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From the deliberately saccharine sweetness of ‘An MP speaks’ to the Byrdsian jangle and drone of ‘Write to your MP today’, McCarthy held firm conceptually. Across their three LPs and nine singles or EPs, the music jangled and the words jarred. And then that was that, the concept perhaps inevitably exhausted. Malcolm Eden resurfaced briefly as Herzfeld while Tim Gane and Lætitia Sadier went on to form Stereolab, staying true to McCarthy’s melodic foundations but introducing Germanic rhythmic influences and a more abstract lyrical palette. Which is not to say that McCarthy did not progress, for they were always trying out new settings and subjects.
For the second issue of my fanzine, before the release of I am a wallet, Malcolm sent me three sides of foolscap in answer to some deliberately vague prompts – you could hardly call them questions. All I gave my readers of this was half an A4 page. Twenty-one years later, it’s time to put this injustice right and, for the benefit of McCarthy fans and anyone who happens to be researching eighties indie-pop and left-wing militancy, reveal more of the contents of that ‘interview’. In contrast to their image, the letter found them in light-hearted mode.
‘Thank you for your note. Tim did buy your fanzine at the Razorcuts gig, so we’d read it before. I’m glad you liked ‘Something wrong somewhere’. Maybe you think, like some people we’ve met, that everything we do afterwards is a falling off. It’s unfortunate that a song we wrote in 1966 in two minutes should be praised so highly.
Here are our loves and hates:-
GARY (he refuses to say which he loves or hates. But he will say that 5 are likes, 5 are dislikes, and 5 depend on his mood. What a difficult boy.): McCarthy, White Rabbit, Dogmatism, 1969, Blood simple, Jane, John, Malcolm, Tim, money, success, peanut butter, adverts, Five Star.
MALCOLM (Loves): Shelley, Bob Dylan, Samuel Beckett, Marx, Lenin, Freud, Joe Orton, Primal Scream, Shakespeare, The importance of being Earnest, the RCP, Cubism, Trotsky, Liz Fraser’s singing, ‘Panic’.
(Hates) Religion, mystification, bad P.A.s, moral panics, pop stars, landlords.
JOHN: (Loves): With the Beatles, The Jam: A beat concerto, William H. Cosby (comedian, dancer, doctor), the United States of America (the country), the Temptations, the Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, J.D. Salinger, Colin MacInnes, Harpo Marx, Stephen King.
(Hates): White rock historians (the Presley, Beatles, Velvets, Joy Division theory), Jean-Luc Godard, designer violence (i.e. films Gary likes).
TIM: (Loves): The Byrds, David Lynch films, existentialism, Syd Barrett, Pop Art and art pop, ALF, Richard Dadd, absurdism, illogic and surreality, Dylan’s 3 electric LPs 1965-66, 1960s Rolling Stones and Beatles, green suede jackets, criminal history, Josef K, Felt, Primal Scream, Terry Thomas, Peter Cook, Psychocandy.
(Hates): work, rationality, computers, illness, logic and practicality, justifying your own actions, triviality, predictability, patriotism, insurance, meat, flares, bad haircuts, exercise, (most) comedians, religion, reactionaries, conservatism.
Q. ‘Sometimes bitter words’: [Malcolm] I don’t feel in the least bit bitter as a person, in fact I’m quite optimistic generally. But there are a lot of ideas, viewpoints and arguments around that I object to strenuously, and in many of our lyrics I’m trying to combat them, ridicule them, do them down. The nastiness of the lyrics isn’t I think attributable to me, to my being a horrible person, but to the nastiness of bourgeois, reactionary ideas.
Q. ‘Red sleeping beauty’: [Malcolm] The chords are E and A, and the odd F. It’s a very old song, two or three years old. It’s the only one of our old songs that we are willing to play nowadays, we’re sick to death of the others. I was reasonably happy with the way the song turned out on the record. The only thing is that, being on an independent label, we can’t afford to record in a very good studio. We’re not intending to bung synthesizers and horn sections on our records if we signed to a major, but the overall sound of an expensive studio improves the quality of the record dramatically. I think the songs we recorded in the BBC studios (the John Peel session) came out much better than anything we’ve done before or since, simply because they were better studios. Those songs sound more or less how I imagined our songs should sound, whereas the songs on ‘Red sleeping beauty’ and on the next 12” [‘Frans Hals’], although fab, were not exactly as I’d imagined them.
Q. ‘Gary’s drumming’: [Gary] I have found drumming to be a singularly unrewarding pastime, mainly because songwriters in general think drummer = lobotomy. However I must admit that nature has seen fit to bless most drummers with a below average intelligence just as it blesses guitarists and songwriters with an above average ego, and bassists with a very average style of dressing. Anyhow for influences I cite Cesare Borgia on ‘Red sleeping beauty’ and Ruth Ellis on the forthcoming ‘Frans Hals’.
Q. ‘Big live sound’ [Tim] None of us weigh more than ten stone.
Q. ‘Wolfhounds’ [Tim] Currently recording their first LP for Decca. ‘More songs about shrikes and warblers’. A savage exposé of trash ornithology produced by former Tweets’ (‘The birdy song’) bassist. (True!) ‘… makes the Byrds sound like the Eagles.’
