a Glasgow pub was also pencilled in as a possible location, the pros and cos of both venues a fiercely debated conversation between band and manager and video production team and – batting for the home team – myself. Eventually, Irvine won out; the right decision as everyone agreed.

It was suggested in conversation that perhaps, maybe, possibly, the group might entertain the notion of playing a few songs after they’d filmed the video shoot. “Like a gig.” There. It was out. The five group members hadn’t been in the same room for eight years. A rehearsal would be necessary. Or rehearsals, plural. When would they fit that in? A gig was unlikely then. Or was it? Yes. It was definitely unlikely. Really though…was it?

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Somehow, come Thursday there, the group was into both the video shoot and a small, low-key gig on the same night. With the Harbour Arts Centre’s 100 capacity audience, it was immediately clear that demand for such a show would far outstrip supply, and so, in lieu of selling tickets, the group took the decision to invite family as well as close friends and allies to the performance. It would need to be top secret. Silence Is Golden. The Sound Of Silence. Enjoy The Silence. Enjoy the silence?!? It’s agony knowing about something that’s guaranteed to be totally magic, yet being forbidden to mention it. Word gets out about this and Irvine harbourside would be awash with collapsing quiffs and foggy spectacled, ticketless fans. Silence should indeed be golden.

A guest list was drawn up. Whittled down. Re-drawn. Re-whittled. Augmented and amended. Replies were immediate and almost all in the affirmative. ‘Yes! We’ll be there! Yes! We won’t tell a soul!’ And d’you know what? No one told a soul. I was amazed that nothing as much as a squeak got out. If you were on that list, well done you. The gravity of the occasion – the classic line-up of the Trashcan Sinatras, live and in the same room for the first time in eight years – was clearly not lost on any of the invited audience.

Thursday 18th June eventually arrived…and there they were! All five Trashcans, packed onto the small ‘stage’ of the HAC, standing on yr actual Paolo Nutini’s Persian rugs for a mid-afternoon soundcheck doubling as a second rehearsal (they’d rehearsed in Glasgow the day before) where they greased the rusty cogs of guitar-based melodic pop back into action. They sounded brilliant; a bit scuffed at the edges, and with not as much of the polished sheen that helps make the records so timeless and essential, but playing with vigour and a studied dedication to the cause.

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They looked great too. A crack New York video team had been flown in especially and the tiny theatre had been transformed into a proper video set. Greens and aquas and scarlets and cyans swept and swooped above…behind…below the group, throwing long shadows on the walls, throwing those in attendance into a bit of a tizz. A pop video! Being made right in front of us! (And this was just the afternoon too; the only folk there were those essential to the running of the show – just wait until later, when 100 eager fans are in attendance.) They run through the video playback five or six times and then, with relevant footage in the can, everyone stops for food and braces themselves for the evening ahead.

There’s a queue longer than Irvine Mall come doors open time and once in, the lucky hundred make straight for a seat. There’s not a bad seat in the house though – indeed, ‘house’ is being generous to this small and intimate room – and once they realise, half the audience makes their way to the merch stand instead. There are bespoke ‘Trashcan Sinatras HAC Irvine’ t-shirts for sale. By the end of the night, none remain. A momentous occasion requires a momentous t-shirt.

The performance? It’s their first hometown show for 39 years – that’s thirty-nine, Archie, and it’s dazzling…melancholic…life-affirming…tear-jerking…unbelievable…funny…pinch me…all of that and more. The Trashcans did two sets of career-spanning fan favourites (Hayfever! Got Carried Away! How Can I Apply?! Easy Read! Orange Fell! Weightlifting!) as well as live debuts of new material (Games For The ZX Spectrum! The Bitter End!), a couple of kinda live, kinda mimed filmed video performances the meat in the musical sandwich. A set that closes with Send For Henny and Earlies would be exquisite in anyone’s repertoire, and in the hands of the Trashcans, the entire room melts just a little. An unplanned encore of Obscurity Knocks was outrageously brilliant, the scrubbed acoustic guitars that little bit faster, the lightning flash of guitar solo that little bit slicker, the ‘turned 21, twist, bust, wrong again‘ line delivered like Johnny Rotten in ’76. Old Irvine punks never die, apparently. Pound for pound, this was breathtaking stuff.

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Will the group tour to promote the album? With Francis and Paul both living on the west coast of America, and what with the cost of touring these days, it all makes for a logistical headache. I’m not so sure they will. Will they play bespoke live shows here and there when the stars and travel arrangements align? I certainly hope so. Everyone in Irvine – band, crew and especially audience – were enraptured. If it can’t be bottled and sold along with the t-shirts, it needs to be brought to the people, however that may be.

You can order Ever The Optimist here.

