Locked Down - Dr John

Provenance: One hundred percent sure that my brother got me into Dr John, although how and when he did remains a mystery. One moment there was no Dr John in the house and then suddenly a 'best of' CD appeared in my brother's room. Anyway, it was very cool.

Happy to say that my brother and I got to see the late Mac Rebennack together at the Barbican Centre, as part of the 2014 London Jazz Festival in a special performance paying tribute to that other favoured son of New Orleans, Louis Armstrong.

Review: There are loads of Dr John albums out there, and I own about four. Why this one? Well, having been stuck in a rut bumping out easy-rollin' rhythm 'n' blues alongside a slew of guest musicians, some bright spark decided that the good doctor needed a bit of lead in his pencil. Enter Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys as producer to stoke the boiler a bit, yet could also be relied upon to be sympathetic towards his subject. Interestingly, Auerbach encouraged Dr John to step away from the piano and onto a range of rather grungy sounding keyboards, whilst he handled guitar duties. Crucially, every song on Locked Down is an original, co-written by Dr John, Auerbach and the band assembled for the album.

As a consequence, Dr John's final studio album of original material sounds fresh, organic, loose and live. Auerbach also gets the production spot on - dusty like the first Wu Tang long player, reverb turned all the way up to spooky, and there's a supreme indifference as to whether instrumental tracks bleed into each other. The end result can only be summed up as sounding downright mean; this is a platter that sounds like it'd beat your granny up for her pension and kick the dog for a laugh. Rather cleverly, it also harks bark to the grimy, indistinct stew (must - not - write - gumbo) of Gris-Gris, the Nite Tripper's very first outing under his own steam.

Whilst this doesn't contain anything quite as weird or demented as 'I Walk On Guiled Splinters' (one of the more disturbing cuts ever committed to tape), Locked Down is dark, swampy and sinister. Dr John spits some surprisingly downbeat, even paranoid, lyrics to the likes of 'Ice Age' (where he compares the CIA to the KKK - nice) and 'Kingdom of Izzness'. I love these songs, with their janky guitars and slightly queasy timekeeping in some quarters, which manage to sound both ramshackle and powerful at the same time.

This sickly, feverish mood persists throughout until the final cut, 'God's Sure Good', at which point the McCrary Sisters come to the fore. On such a necromantic album, it's almost a relief to hear the affirmative, joyous wallop of traditional black gospel, which the sisters provide with gusto at each chorus. Even here, on what should be the most straightforwardly positive song, the denouement morphs into a wild, abandoned jam. Despite the protestations of affinity towards a nominally Abrahamic God, darker forces always seem closer to hand.

In summation, Locked Down is a superb Dr John album - greasy, ugly and shorn of the tameness that had crept into some of his latter-day output. Credit must go to Dan Auerbach. By shutting the door on pipe-and-slippers guest spots and woodshedding a crack band, he managed to coax a set of performances more fiery and vital than anything had sounded in years. Is this Dr John's best album since Goin' Back to New Orleans? Is this Dr John's best since City Lights? You be the judge. Meanwhile, I'm going to skip back to 'Eleggua', which hitches marble-mouthed Nawlins hokum onto a tumbling woodwind riff and rides it all the way home.

Dr John was a big loss. Like his hero Professor Longhair, you knew it was him within seconds; those trilling triplets on the high keys, that entirely unmusical, strangulated rasp that nonetheless sounded perfect atop the jazzy, funky rhythm and blues that was his trademark. I saw him perform twice, and he was spectacular on both occasions. Now all I can do is cue up 'Iko Iko' and daydream about the time I spent back in the Crescent City ten years ago. That's not a bad consolation prize, though, is it?

Texas Flood - Stevie Ray Vaughan

Provenance: Back in the mists of time, long before your Facebooks and Tweet-O-Grams, people did things like collect stuff, get drunk, and attempt to master an instrument. Yes, your humble scribe did some of the former (Panini football stickers, matchboxes) and much of the latter (guitar, a bit of mandolin). As for the drinking? I couldn't possibly say! [Insert winking emoji here.]

My parents very kindly paid for a guitar teacher to do things like point out the wiry bits were called strings, and that it would help if I used both hands. Once basics had been raised to a level of competence, he was keen that I learn to improvise - in essence, to hold enough theory in my head that I was able to react and adapt lead playing, in real-time, to musical structures. A good foundation for this is blues music, which uses the minor pentatonic scale extensively (the bedrock for most rock music) and which often relies on familiar chord progressions.

So, how do you engage a teenage classic rock and metal fanatic with the blues? Give him something suitably rocky and pyrotechnic to aspire towards - and thus, the first blues I ever played was Stevie Ray Vaughan's 'Pride and Joy', which appears on today's album, Texas Flood. I loved it, even the tricksy turnarounds and unfamiliar shuffle feel. Plus it proved to be a watershed moment, as I am now a fully-fledged blues fan; my favourite players are people like Mississippi Fred McDowell and especially the merciless Lightnin' Hopkins, but I'll always retain a soft spot for SRV for providing me with the gateway drug.