While you’re waiting for the end of July, here’s the visualiser for Games for The ZX Spectrum…or Zee Ex Spectrum, if you happen to find yourself talking about great music when you’re Stateside with the Tartan Army.

 

Get This!

Gerry Synonym

Craig McAllister

There’s a La’s story I was party to a few years ago. It concerned the recording of their album – I mean, it would, wouldn’t it? The gist of the story involved a conversation between Lee Mavers and a producer – Mike Hedges, maybe, Steve Lillywhite, perhaps (whichever one they’d been encouraged to work with on this particular session, it doesn’t really matter), with Mavers getting hot under his Evertonian collar at the producer’s inability to capture the sound in his head.

‘But it sounds great, Lee!‘ said the producer, with genuine reason.

‘Nah. It’s shit, mate.’

‘It’s brilliant, Lee. Honestly!‘

Mavers looks him directly in the eye.

‘D’you know when yer mam makes soup and she takes all the ingredients; the lentils and the beans and the pulses and the onions and the stock and she mixes it all together and what it tastes of isn’t only the lentils and the beans and the pulses and the onions and the stock…but she’s somehow created another flavour? That’s what I want from our music. You,’ said Mavers pointing accusingly at his patient producer, ‘are incapable of bringing out that magic flavour.’

Lee Mavers. Souperstar.

It’s more fact than argument these days, but when Gerry Love left Teenage Fanclub, the magic ingredient that elevated that group’s music above and beyond their peers also left with him. A musician with a supreme pop nous derived from the left of centre and the more obscurish corners of music fandom, Love is a master at wringing a melody from simple words and chords. Hindsight shows that, while in Teenage Fanclub, the Love-penned tracks were often the best. Slower to hit the spot in some cases, immediately ace in others, a song written by G. Love comes with an 18 carat gold certificate of excellence.

I sat in on a soundcheck a couple of years ago while the now-solo Gerry and his backing band worked up dazzling versions of Don’t Look Back and Star Sign and Sparky’s Dream and December and Sweet Days Waiting and Thin Air and…(you get my drift, surely)…this – one of his greatest compositions.

Teenage Fanclub – Going Places

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Nestling innocuously in the middle of side two of 1995’s Grand Prix – the thinking man’s favourite TFC album (or is that Songs From Northern Britain?) – Going Places show cases not only Gerry’s way with a melodic twist, but also Norman’s divine harmonies and Raymond’s tasteful use of fuzz guitar. It’s Teenage Fanclub in microcosm – a beauty, in other words.

Ringing in on a riff born from Roger McGuinn tackling Maggie May, Going Places is classic mid-paced, mid-era Fanclub. It’s Gerry’s song, so he takes the lead, singing against his trademark frugging bass, his bandmates clearing a space around him. ‘Look at this,’ they go in the playground of pop. ‘Ain’t Gerry’s song sumthin’ special?!‘ The group picks it up for a chorus which arrives on the coat tails of hammered-on and hanging on chords, replete with some sweet, sweet Norman harmonies, Raymond and his fuzz box roughing it up just so. ‘Just kick my feet off the ground, I’ll embrace the sky,’ goes Gerry, Norman joining in on honeyed harmonies as the group behind them aims for the stars and overshoots to the sun.

They know, the Teenage Fanclub, that sometimes less is more, so they immediately pull back. Is that a banjo after the first chorus? I think it is, y’know. A gentle clatter of milk bottle percussion amongst the down-home brouhaha? Sounds like it. There’s some reverberating, vamping organ, some mild tremolo action from Raymond in the second verse, a subtle hint of polite feedback and then the next chorus is upon us, guitars zipping freely as the clouds part, the sun-scorched melody sounding both melancholic and uplifting – a rare trick that not many writers can pull of successfully. The whole thing chimes and clangs and rings and zings in a giddy union of interplay, the McGuinn-does-Maggie-May signature riff echoing forever and we’re – yes! – into another chorus, Gerry kicking his feet off the ground, a falsetto’d Norman momentarily letting himself go and woo-hoo-hooing like Al Jardine in 1966. If y’don’t like this song, the saying goes, you must be deaf or dead, or both.

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Gerry Love is, like me, an alumnus of Our Price. While I was manning the counters in Irvine and Kilmarnock, Gerry was doing likewise in Hamilton. Within the identikit shopping centres of Hamilton, Irvine and Kilmarnock you’d find branches of a chain of travel agents called Going Places. I like to think that the shop name stuck somewhere in Love’s head, waiting for the right song to come along. We might not have Our Price and Going Places anymore, but we’ll always have Going Places.

Get This!, New! Now!