Review: Stevie Ray Vaughan came to prominence during the 'blues boom' of the 1980s, which saw the emergence of artists like Robert Cray and the resurrection of others like John Lee Hooker, whose star-studded 1989 album The Healer won a Grammy award. So what was SRV's contribution to the genre? One could argue, nothing new. There are parallels to be drawn between Vaughan and the British guitarist Alvin Lee, who was similarly lionised for his hyperkinetic rhythm 'n' blues playing. An argument could be made that Vaughan was an improvement - defter, more accurate, a better songwriter and, crucially, in possession of a genuine grit 'n' diesel Texas drawl, as opposed to the dorky facsimile that Lee (and, in fairness, many others) tried to conjure up. Unlike Lee, Vaughan didn't stray far from the blues either; yes, he made a cameo on a Bowie album, but his own material was locked down, and when he did interpret the music of others, it was to emphasise its bluesiest elements (his take on Jimi Hendrix's 'Little Wing' being a prime example). There was no meandering into psychedelia with Vaughan, which cannot be said for Alvin Lee and his band Ten Years After.

Let's start off with my own personal bone that requires picking with regards to Texas Flood; 'Pride and Joy' and 'I'm Cryin'' are the same freaking song. I get that the first is celebratory and the latter strikes a more consolatory tone, but dude, write some new music. It's a ten track album that doesn't even top forty minutes and yet here are a couple of 'companion pieces', I guess. A bit of a 'fuck you' to the blues buying public, but I must admit a sneaking respect for this approach. It's like writing a song for your girlfriend, and when she dumps you trying to fit the name of the new squeeze into the melody. Writing the same song for when you're both happy and sad about your partner is, upon reflection, quite an alpha move.

Duplication issues aside, this is a quality slice of 1980s rock-influenced blues. The clean production sound works when recording what is a small combo - Vaughan is backed by bass and drum-mongers Double Trouble throughout - as it brings his ultra-precise lead playing to the fore. Remarkably, for such a polished product I was later to learn that the entirety of Texas Flood was recorded in two days and features no overdubs. Give or take some messing around with the levels, what you're hearing is the live band, it's extraordinarily tight. The vocal performances are fantastic too, and it's boggling to try and comprehend how SRV managed to wring such impassioned performances from both hands and larynx without any need to go back and fix anything.

All the hallmarks of Vaughan's playing are there from the get-go, too; heavy vibrato on bent notes, daggerish little single-fret slides and almost percussive use of double stops. The latter is especially evident on 'Love Struck Baby', a twitchy, fidgety shuffle blues that begins more like the commencement of a boxing bout than a blues song. The most comprehensive displays of SRV's guitar trick-bag are to be found on the instrumentals 'Testify' and Stray-Cats-on-amphetamines rockabilly whirlwind 'Rude Mood', although the dizzying 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' runs them close; and that aforementioned deftness comes to the fore on the closer 'Lenny', another instrumental, in this instance an glimmering, iridescent tribute to Vaughan's partner Lenora Bailey (she thought 'Pride and Joy' had been written for another woman, so SRV wrote her a brand new song - wise man).

And yet.

I can't claim to hold too many original opinions on music; I think my takes on most of these albums resonate with the critic pool at large, albeit not as well written. I do adhere to the odd heresy, like my belief that Neil Young's Trans is misunderstood and ZZ Top's Recycler is not devoid of merit, but by and large I'm reasonably vanilla. Thus, here's my lukewarm take on Texas Flood that anyone familiar with SRV has probably seen ambling over the horizon for a while now - it sacrifices soul at the altar of technical ecstasy.

The problem is probably me and my relation to blues music. When I interrogate my own feelings about Stevie Ray Vaughan and the blues I feel a bit queasy, to say the least; am I like the martinet Ewan MacColl, insistent on "authenticity" above all else? Would I have pulled the plug on Dylan? I've been a good boy, I read Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta and feel clued up enough not to fall into the authenticity trap (I've written about this before now), so why do I have such a problem with Texas Flood? Is it merely because this is tagged as a blues album, and so I'm bringing a whole mess of expectations to the table that really shouldn't be there? How come I can enjoy the 'newgrass' movement begun in the 1970s (which sought to fuse bluegrass to styles such as jazz - and this has just reminded me to go and listen to some David Grisman Quintet) without my appreciation of bluegrass colouring the experience? Perhaps because my knowledge of bluegrass is dwarfed by what I (think I) know about blues music, and is unencumbered by those strange gatekeeper tendencies that can sometimes evolve alongside a burgeoning personal passion.

Sadly, I must conclude that I'm simply too smart to properly appreciate Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Genuinely, though, I really must stop sorting things into boxes and weighing up their merits accordingly. Because taken at face value, Texas Flood is a rollicking good time. It's an album full of good singing, good playing and lots of whizzy guitar licks, and so in the future I'm going to endeavour to meet the album on these terms alone. Even if 'Pride and Joy' and 'I'm Cryin'' are the same freaking song, goddamn.

Bella Donna - Stevie Nicks

Provenance: Last Sunday (8 March 2020) was International Women's Day - and with Sundays being the day of the week I generally reserve to update this blog, it would've been fitting to have written about a female artist. Believe me, I am acutely aware how much this blog skews towards the XY chromosomal combination.

However, I was enjoying a long weekend in Poland at the time, so have had to defer this review. Please, feel free to interpret this review as metonymical of my entire approach to IWD2020 - late, half-assed and woefully insufficient.

Anyway, I bought Bella Donna because I realise it contained the two Stevie Nicks solo songs I was familiar with (I like both), plus the album art is top notch. I don't know what the fuck that sad thing in the bottom left-hand corner is, but it wouldn't be out of place in an abode with a 'live, laugh, love' wall sticker. Also, I had just assumed that Nicks was riffing on a witchy vibe by holding a snowy owl, or maybe a dove, given the lyrics to 'Edge of Seventeen'; I'd never really looked too closely, and I register a mild jolt of glee and surprise every time I squint at the cockatoo perched on her hand.