Coxon At The Controls

Craig McAllister

A couple of years ago, to generally positive reviews, the reformed?/reawakened?/reimagined? Blur released the horrendously-titled The Ballad Of Darren album. In this part of the world it was welcomed with keen interest, not necessarily for the music, but because the cover art showed the outdoor pool at Gourock, a seaside town a short 20 miles drive up the west coast from where I’m typing this.

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Gourock, like so many of the seaside towns in Inverclyde and Ayrshire, suffered hard at the advent of the package holiday. Why shiver yr bollocks off in the Firth Of Clyde when you can gently bathe them in the mildly tepid aqua blue of the Mediterranean? Why shove a roll ‘n slice down yr gub quicker than you can bat off the local divebombing seagulls when you can sit lazily under an umbrella while drop dead gorgeous Alejandro brings you fresh tapas on request? Why suffer the slops and sticky carpet of the Kings Arms when you can be supping San Miguel in short sleeves until sunset? Tennent’s or tapas? For most Scottish sunseekers there was only one choice.

At some point a decade or so ago, someone decided Gourock’s outdoor pool needed bringing back to life. With wild swimming now being a thing, Gourock’s fresh, salt water pool would be just the ticket for any locals for whom the smell of industrial strength chlorine and echoing kids as they shot out of flumes was too much. And they were proved right. The Gourock outdoor pool is extremely popular, despite the Blur cover showing one lone swimmer getting the lengths in under a slate grey west of Scotland sky, the island of Rothesay a forlorn-looking headland over the water.

And now…

Graham Coxon, chief guitar mangler in Blur is due to release a solo album called Castle Park.

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So what, you say. Written down it doesn’t have the same effect, but told to any Irvinite, Castle Park – or the singular Castlepark, as we have it – will have you instantly thinking of the large housing scheme on the outskirts of the town. Built to house Glasgow’s overspill when the city was going through a regeneration programme in the late ’60s, Castlepark subsequently spawned a whole raft of rockers and writers, many of whom eked out a living in the creative arts, and continue to do so.

First Blur and the Gourock pool. Now Coxon and his album named after an Irvine housing estate *. Sometimes your interest is piqued in the most unexpected of ways.

* not really

Recorded in 2011 and swiftly shelved due to Blur re-activity, Castle Park rattles and rolls like all the best Coxon tunes do. Lead single Billy Says is terrific, a mod pop slice of Who/Diddley maracas, off kilter harmonies, na-na-nagging hooklines and a ripper of a wonky solo – something of a Coxon trademark whenever he’s given free reign at the controls. If it’s thunking great beat music you’re after, Billy Says and Castle Park is where you need to turn to.

Back in Thatcher’s 1980s, the Irvine Music Club was housed inside a converted school prefab at Castlepark Community Centre. In the name of rock ‘n roll, lots of us cut our teeth (and fingers) strangling the life out of the classics as bands were formed and augmented and chopped and changed, some of them even savouring the sweet taste of radio airplay and mild success beyond the KA12 postcode.

If it was still going today, I’d like to think the bands in the Irvine Music Club would be creating effervescent guitar-based music like Billy Says. It’s exactly the sort of manic, groove-based guitar record that would’ve had me scrambling to rip it off had I been a cocksure teenage guitar slinger with dreams of the charts and beyond.

Get This!, Live!

Swamp Thing

Craig McAllister

We’d spent our formative drunken teenage years falling out of lofts, falling through hedges and falling out and in with each other through a holy triumvate of sounds; New Order’s Blue Monday, Simple Minds’ I Travel and the entirety of Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense album, so when Alex Aitken one day thrust a copy of Talking Heads‘ Speaking In Tongues into my hands and said, ‘Remember when you said if I ever saw this record, I was to buy it for you? Well, here it is. That’s £3.99 you owe me,’ I was a wee bit perplexed. He might also have said, ‘Make it a fiver to account for the petrol money,’ but to be honest, I can’t be sure I’m not making that part up. Either way, I fell into ownership of Speaking In Tongues only because Alex shook me down for the money.

His story had more holes in it than his Ford Capri. I’d never asked him to buy it for me. I love record shopping; I could easily have bought it myself if I wasn’t chasing other essential records, like It’s Alive and The Head On The Door. He hadn’t gone to Ayr and thought, ‘Oh, Craig would like that…must get him it…‘. He’d bought it fairly and squarely for himself and clearly hadn’t taken to the record’s rather sterile sound, so the sneaky bazza thought he’d offload it to me instead. And it worked.

Me? Despite feeling mugged, used even, I’ve loved it from first listen to last (yesterday morning, if yr curious). True, Speaking In Tongues is clinical and awkward where the same songs on Stop Making Sense are organic and flowing and groovier, but I fell for it all the same. It struck me yesterday that, after Remain In Light, it might’ve crept into the second-top slot of my internal Talking Heads Top 5 albums.