Review: My version of Bella Donna is a three-CD set, containing the original album on one disc, a whole mess of bonus tracks on a second, and a third containing a 1981 live show. For the purpose of this review I'll only be looking at Bella Donna itself, but the live set is rather wunderbar, and the extras include Nicks' contribution to bonkers Canadian animated feature Heavy Metal. To those of you who are not part of the cognoscenti where Heavy Metal is concerned, it's a sci-fi anthology film featuring music by Blue Oyster Cult, Devo, Donald Fagen and Sammy Hagar (amongst a raft of others), plus vocal performances by Harold Ramis and Jim's dad from the American Pie franchise. Go see it now if you've yet to do so.

So, to Bella Donna - which sounds pretty much exactly how you imagine a 1981 solo release by Stevie Nicks should sound. By which, I mean that it's sumptuously produced, tastefully arranged (ahh, is that a hint of 'congas in the night' I hear?) and leaning heavily on the most successful period of her career to date, the soft-rock behemoth that was late-1970s Fleetwood Mac. The title track itself has it all - the push-pull dynamics, woozy lead guitar and Nicks' oddly bleating vocals gliding atop the quiet storm. Congas are present. It should be dreck, but it's beguiling really, lulling the listener into a kind of drowsy acquiescence.

It's curious to hear the shift that occurs on track three, 'Stop Draggin' My Heart Around', Nicks' collaboration with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, because we're suddenly snapped out of the soporific twilight conjured up early doors. It's a stretch to say that Petty and chums inject any sense of punky urgency - this is the Heartbreakers cruising at low altitude - but there's definitely a little more spit 'n' grit present. It also works splendidly, Nicks' gossamer (took me six paragraphs to use this word, gimme some credit) presence butting up against Petty's adenoidal wail agreeably.

Perhaps the most impressive achievement of Bella Donna is that it's entirely self-contained, its own universe of angst, loss, regret and heartache. Even when Petty and, later on, Don Henley get to share the spotlight it's always as guests in Nicks' world of pristine high drama. The only real misstep on the album, 'After the Glitter Fades', still inhabits this darkling soft-goth realm despite being a hokey cocaine-cowboy crack at country. No matter though, because straight afterwards comes the monumental 'Edge of Seventeen'.

For the record, 'Edge of Seventeen' is a song I can listen to again and again. It's pretty much perfect, right? From the juddering guitar riff to Nicks' tough, slightly strained vocal it sounds weird and arresting from the get-go; and the layered voices swooping in from all angles give proceedings a hint of hysteria, as if 'Edge of Seventeen' is about to break apart under the weight of its own foreboding and magnificence. All of this is underscored by an almost unbearable tension - the needle-point rat-a-tat guitar merciless, without any kind of drum break to provide a comfortable groove until it feels almost too late.

It's with absolutely no sense of denigration that I consider Bella Donna to be the stylistic companion piece to Christopher Cross' debut, seeing as I view that doozy as a yacht rock masterpiece. However, whilst Cross works with the pastel tones of a Malibu sunset, Nicks' post-meridian music is redolent of flickering candelabras and pregnant thunderheads. Interestingly, it's when the blokes get in on the act that Bella Donna sounds most earthbound, and Henley's otherwise likeably vulnerable crooning on 'Leather and Lace' is a little thumping compared to Nicks' glabrous keening. I haven't even found time or space to give tracks like 'Kind of Woman', 'Think About It' or 'How Still My Love' their due, each a little sparkling mote of glitter.

Bella Donna is a triumph, a swirling ocean of yearning and romance. Why are we listening to tinny, minor-key sadsack robo-pop when this exists, I wonder?

The Captain And Me - The Doobie Brothers

Provenance: The Doobie Brothers had long been a shadowy presence in my musical consciousness prior to picking up The Captain and Me. I had vague notions that they were a big deal in the USA, and knew 'Long Train Running' (which is on Captain...) from a variety of dad-rock compilations. Everything else is a little hazy.

For example, did I know 'China Grove' before playing Grand Theft Auto? I certainly covered it in a band later on, but I can't say whether my virtual capers predated my purchase of this album or not. I knew the song 'Listen To The Music' long ago, but wasn't sure who did it (NB: the Doobie Brothers). Same deal for 'What A Fool Believes', and in any case it doesn't sound much like the Doobies; it's more akin to the unholy prospect of Captain and Tennille fronted by a walrus. No good, man.

So, at the point of buying this album I perhaps thought of the Doobs as a bit southern rocky, slightly funky ("but can you imagine Doobie in your funk? Whooo!") and maybe prone to the odd boogie number. And you know what? I was right.

Review: Everything on The Captain and Me is done tastefully and is in its place. The rocky bits rock out, the mellow bits are nice and serene, the quiet bits are quiet and the loud bits are also quiet. It's well-played, well-sung, goes down smoothly and is about as edgy as a damp cabbage. Keep this one on file for a sun-dappled day suited for ingesting soft drugs and makin' it with your old lady.

Weirdly enough, given the above, I don't hate it. I hate bits of it, sure, but overall The Captain and Me coasts by on just enough charm and finesse that I can't bring myself to condemn it outright. There's a slickness to proceedings that, as a fan of Steely Dan and Christopher Cross, I view largely as a positive. Sure, I've got Crass and Stooges albums tucked away (yet to be reviewed, I remind myself) but the top-down, ease-the-seat-back coolness of American FM rock (always American, as the British flavour always seems a bit desperate) can work a strange magic on me. Take that old warhorse, 'Long Train Running' - a clumsy funker featuring prominent congas; yet it glides by on a sublime vocal hook coasting over the top of attractively itchy guitar work.

That equally hoary slice of highway razzmatazz, 'China Grove', a strange paean about what sounds like an utterly ghastly commune in Texas, wins out with a guitar riff that is kissing cousin to Nazareth's 'Hair of the Dog', but it's infinitely smoother and less clay-footed in execution. I suppose a certain nimbleness and elasticity accounts for the appeal of the Doobie Brothers on this album; high mids, choked-off bass (for the most part) and guitars that cluck and peck, rather than sledgehammer you into acquiescence. Keep it light and airy, give the melodies a bit of breathing space, add a bit of diet bluegrass acoustic guitar and you're onto a winner, baby.

However, the eagle-eyed amongst you will probably gather from "I don't hate it" and "I hate bits of it" that I'm not entirely uncritical of The Captain and Me. And these aren't the small, easily surmountable bugbears such as the hamfisted stab at a multi-part song that makes 'Clear as the Driven Snow' sound like a bargain basement Kansas ft. Roy Harper track, because if I bitch about that I might as well throw out most of my 1970s rawk platters. No, we're back onto women getting a bum deal from these fucking hippies, again.

Thus we have 'Dark Eyed Cajun Woman', a track that hangs off a knotty, stuttering guitar riff which is great, great, great. What could be a witchy little swamp rocker instead gives one a bit of a chill with the lyric "You know, I took you for a small girl / Really not quite seventeen." Admittedly our serenade goes on to state, with some relief I should imagine, that he was wrong and that the object of his ardour was a grown woman. Phew! No need to join the ranks of the Rolling Stones and Faster Pussycat in my hall of shame.

The other lowlight comes in 'South City Midnight Lady', which has a title that makes me want to reflexively puke. It's actually sports one of the prettier melodies on Captain..., a gently yearning thing that the Eagles used to be able to conjure up before they dived into a hillock of fine Colombian. However, come the chorus and we're getting the following being dribbled out:

South city midnight lady
I'm much obliged indeed
You sure have saved this man whose soul was in need

At this point I'm scooping up the vomitus so I can swallow it back down and re-evacuate this shit out of the most fitting orifice. No name, no agency, no nothing about the person this song is addressed to aside from what she can do for the drunkard night owl she's unlucky enough to be lumbered with. Not especially egregious on its own, but as part of the wider Captain... context, women only serve as objects to be desired or discarded. The way this is simpered out pisses me off, and the cherry on top of the turd is that awful faux-Southern gentlemanly "much obliged indeed". I'd haul these guys in front of the Hague for that alone. Incidentally, the next song, on which the Doobies try (and fail) to sound tough, is called 'Evil Woman'. Of course it is. Of course.

(Which is not to say you can't do a song like that; ultimately it's the prerogative of the artist. But ELO can do an 'Evil Woman' with at least some degree of wit and accomplishment, and even Cliff Richard can pull off a 'Devil Woman' by making it a surreal end-of-the-pier chiller, one that he can never perform again because it's too spooky for his religious faith to handle.)

So, what the hell, go listen to The Captain and Me for an undemanding forty minutes or so. There's good singing, good playing and some sweet harmonies to be had. I personally prefer this rotating cast of vocalists than the era where Michael McDonald is thrown into the mix, but whatever. Best enjoyed with a cold beer and an empty brain.

11 - The Smithereens

Provenance: I'm screwing my eyes up in concentration here as I struggle to work out how I've ended up with only one Roy Harper but three Smithereens albums at the time of writing. Hell, I have two (should've been three) Autograph albums.

There's a mere wisp of an idea blowing around in my brainbox that it relates to a message board thread about great local bands who never really got the national exposure they were due. I believe the Smithereens received a couple of mentions from New Jersey based posters; enough to pique my interest at any rate. Autograph aside, that message board's hit rate has been decent, and evidently Smithereens albums weren't exactly going for a king's ransom as I bought three in one fell swoop.

First impressions aren't good though, are they? That's some really desperate cover art. Why they even went with an Ocean's 11 theme is mystifying, as there's nary a hint of Rat Pack to be found anywhere in the Smithereen's back catalogue, as far as I'm aware. The only thing I can think of is that the New Jersey-based band shared a home base with some of the Chairman of the Board's friends, associates and acquaintances.

Review: Not bad. Not the kind of thing I would usually go for, but 11 is listenable enough to be on my iPod as a change of pace. 

How would I describe the sound of the Smithereens on 11? They are right up there in the 'superior bar band' category that is topped by the E Street Band, and often includes acts such as Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and Graham Parker & the Rumour. Definitely, then, an impression that this is music played by blue collar strivers, though with less of the soul influence than some of the acts in the genre. You could also say that they're college rock-adjacent, though at the noisier end of the spectrum; you could imagine the Smithereens playing on a bill with Camper Van Beethoven before slinking off to the bus to listen to AC/DC. Lastly, there's a discernible power-pop strain to 11, as most of the tracks are built around strong, catchy melodies. 

So, some nice influences in the mix, but the fact that I can so readily locate them probably contributes to why they were never world beaters - a lack of originality. Undoubtedly decent crafters of song, the Smithereens just lack that spark or originality or a signature twist that says "this is a Smithereens record." No great shame in that at all. Instead, we get rock music with its foundations on display, rendered here very competently, sometimes superbly, and almost always enjoyably. 