It’s that heady combination of sunshine and rhythm that does it – the chattering and day-glo synth lines, the bubbling bass, the rinky dink guitars and lightness of percussive touch that also gave birth to the Tom Tom Club record.

It’s that inescapable notion that here is a band totally in simpatico with one another. Bass lines suggest guitar lines, synth lines ape the bass lines, percussive tumbles punctuate the gaps between David Byrne’s idiosyncratic vocal lines; the group is one living and breathing funky organism.

It’s the realisation that those stoopid Talking Heads failed to put This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) on the original record. It’s there now, of course, reissue programmes being a by-word for fan-fleecing, but back in the day – until I’d seen the Stop Making Sense concert film at least – I only knew This Must Be The Place from the Speaking In Tongues album. And, what with it instantly being my favourite Talking Heads song ‘n all meant that its parent album had permanent residence in the softest spot of my heart.

I’ve also got a room next door to it for Swamp.

Talking Heads – Swamp

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It’s one of those tracks that is instantly familiar the moment you first hear it. It’s stompy. It’s incessant. And it features that caveman-ish, neanderthal hi-hi-hi-hi-hi chant that you – yeah, you! – have chanted at least once in your life. Once heard, instantly memorised.

A bendy keyboard motif. A four to the floor groove. A rinky dink guitar. David Byrne chatting gibberish and nonsense through the intro. Let me tell you a story, he eventually says, his voice slipping and sliding like your sleazy uncle on a boys’ night out, unfolding a lyric addressing existential dread and goodness really knows what else. Rarely has abstract art sounded so goddammed groovy.

Wha’sat? who’s drivin’…where we goin’?…who knows?…a medical chart on the wall…soft violins, hands touch your throat…how many people d’ya think I am?…we’ve come to take you home…woo-hoo!

It’s a head-noddin’, butt-shakin’ monster of a groove. Immensely fun.

Here’s the perennially fab-u-lous version from Stop Making Sense. Byrne’s twitches. Tina’s shoulder shrugs. The band, silhouetted and back-lit in orange. Era-defining stuff. I can’t imagine you’ve never seen this before, but you’re probably long-overdue another viewing,

I was chatting to Jim from the Vinyl Villain recently and we were discussing rock biographies. He was telling me that he’d gone off Talking Heads a wee bit after reading Chris Frantz’s Remain In Love autobiography and discovering that they were a fairly privileged and well-off group, with access to good universities and yachts and country clubs and a whole plethora of things that were well out of the reach of yr average Bowery punk rocker, and it got me thinking about it on the drive home.

There’s no denying that Talking Heads were from a fairly comfortable background, but I’m glad they chose to put their efforts into creating vital and essential art-rock for all, rather than choose to live it up anonymously in a world most of us know little about. Or maybe they’ve managed to straddle the two worlds, and we just don’t realise it…which is waaay more punk in any case.

Click click, see ya later.

Get This!, New! Now!

Maybe It’s Mind Over Matter

Craig McAllister

There’s been a good wee buzz in the more discreet corners of the world wide web surrounding the imminent release of the Trashcan Sinatras‘ (magnificent) seventh album, Ever The Optimist.

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Around the turn of the year, Billy Sloan’s BBC Radio Scotland show had the first play of The Bitter End, the irony of the track’s title only slightly lost on the evergreen presenter who was at the helm for his second-to-last late-night radio show. A sparkling and thumping three chord guitar anthem, The Bitter End was, in the absence of an actual physical single release, the ideal track with which to announce the return of a group which had been low-key to the point of invisibility over the past decade. Save a couple of largely ignored (yet indispensable) 7″ and 12″ releases and a back catalogue reissue campaign through the Last Night From Glasgow label, the group had been apparently inactive. Their previous album, Wild Pendulum, was now ten years old and there was an uneasy air that maybe, as far as cult groups go, that was that.

Little did anyone outwith the group’s close-knit inner circle know, but ideas and rhyming couplets and chord progressions and guitary hooklines and actual songs were percolating, whizzing around the planet between the principal Trashcans in the form of digital demos, the bedrock upon which Ever The Optimist was taking shape.

If The Bitter End was the perfect ‘we’re back! back! back!’ lead ‘single’, then its follow-up would further whet the appetite of a collective fanbase desperate for more few material. Bad Husband was ushered confidently into the world a month or so ago, a duet with Camera Obscura’s Traceyanne Campbell with a cyclical chord progression and weaving melody to die for; the Trashcans of old, but viewed through an Islands In The Stream filter. I must’ve heard – and really listened to – this song a couple of hundred times by now and it’s yet to sound anything less than fresh and urgent.