Oh, oh, I'm so downbeat! Look, here are the good things - firstly, singer-songwriter Pat DiNizio devotes himself to writing about love and loss in an admirably single-minded manner. Romance is always a good topic in popular music, and it's served very well here on the quieter tracks such as 'Blue Period', tracks that invariably use the cool major-minor trick I consider to be the hallmark of all the best love songs. I've been listening to a lot of 1960s pop recently, and I'm hearing a lot of what makes the best of that era so appealing; alongside the cute chord changes, there's some neat harmonising and judicious use of female backing vocals to be found - 'Baby Be Good' features all three.

The late DiNizio also wins out as the front for all this material, as he sounds like the kind of guy who had his heart broken a few times. He can sound defiant, such as on the stadium rocker standout 'A Girl Like You', but mostly he's the friendzone incarnate. Perhaps not the most flattering characterisation, true, yet 11 would suffer if the Smithereens' singer was some alpha-male heartthrob. All this comes to a head on the curious 'William Wilson', which despite being in possession of an ambiguous lyric, comes across like a Gen X retread of the Kinks' hero worship number 'David Watts'. (DiNizio's own explanation of 'William Wilson' hardly helps - it's variously about Brian Wilson, an Edgar Allan Poe story and the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.) 

Another point in the Smithereens' favour is that 11 benefits from a punchy, chunky production sound. Just as the best power-pop often possesses a hint of venom amidst all the prettiness and candyfloss, DiNizio's wimpy descants strut from the speakers like puffed-up beachfront beefcakes. It's all rather larky! 

It's just a shame, then, that even on such a short collection - it clocks in at under 35 minutes - 11 runs out of puff on the last two numbers. Firstly, 'Maria Elena' features what sounds like an accordion. I don't even care if it isn't an accordion (I think it is), I dislike accordions in rock music almost as much as I dislike whistling. Leave accordions to zydeco musicians, French street performers and Peter Sarstedt, that's what I say. Finally, 'Kiss Your Tears Away' means that 11 wheezes to its conclusion - no amount of jangly, raga-inflected guitar can save what is a soporific and low energy workout, even if DiNizio is at his most sensitively simpering best. My advice would be to skip back to the start and give 'A Girl Like You' one final blast - it's just that good.

Beggars Banquet - The Rolling Stones

Provenance: I received this as a 17th birthday present from two friends, Stef and Amy. Pretty good going for two 16 year-olds who admittedly didn't share my taste in music.

Review: The Rolling Stones have floated around my consciousness ever since I can recall being aware of music, albeit in compilation formats. This was my first Rolling Stones studio album, and it was one of the few CDs that followed me to university. As such, I've listened to it a lot, and it's fair to say that I'm deeply smitten. However, as with many ageing partnerships, one party (me) is starting to get a little rattled by some of Beggars Banquet's peculiarities.

The first one is that I simply don't like what is probably the most celebrated track on the album, 'Sympathy For the Devil'. Just as I don't like whistling on record, neither do I enjoy the weird hooting that plagues half the track. I could possibly tolerate a few bars of hoots here and there, I'm not an unreasonable man; and I positively love 'Sympathy's...' sulphurous lyrics and the hypnotic, insistent candomble rhythm. Yet I almost find myself dreading the commencement of the hoots, because it smothers all those elements that otherwise make the lead-off number a corker. For what it's worth, those nabobs of taste and sensibility over at Rolling Stone rank this the 32nd greatest song ever, so what do I know?

The other issues I have go a little deeper than simply not liking a musical choice or two. A good fifty years and change has passed since Beggars Banquet came into being, so I wish to be careful that I don't slip into anachronism here, but I also claim it as my right in 2020 to find 'Stray Cat Blues' unpleasant. I wasn't too keen on glam-metal guttersnipes Faster Pussycat making approving noises about underage girls, and the same applies to the Stones, no matter that they're treated as the more august and accomplished act. The shame here is that 'Stray Cat Blues' is a smashing rock song, a grinding, swaggering thing, but it's completely undermined by the grim subject matter.

An extremely feeble justification, perhaps, is that 'Stray Cat Blues' is documentary-as-art, a chronicling of the spirit of the age. Because in the world of rock, vulnerable girls were undoubtedly being abused by men, many of whom we now consider to be national treasures. We're happy to (rightly) shun the predator who farted out bubblegum like 'I'm the Leader of the Gang', but less keen to mete out the same treatment to the guys behind 'Space Oddity' and 'Stairway to Heaven', whose transgressions may have been more opportunist or incidental, but which would hardly escape censure if they were carried out by the Average Joe living down the street. Will popular music face its reckoning, or are we just going to wait for these alleged abusers to die quietly?

My other big problem with Beggars Banquet is one that I feel is a little more complex. 'Prodigal Son' but just be my favourite cut on the album - a faithfully downhome recreation of Reverend Robert Wilkins' blues parable. It's the song that pushed me to try open tuning for the first time, opening up new musical vistas for this bodger. So what's my beef? Well, at what point does a tribute, or an attempt at authenticity cross over into something a tad more...problematic? The Rolling Stones made much hay from assimilating / appropriating / popularising (delete as applicable) black blues and R&B music, and in fairness to them Jagger and Richards have never hesitated to publicise the names behind the music. Undoubtedly, all blues-based music contains its own gestures and semiotics, one of which is the almost ubiquitous 'mid-lantic' voice adopted by British exponents, which I have no problem with. However, on 'Prodigal Son' it feels like Jagger takes it a step or two too far, and steps over a line into minstrelsy. One can be generous and hope that the intentions were pure, but the fact remains: it's an uncomfortable listen.