I’ve been very lucky, y’see, to have had the entire record on repeat for six months or so. I’ve grown to love its perfect mix of bombast and brittleness, the way it flits from loud to quiet, from foot-down-and-drive anthemic to heartstring-tugging introspection and insularity. Without spoiling anything further, I’d say with a fair amount of confidence that Trashcan Sinatras fans will really take to it and love it. I might even suggest, debatable as that will prove to be, that it’s the band’s greatest album.

I was actually a wee bit surprised at the choice of third ‘single’.

Melodramatic and its accompanying video was released mid-week there, again to high praise and an outpouring of superlatives. Within the context of the album, Melodramatic might be my least favourite track (yes, really!) – which might say something to anyone here who’s reading this and now can’t wait for the album – but taken as a stand alone track…and with the benefit of a video behind it, (especially the video) I’ve been appreciating it all the more.

Much of the studio footage in the video was captured four years ago in Glasgow’s Gloworm Studios by Stephanie Gibson. Stephanie, as some readers here will know, was responsible for the portraits and abstract images that helped elevate The Perfect Reminder (my book on the making of the second TCS album) from mere reportage to definitive biography. Stephanie’s video footage was sympathetically edited and knitted together by Chris Dooley. Chris, as some readers here will also know, was responsible for the design, look and feel of The Perfect Reminder, elevating it from definitive biography to luxury item. And why am I telling you this?

I’m telling you this because four years ago, just after our book was given the Saturday night headline slot at the Aye Write book festival in Glasgow, Stephanie and myself were invited to Gloworm for an afternoon. So while Stephanie was filming the band at work, I was sat on a couch in the studio taking it all in; John as he played a chord sequence – warming up, I thought – until Davy leaned over and slid the faders on the desk to bathe the room in a sound of liquid gold – a brand new Trashcans’ track in the process of being born! I could see Stephen in the drum room, working his kit with a tender touch. I could hear Paul’s guitar(s), flown in digitally from the west coast of America and playing fantastically and loudly through the studio’s speaker system. And although I couldn’t yet see Frank, I could hear him and his unmistakable pitch-perfect voice. He was singing slowly – crooning even –  about ‘the likes of Cincinnati‘. Wow, I thought. They’re channelling Scott Walker, but twisting his words through trademark TCS wordplay and turning out a slow-burning beauty…and right before my eyes and ears. If this is the demo, I’m thinking, I can’t wait to hear the finished version.

“Yeah,” said Frank to me a month or so ago. “We binned that one.”

It’s not on the upcoming record at all. Which, again, should give TCS fans a glimpse into the high watermark of quality they demand before they’ll attach their name to a song.

If you watch the video carefully – and don’t blink at the wrong moment – around the 37 seconds mark, you’ll catch a glimpse of my surprised face as Stephanie’s camera swoops down on the sofa I was sitting in while that glorious Trashcans sound filled the room. Look ma! It’s me! In a pop video! What a thrill!

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You can pre-order the new Trashcan Sinatras album Ever The Optimist from all the usual places, including here. Whatchawaitin’ for?

 

 

Get This!, Hard-to-find

Speakers Corner

Craig McAllister

When you first attacked that plank of wood you had the cheek to call an electric guitar, if you were like me you were in immediate need of something with which to amplify your clunky chord changes and morse code ‘solos’. If you were in luck, you might’ve found yourself in possession of a wee Marshall 20W job, with all-important parent-bothering distortion on tap at the turn of its golden dial. You might, if you had an elder sibling who’d already been through this formative stage in life, have access to a Roland Jazz Chorus, its syrupy-thick chorus effect giving you the ideal angle to your jangle. You might even, if you had a dad who’d once dabbled with being a weekend rocker or roller, have access to a Fender or a Vox or similar – a proper amp that required far more volume than was house-friendly in order to sound good.

Me? I had a shitty wee Badger Piccolo. A tiny, tinny 15W affair that only came to life when plugged into a Rocktek distortion pedal. But it was enough to stir enough conviction in my hacked and calloused fingers to stick with this thing called playing guitar.

At one point I graduated to a 30W Peavey. It had a chorus setting. It had a spring reverb that wobbled and vibrated like a violent Hanna-Barbera sound effect if you banged or moved the amp while it was switched on. And it had a push/pull dial that changed the tone from fizz to fffffiiiizzzzz and back again. Coupled with the ever-present Rocktek pedal, this became my (coughs) signature sound.

The young guitar player in me was delighted to see three of my favourite groups employing the Peavey as a means to sculpt their sound. Paul Ryder of the Happy Mondays used one on Tony Wilson’s ‘Other Side Of Midnight’ as the solid foundation upon which the group rattled out their rickety street urchin funk.

Inspiral Carpets had two – two! – on stage at Glasgow Tech, one for the bass and one for a guitarist playing open chords through a fuzz box – just like me!

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Most thrillingly of all, Ride – who had just released the ‘yellow daffodils’ 12” had one just like mine (not the one in the picture above – which means – amp detectives – that Ride had more than one too), propped up on a beer crate beside the drum riser on Glasgow Mayfair’s stage.

Ride? Ride! They make that glorious racket with a Peavey?!

And here was me thinking they’d be standing awkwardly and staring through lank fringes at their desert boots in front of a solid wall of Marshall stacks.

Between Ride and Inspiral Carpets and Happy Mondays, there was, it seemed, hope for bedroom guitarists everywhere. And sometimes, as it turned out, hope is all you have.

This popped up on Instagram recently.

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It’s Pixies’ Joey Santiago with a Telecaster and a Peavey.

Wait! What?

Joey used a Peavey too?!

On Surfer Rosa?!?

On SURFER ROSA?!?!?

That ear-destroying surf punk mix of siren guitars and riffage heavier than a shower of blacksmiths’ anvils was created with a Peavey too?! Who knew?!

This is akin to winning the Le Mans 24hr on a pushbike. Mr Bean knocking out Mike Tyson in the first round. Hearts winning the Scottish Premiership…you get the idea. As unlikely as it seems, it’s quite possible to make thunderous alt rock through a humble Peavey amplifier. Rock me sideways, Joe.

Pixies – Vamos

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‘Estabo pensando sobreviviendo con mi sister en New Jersey!’ goes Frank Black, all menace and snarl. ‘We’ll go to California!’ he screams.

Screeeeeeeee! goes Joey’s Peavey-powered guitar. The rhythm section pummels out a breathless and steady backbeat. Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Joey attacks those six strings like the Boston Strangler himself, bending them, twisting them, grappling the life out of them until ear splitting feedback saws its way through the stew.

At several points there are clangs – instantly recognisbale clangs to any Peavey owner (but who knew at the time?!?) – of Joey hitting, banging, thumping the side of his amp until the reverb spring rattles like a cartoon explosion – that self-same cartoon Hanna-Barbera sound effect first heard at home and in smelly rehearsal rooms, now magnetised to tape forever.

I don’t listen to Pixies that much these days, but Joey’s social media post has had me scurrying back particularly to Surfer Rosa recently. A powerful reminder that the best things are often created in the most simple of ways.

Get This!

Foresight Isn’t Anything At All

Craig McAllister

That episode of The Simpsons with R.E.M. in it never tires. For whatever reason, the group are playing live in Homer’s garage – spoken to rhyme with Farage, Scottish readers – and tearing through a rockin’ version of It’s The End Of The World As We Know It… until they realise that they’re not actually in the private bar of some tech-bro millionaire like they thought they were, but in a hastily converted addendum to the Simpson family’s house. Momentarily enraged, Michael Stipe smashes a beer bottle, ready to attack poor Homer, until he is held back by Mike Mills and Peter Buck.

“No, Michael! That’s not the R.E.M. way!”

“You’re right. Let’s recycle the shards and get out of here,” says a remorseful Stipe, already on his knees and sweeping up the broken glass.

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By 2001, when this Simpsons episode aired, R.E.M., despite their global ubiquity and mass appeal without creating mass market music, had something of a sniggered-at image. They were vocal and active in environmental conservation and recycling issues. Their CD sleeves (no vinyl in ’01!) came printed on recycled card. They played Adam Yauch’s Tibetan Freedom concerts. They donated to the World Wildlife Trust. They aligned themselves to any cause that promoted peace, equality and the non-destruction of the only planet we have to live on… which are all totally admirable and worthy causes, as you know, but causes nonetheless that musicians hadn’t really got behind before.

You’ve gotta kick against what’s gone before in music, so while no act was entertaining the notion of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Starship’ as a means of travel between shows, no-one other than R.E.M. (and maybe Neil Yong) was giving the issue much thought. Nowadays, they’re all at it. Radiohead are extremely vocal on environmental viability. Thom Yorke has played benefit concerts for the Green Party. Coldplay are advocates for sustainable touring, keen to reduce their carbon footprint wherever possible. You won’t find any single-use plastics or meat products at a Billy Eilish show. The 1975 – The 1975!! –  teamed up with Greta Thunberg to release a track, with all profits going to Extinction Rebellion. A cynical marketing opportunity? Possibly, maybe, (definitely!), but one that causes a small ripple of positive effect across the planet.

For all things eco, you can go back to 1989 with R.E.M. Not for nothing is that year’s album called Green. No-one was green in 1989 except R.E.M. and, among a handful of barely-heard – and barely heard of – organisations, Greenpeace, the grandaddy of them all, who themselves only really brought these issues to the mass market once they started sponsoring Glastonbury in 1991.