I always think of Beggars Banquet as the most bluesy of the Stones' albums, but closer examination suggests that only about half the joints qualify. We've got the aforementioned 'Prodigal Son', the grisly 'Parachute Woman', 'Dear Doctor' and the beautiful, pining 'No Expectations'. Maybe my mistake is down to these being my personal picks. Nothing else, aside from 'Sympathy For the Devil' is bad, but 'Jig-Saw Puzzle' floats by a little and the country gospel closer 'Salt of the Earth' feels a mite wan and insincere for my tastes. There's no fucking with 'Street Fighting Man' though, which contains a bit of welcome bite and snap, plus the cryptic lyric 'Well now what can a poor boy do / 'Cept for sing in a rock 'n' roll band / 'Cause in sleepy London Town there ain't no place for a street fighting man'. I wonder whether, given the unrest on the continent, and the protests against the Vietnam War in America, Jagger and Richards weren't throwing a couple of jabs at the relative torpor of London? The Stones do politics, eh?

I'm sorry I haven't talked about the music so much here, because much of it is really fun. Beggars Banquet is loose, shambling and a bit scruffy in places, but hangs together through will and personality. It also contains good examples of what Keith Richards called 'acoustic glue' in his autobiography, essentially keeping an acoustic guitar strumming away whatever is happening out front in a bid to force some cohesion to proceedings. If you can stomach the shit bits, Beggars Banquet is otherwise a tour-de-force of British R&B. It's a big 'if', though.

S.F. Sorrow - The Pretty Things

Provenance: I can't imagine I bought this album without reading about it somewhere. It's very possible that it's another Classic Rock job, although what works against that theory is the fact that I like this album.

Review: I like this album, I love this album, and I think I instinctively knew I'd regard this as something special the moment I heard the weird bent note that serves as an introduction to S.F. Sorrow. As with many wonderful 1960s offerings, where the studio became a playground of the imagination, on this collection the Pretty Things conjured up a raft of sounds that I've yet to hear on any other recording. Thus, I can identify the song 'S.F. Sorrow Is Born' within about half a second.

It's worth noting at this stage that, alongside being a landmark in British psychedelia, S.F. Sorrow is a concept album - maybe the first concept album, as we recognise them, inasmuch as the songs are thematically linked and a narrative flows throughout. As with many of their counterparts dipping their two in the lysergic end of the pop spectrum, a debt is owed to Lewis Carroll's prism of surrealism. However, the biggest IOU needs to go to the Beatles. The Pretty Things went through quite some metamorphosis to reach this point; their first two albums were raw, almost troglodytic R&B, but third album Emotions combined this with a strain of freakbeat. S.F. Sorrow feels like a further filtering of sensibility, a dawning craftsmanship to go with their undoubted energy. Also thrown into the mix is Edwardiana, which no doubt coloured the decision to shape this album around the Great War.

As with the Small Faces, the Beatles, the Hollies and especially the Kinks (who would also look backwards with The Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)) there is a sensibility to all this that is peculiarly British - again, perhaps derived from the readiness of the Beatles to place Music Hall influences front and centre in their music. Even when sung in the mid-Atlantic voicing unique to popular music, it sounds British - nay, English - and never more so when you're yanked back to this dreary little island by accents that seem to have faded somewhat over the past half-century. The verses to the wonderful 'Baron Saturday', for example, are sung-spoke in an uptight, campy sneer that's most reminiscent of Peter Cook (of all people), whilst the plummy voice reading the names of those lost in action at the end of 'Private Sorrow' sounds like it belongs in a museum.

(It's probably worth a quick synopsis of the plot - halfway through my review (I'm good at structure!) - as far as I can make out: a boy called S.F. Sorrow is born; meets a girl; serves in the trenches; is then due to be reunited with the girl who is travelling to meet him on an airship that suffers the same fate as the Hindenburg; and finally, overcome with grief, retreats into a bizarre internal world until he dies alone.)

It can't be overstated how much of a sway the Beatles of Sgt. Pepper has over this album. Both 'She Says Good Morning' and 'Baron Saturday' feature choruses that would bring nods of approval from Lennon and McCartney, whilst 'Bracelets of Fingers' (superb title) starts with a harmonised intro of blissed-out "love, love, love" that suggests to the listener that, perhaps, love is all you need. However, whilst on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band the Beatles' emotional lexicon ran as far as bittersweet, the Pretty Things embrace full on bleakness. 'I See You', a number that ebbs and swells like the Moody Blues at their most stately, describes a mind succumbing to dementia, and the pulsating 'Old Man Going', underscored by some Black Sabbath guitar (yes, really) is simply harrowing. The last few tracks on S.F. Sorrow are unutterably dark, and prefigure the boom of downer rock that signalled the sunset on the Age of Aquarius brought about by Altamont and too many bad trips.

However, if I've made it all sound rather derivative, don't be fooled; there's magic on this album. I mentioned Lewis Carroll early on, but the quasi-nonsense lyrics also tip a wink to Edward Lear (and there's even a mention of a 'runcible spoon' in 'Baron Saturday', the sneakiest track on here). As mentioned before, 'Old Man Going' does sound like an ur-Sabbath at times; 'Balloon Burning' feels like a journey to the centre of the mind with its nagging, horror-show lead guitar; and perhaps best of all is 'Private Sorrow', which combines a doddery martial beat with vocals so guileless and wide-eyed that the shrapnel flying overhead transform into objects of kaleidoscopic wonderment.