In fact – and yeah, you were about to point this out – you can go even further back with R.E.M. all the way to 1986 and Life’s Rich Pageant. On this album – R.E.M.’s greatest (fight me, unless that’s not really the R.E.M. fans’ way either) you’ll find Fall On Me, a song which has its lyrical roots in the effects of acid rain. What is it up in the air for indeed.

R.E.M. – Fall On Me

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UNITED STATES – CIRCA 1986: Photo of REM (Photo by Stephanie Chernikowski/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

I’ve been hammering Life’s Rich Pageant this past week. I’d guess everyone’s favourite R.E.M. record is tied up with memory from the first time you heard it – the people and places and things that were going on in your life as it soundtracked it – and so just as Hunky Dory is my favourite Bowie album and Bringing It All Back Home is my favourite Bob Dylan album, My Aim Is True my favourite Elvis Costello record and A Hard Day’s Night my favourite Beatles album – not their best, but my favourite, Life’s Rich Pageant will always be R.E.M. record numero uno. It’s the first album I heard by them and it’s their best record too. Easily. It just is.

On LRP, the group is heading from the underground to the overground. In fact, by now they’ve probably done so, but there’s still enough mystery and obfuscation in their sound, still enough angle in their jangle to keep them independent, or college rock, as they’d say in Athens, GA, that the weirdos haven’t deserted them and the man in the street isn’t quite sure yet of what to make of them. On Life’s Rich Pageant, R.E.M. are flying. They’re tight and muscular (Begin The Begin), they’re esoteric (Underneath The Bunker), they’re heads-down and rockin’ (These Days) and they have a keen ear for a pop super-hook within a murky melody (I Believe).

On Fall On Me, Michael Stipe’s vocal is stately and focused, lending gravitas to a song about the effect of gravity. Mike Mills’ backing vocals soar with a Wilsonesque melancholy, and Peter Buck’s Rickenbacker jangles like the Stateside cousin of Johnny Marr on those early Smiths records, all sad-eyed minors and widescreen major 7ths. As a song, it’s perfect. As a recording, it’s a major tour de force. And, just like the issues it addresses, it’ll never get old.

Get This!, New! Now!, Peel Sessions

To Hell With Poverty!

Craig McAllister

I came to Gang Of Four via the Wedding Present. I was in thrall to Madness and Adam and the Ants and clearly far too young for this thing called post-punk, but I was however just the right age for David Gedge’s gnarly yet faithful reworking of GO4’s I Found That Essence Rare; one group from Leeds being reverentially covered by another, which was somehow, to these ears, a symbiotic moment of baton-passing. I did what most of us do when we discover a new band – I worked backwards to find the source. I’d eventually find …Essence Rare on Gang Of Four’s debut album Entertainment!, an aptly-titled, bone-shaking, nerve-jangling amalgamation of tight ‘n taut basslines, fuss-free drumming and scorching guitar; all pristinely jagged lines and trebly, ear-splitting attack. Jerky music for twitchy people, the sta-cca-cca-cca-ccato guitar stylings belonged to Andy Gill, but the colour on GO4’s razor sharp cheekbones came courtesy of vocalist and lyricist Jon King. Socially-conscious, anti-capitalist and anti-military, King’s words cut just as cleanly, just as sharply as the six strings that rang from Gill’s electric Ibanez.

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As it turns out, Jon King writes exactly the way Gang Of Four sounds.

In his autobiography, From To Hell With Poverty! (published for the first time in paperback on 16th April 2026) there’s nary a flabby line nor bloated opinion. Clean, lean and free of fat, his words are economical and considered, yet shining with individual style and an ear-ringing clarity. If literate and bullshit-free music biographies are your kinda thing, you’ll probably want to read it.

Thrillingly, Jon and his team have asked if Plain Or Pan will run a feature ahead of the book’s publication, so here we are, one aborted Zoom session (hands up – my fault) and a scrambled phone call later.

Me: This music thing, then. What are your earliest memories of music? When did you start playing in bands? Was there a point when you thought, ‘hang on – I could maybe make some sort of a living from this?’

JK: At the risk of saying it’s all in the book…

There was no music at home. We had no record player. We had a wind-up 78 which my mum had picked up at a jumble sale, along with a pile of shellac records. No delta blues classics, unfortunately. Just stuff like The Teddy Bears’ Picnic. On a Sunday we’d listen to Two-Way Family Favourites on the radio, broadcasting from the real fag-end of the British Empire. Light entertainment parlour music  – Max Bygraves and the likes.