It would also be remiss of me not to return to the ultimate track on S.F Sorrow, which as I mentioned earlier, completes a trifecta of misery. Yes, 'Loneliest Person' is a glum meditation on solitude but it is also the most beautiful acoustic ballad I can recall hearing in a long while, flickering briefly like the flame of a matchhead before disappearing into smoke and silence.

Hot Shots: #13 - Tower of Strength - Frankie Vaughan

Frankie Vaughan aka Mr Moonlight was an easy listening icon of the late 1950s into the 1960s, but here in his gutsiest performance he resembles nothing less than a human wind tunnel. Don't believe me? Then why not hear what the good folk over at the excellent Freaky Trigger website say in words more eloquent than I could ever muster:

A record that anticipates, outdoes, and sadly fails to prevent Tom Jones, “Tower Of Strength” is the pop equivalent of those great, famous old Charles Atlas ads. Hey! Wimp! Fed up with having sand kicked in your face? Well, we can’t promise you the secrets of muscle mystery, but we can slap your frustration on vinyl and let you howl along as if you did have biceps like steel cords. 

Frankie Vaughan’s performance is beserk – check that first verse, he bellows the lines and then ends each one – “door!”, “knees!”, “mee-eee!” – with a different kind of shriek. When he comes back for more in verse two his voice is more of a bassy gasp, and then he ends it all with a cod-opera flourish. Marcello C has called this one of the great British soul singles – I’d agree, but I think it’s helped hugely by being recorded near the beginning of soul, before its emotional lexicon had been fully compiled. 

In the right mood “Tower Of Strength” can harrow you, but in another mood – which also turns out to be ‘right’ – it’s an absolute hoot. Like much of my favourite British music, you can take it as seriously as you like – or need.

Super! Go and read everything else on the site too, it's boss.

Welcome To The Pleasuredome - Frankie Goes To Hollywood

Provenance: The Burger King advert that featured 'Two Tribes' made a big impression on me. So when I saw this for a princely £2 in HMV, I considered it a low risk gamble.

Review: One of the most baffling, surreal pop experiences you can subject yourself to. Almost everyone knows the immaculate credentials of 'Relax', 'Two Tribes' and 'The Power of Love', but do you know they come from a sprawling double album that features covers of Edwin Starr, Bruce Springsteen and Dionne Warwick? Or that the first track is an aural wonderworld that stretches to thirteen minutes? Or that Chris Barrie (Red Dwarf, The Brittas Empire) provides not one, but two impersonations for spoken word passages?

Like The Lexicon of Love, a favourite album of mine, this is identifiably a Trevor Horn production. As with everything he turned his hand to during this era, ...Pleasuredome sounds incredible on a good set of speakers; and it helps that the performances were given a polish thanks to the presence of various studio hacks. Songwriting credits are spread amongst the band on the original cuts, but singer Holly Johnson is probably the only member of Frankie... who can be counted as a consistent presence.

The only time Horn's golden touch turns to shit is the completely gratuitous, chintzy cover of Warwick's 'San Jose (The Way)' One might argue that most of the covers, skits and interludes are gratuitous, given that they amount to little more than padding, but 'San Jose' simply doesn't fit in with the bombastic, priapic thrust of almost everything else on ...Pleasuredome. It's pretty insipid, especially when compared to their hemi-powered turbo through Springsteen's hoary old classic 'Born To Run' (incidentally, I knew the Frankie... version before the Springsteen original, and I prefer it). Admittedly, the cover of 'War' sounds a little anodyne, sacrificing the raw funk power of the original instrumentation for synthesizers, but it's saved by a bizarre intro courtesy of the aforementioned Chris Barrie, rambling away in a startlingly good Ronald Reagan take-off.

The covers aside, about the only other aspect of ...Pleasuredome I don't like is 'The Power of Love'. Although it's Johnson's most assured vocal on the album (albeit shorn of his usual winking seediness), overall it's a sluggish, insincere mess. How it became the Christmas-defining giant it has morphed into is anyone's guess; I was going to say it belongs in the same division of insipid yuletide pap as East 17's 'Stay Another Day', but that's harsh on Brian Harvey (a man who managed to run himself over after consuming too many jacket potatoes) and company. Go ahead, call me a tin-eared poltroon, but it's a shit song.

However, elsewhere the music fizzes, bubbles, pumps and shimmers in gloriously overblown style. It's easy to forget just how pounding 'Relax' sounds with the dials turned up; on the other hand, it's difficult to understand just how BBC programmers let this one through the net to be played on daytime radio when even the bass line sounds this obscene. The other superstar number, 'Two Tribes', is thrillingly propulsive, coming on more like Iron Maiden's 'Wrathchild' than any piece of chart fluff has any right to. It's also slyly self-referential with the lyric 'Are we living in a land / Where sex and horror are the new gods?', when ...Pleasuredome contains 'Relax' (which was accompanied by a suitably deviant music video) and 'Krisco Kisses', a snazzy paean to fisting.

On that point - the what was originally side four contains some lesser known gems (and 'The Power of Love'), all written by Frankie... personnel. Neither 'Black Night White Light' nor 'The Only Star In Heaven' are classics, but both have their merits; the former rendered especially attractive by its moody minimalism and stuttering rhythms. There's a couple of decent Frankie... generated moments on side three too, chief amongst them the jive-talkin' funker 'Wish (The Lads Were Here)', which features some truly tintinnabulous slap-bass playing.