I heard music properly for the first time only after I’d passed the 11+ and found myself at Sevenoaks School. The boys in the art room, who’d have been 17 and 18 at the time, played Highway 61 Revisited. Baaam! This totally thrilled me. I’d never heard anything like it. It was anti-authority, driven purely by creative artistic integrity…it was immediately my kind of thing. From that moment on, all my money earned from fruit picking and potato picking went on records. I’d heard Hey Joe and Space Oddity during lessons and these became the first two 7″ singles in my collection. I’d pick lots of records up at jumble sales. Clearly, a lot of parents were emptying out their children’s bedrooms after they’d moved out, and I became the welcome recipient of their abandoned record collections.

I gained a total love of music from those art room listening sessions, but I never really wanted to be in a band. I wanted to be an artist. I went to study Fine Art at Leeds University and a bunch of boys from Sevenoaks followed me. These fellow art room boys – Mark White, Tom Greenhalgh and Kevin Lycett would end up in The Mekons. Adam Curtis would become a documentarian. Paul Greengrass went to Hollywood and directed all those Bourne Supremacy films. Andy Gill would become the guitar player in Gang Of Four. We were a creative, competitive group of friends, pushing one another towards artistic endeavours.

I wanted to write my dissertation on Jasper Johns, the American painter and sculptor and, amazingly, I was given a research grant to go to New York to learn all about him. Andy thought, ‘If he can get to New York, I can too,’ and he got himself a grant as well. I can’t emphasise how extremely lucky I’ve been in life. Sometimes, things happen to me that have had positive outcomes on my situation. This New York trip was one such thing.

We were put up by a woman called Mary Harron. She was a journalist with New York Punk Magazine, just about the definitive word on this new thing. She’d recently broken up with the drummer from the Patti Smith Group. Mary lived in St Marks’s Place, the hippest, most happening area of Manhattan at the time, with jazz clubs around the corner where Coltrane and Davis had played. Debbie Harry lived nearby. Richard Hell too. And she let Andy and I crash on her floor for the duration of our stay. We’d be out all the time, regulars in CBGB’s, getting in for nothing simply by being with Mary, and we’d see all the bands; Television, Blondie, Ramones, Talking Heads.

Because we were always there with Mary, people would ask us, ‘What band are you in?’ Andy would always reply, ‘The Mudlarks’, and they’d all nod knowingly, even although this was entirely fictitious and we had no intentions of becoming musicians. But when we returned to the UK, punk had made its way there and we started thinking about its possibilities. I saw punk as an art project. Music wouldn’t interfere with my painting…it would contribute to it.

Before we knew it, Andy and I had formed not The Mudlarks but Gang Of Four and in no time we’d toured with Buzzcocks. They were great friends and sponsors to us. They still are, actually. It was Steve Diggle’s suggestion that I write this book and I’m so glad I let him inspire me.

We toured the States with Buzzcocks. We’d often play two shows a day; we’d open up for them and then play one of our own shows in a small club elsewhere in the city. At one point, we did something like 40 gigs in 30 days. This is where we really learned to play.

Gang Of Four – I Found That Essence Rare (Peel Session, 9.1.79)

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We paid it back when it was our turn to do headline tours. Over those tours, we had great support acts; REM, Mission of Burma, Pylon, The Specials, The Smiths. U2 opened for us once. We were inspired by Dylan, Television and the likes, and Gang Of Four became inspirations for Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana and REM. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, don’t we? Gang Of Four have a brilliant track record in bringing along groups who would subsequently eclipse us!

I’m still friends with lots of these people. Last year in the States, Mike Mills jammed with us. Peter Buck has too. We never made Entertainment! in order to make loads of money – that was just not in our thoughts when we started the group. My ambition was simply to change the world. At the end of the ’70s we had facism. We had war. We had poverty. We had social issues. I don’t think (Jon sighs in resignation) that I managed to realise that ambition.

I compliment Jon on his book; the writing style, the pace, the unputdownability of it all.

‘Avoid adjectives and adverbs,’ says Jon from down the phone. ‘Avoid cliche. Avoid metaphors and similes.’

This is the writer who, on Entertainment!‘s Glass wrote, ‘I’m so restless, I’m bored as a cat.’

‘Yeah,’ he laughs with a wry grin. ‘It’s a stupid simile too. And cats are anything but bored, aren’t they? They’ve nine lives to live for a start. They’re always up to something. I’m really annoyed with myself for writing a lyric like that.’

Find out what else irks and annoys Jon King in To Hell With Poverty! 

To Hell With Poverty! is published in paperback by Constable on April 16th 2026.

Its launch will be officially marked north of the border by two events in Glasgow and Edinburgh on the 23rd and 24th April. The Glasgow event, at the 1 of 100 premises is sold out. There are a handful of tickets left for the 24th at the Voodoo Rooms. Asking the difficult questions in Edinburgh will be Phill Jupitus.

You’ll probably want to be there. And you’ll definitely want to read it.