The very definition of a mixed bag, then, but with Horn at the helm ...Pleasuredome almost always defies banality with sheer presence and heft. Even the quieter moments are swaddled in banks of keyboards and guitar, culminating in a comfortable mid-range miasma that bathes the eardrums. How else, honestly, could you get away with a track like 'Welcome To The Pleasuredome', with its gongs, harmonica, Fairlights, jungle ululations and twisted snatches of Samuel Taylor Coleridge? It rises and swoops like a Gershwin rhapsody for nearly quarter of an hour and never once grows wearying. In some ways it resembles Rush's '2112', inasmuch as it serves as a blueprint for everything to follow. Bonkers, over the top, sublime.

Oh, and Barrie's other impersonation? Prince Charles, ruminating upon the male orgasm. Have fun, kids!

Edgar Broughton Band - Edgar Broughton Band

Provenance: I'm reasonably conscious of the fact that to make points about music I often grab at comparisons. It's cheap and easy, but it relies on the reader knowing something of the artists I use as comparators. I've oft seen this technique used as a form of one-upmanship, a chance to preen with a display of obscurantism designed to dazzle the poor reader.

I realise I'm guilty of this, but in mitigation, I barely know anything. So when I hear wobbly, bubbly synth soundscapes I think "that sounds like the Alan Parsons Project", and when I hear dark, off-kilter psych I think "that sounds like the Edgar Broughton Band." Or more accurately, that sounds like Edgar Broughton Band, their third album, because it's the only album of theirs I own.

Anyway, I saw these guys raving it up in a BBC4 documentary on psychedelia so I bought what looked to be their most promising album. This is it, and I'm now going to review it, so next time I say "this sounds like the Edgar Broughton Band" you can scratch your chin and say "yes, of course" to yourself and feel a whole lot better.

(By the way, earlier in the week I was in a record store with a friend when a vaguely familiar song came on. "That", I started to chirp like the unthinking automaton I am rapidly turning into, "sounds like the Alan Parsons Project". It was Pink Floyd. Again, to defend myself, I'm pretty sure Alan Parsons was the engineer on the track in question.)

Review: I am always up for a good psych band, and the best I've witnessed in a long time was Kikagaku Moyo. What made them stand out from the other acts on the bill was their discipline. Whilst their support were content to meander pleasantly in the realms of sub-Hawkwind space rock, Kikagaku Moyo took a mentality of the cold-blooded killer to their music. That's not to say it couldn't be gentle or affecting, but there was no flab, no excess and they could turn on a sixpence when required. This aspect to their performance was almost as impressive as the music itself.

Likewise, there is little that's too loose on Edgar Broughton Band, and certainly compared to their lysergic-powered contemporaries there is precious little dicking about. Live, apparently, it was a different story, but by and large the temptation to wig out is reigned in. As an individual who finds the Grateful Dead and those interminable fucking 'Mountain Jam' tracks on the Allman Brothers' Eat A Peach albums the very antithesis of good music, this is most welcome indeed. (NB - I like it when good musicians stretch out; there's plenty in jazz, a good few electric blues artists who understand the push 'n' pull dynamics of tension, and I will defend Hawkwind to the hilt; but the prospect of Led Zeppelin 'jamming' a track for half an hour gives me happy thoughts about cyanide pills.)

It's probably a major dysfunction of mine that I'm mildly surprised every time at how much of a country influence is evident on what would have been side one of Edgar Broughton Band. There's a fair amount of acoustic instrumentation scattered throughout, and even some rather cornpone harmonica (though it is very enjoyable, I confess, I confess!). To undercut the rootsiness, there's also a sense of darkness seething throughout; 'Poppy' sounds like a druggy, pin-eyed 'Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?' and 'The Birth' is an unnerving slice of goggly hysteria.

The standout, however, is the majestic 'Evening Over Rooftops', which begins in a quietly unsettling way and builds and builds to a wild, swirling crescendo. The best aspect of 'Evening Over Rooftops' are the lyrics, which manage to be surreal and terrifying at the same time. I think what seizes me each time I hear 'Evening Over Rooftops' is that I can't recall another rock song with such an unsteadying lyric; it's like the most deathly of Anna Akhmatova's poems set to a kind of symphonic armageddon. Intriguingly, the backing singers on 'Evening...' are the Ladybirds, most notable for their frequent appearances on The Benny Hill Show.

Side two drops off a little bit, and although there's nothing here I actively dislike, 'Madhatter' grates a little with its rinky-dink Syd Barrett affectations. Still, there's more than enough to hold the attention - 'House of Turnabout' ducks and weaves nicely, 'Getting Hard/What Is a Woman For?' is another fantastic slowburn track with suitably bonkers vocal (points off for the horrible, horrible title though) and 'Thinking Of You' is a chilling, spiky cut of Brit folk (featuring Mike Oldfield on mandolin!), coming across like a dead-eyed Incredible String Band, or a twisted Planxty (minus the Irish brogue). Edgar Broughton's singing merits a mention, because it's hard and tough most of the time, and at times he genuinely evokes Till Lindemann of Rammstein fame.

Okay, so the album ends on a bit of a crawl with the surprisingly schmaltzy sounding 'For Doctor Spock', but its saved by its elliptical lyric featuring babies going on strike (the Dr Spock of the title being Benjamin Spock, the famous parenting guru), resonating with the environmental concerns that flit in and out of Edgar Broughton Band's music. Overall, it's a weird, disconcerting and varied journey through a bingo hall of early 1970s Brit psych, but rewarding for the sojourner. Rewarding? Bloody brilliant. Also, the bonus tracks on my CD are cool, which is never a given on these reissues, standout number 'Call Me A Liar' hitting a real groove.