Q. ‘Next’: [Malcolm] John buys all his jumpers there. That’s a fact.
[Malcolm] The gigs you’ve seen us at we think were awful I should warn you. Every ten years we deliver a stunning performance.
Barking is ugly ugly ugly. We attended Billy Bragg’s school. And the Tremeloes’. Not at the same time of course. It is a miracle that such a nice bunch of lads should have been produced by such a rat hole. (The Tremeloes I mean.)’
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More substantial 21st century interviews with Malcolm Eden and Tim Gane, conducted by Tommy Gunnarsson for Penny Black Music
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An unreleased McCarthy song (‘Who will rid me of these turbulent proles?’) and several live Wolfhounds tracks
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Backed with on the Manic Street Preachers’ cover of ‘Red sleeping beauty’
A Peel listener with archival tendencies, I was always going to be a sucker for The Peel sessions, Ken Garner’s updated version of his earlier book In session tonight. The story of how the sessions developed within the BBC is fascinating, and producers like Peel’s first at Radio One, Bernie Andrews, emerge from the background as stubborn, innovative heroes without whom Peel could not have had the impact he did. It also makes you fully understand why, despite the protection afforded him by Andrews and John Walters, Peel always feared for his airtime at Radio One, his standing balanced against any new controller’s desire to make their mark by tinkering with schedules in which Peel stood out like a sore thumb.
It takes a little over a hundred pages to list the 4,400-odd sessions, personnel and track listing and all. Your eye alights at every turn on great ones. Laugh’s two very different sessions recorded less than eighteen months apart, before and after their Sensation number one reinvention. The second Last Party, the one with ‘The full English breakfast’ and ‘Purple Hazel’. The first P.J. Harvey. Sudden Sway’s inventive non-musical interventions. You cannot put a price on the oddities that Peel presented to formative minds.
Then there are those I might have heard but cannot recollect, like the second Autechre, for which the entry states that Peel, presented with an untitled session sheet, made up the titles himself: ‘Gelk’, ‘Blifil’, ‘Gaekwad’ and ‘19 headaches’.
Of particular interest are the mythic times before I became a Peel listener. What are the sessions recorded by the Kinks in 1967, ’68, ’72 and ’74 like? Also in 1968, the first of a succession of Bridget St. John sessions went before the fearsomely crusty and anachronistic institution of the BBC’s audition panel, who commented that it was ‘pretentious rubbish… her guitar playing is inaccurate and uninspired and her voice dull.’ Despite this, Bridget got a ‘borderline pass’ and so her session was broadcast. From the early eighties, the first James session, and a subsequent and evidently much less well-known Fire Engines session in contrast to the much lauded and traded first. ‘Young tongues need taste’, ‘Qualitamatic’, ‘Produced to seduce to’ and ‘The big wrong time’ were first broadcast on 23 November 1981. On titles alone, it ought to be as renowned as the first, but interviewed by Innes Reekie in 2005 for a great but never formally published article, Davy Henderson said, ‘Around the time of the second John Peel session, we were shit… Our compass was a fake… We should have trusted our internal magnets… We should have trusted our inability.’
So is Davy right, or does the music deliver on the promise of the titles?
Counter-intuitive it may be, but rather than hearing another paean to your favourite group it’s often more rewarding to read about why someone likes music with which you have no familiarity, that you are not interested in, or even actively dislike. It challenges your preconceptions, widens possibilities, enlarges your rationale for listening to music. Do it regularly enough and preconceptions are minimised and maybe even disappear.
When I came across Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, the title I was initially drawn to was Let it be, Colin Meloy’s memoir built on the raw and rugged substance of that album by the Replacements. I’ve never knowingly listened to the Replacements, and have only ever been mildly inclined to seek them out, despite a certain fascination with their fucked-up mystique. I was keen to learn more, and as curious to see how they were important to Meloy, whose group the Decemberists I have listened to as much as any since Alistair first mentioned them in dispatches on Tangents. How great it was to work my way through the songs of a writer whose twin fascinations were historical narrative and life on the ocean, putting these to work against a well-defined musical sensibility to say more about the 21st century than anyone else seemed to care to do.
As it turns out, few of Colin’s pages go into any detail about the actual sound made by the Replacements on Let it be, and nor does he go out of his way to say exactly why he was attracted to the music of the Replacements rather than that of x, y or z, save for a sense of identification; that being from Minnesota, the ‘Placemats’ must have endured the same frozen winters and backwater culture as the young Colin in Helena, Montana. They could be the band making the glorious racket in the garage down the street.
Colin’s story is all about agency and context – cultural, familial and social. He writes about how a love of music arises out of the ashes of childhood, how in adolescence that love becomes so engulfing that it blinds you to everything else, and how slowly but surely you determine that you must become a participant. At some point along the line you establish in your mind a connection with a band that are where you want to be. It doesn’t matter whether this connection is real or illusory; what matters is that it’s conceivable.
Colin might have taken his musical rites of passage further, to the point where he has established a fully-functioning band, rather than end it arbitrarily at the point when he dares to dance aged fourteen with a girl in a bar. But his take on Let it be captures something infrequently documented as well as it is here – the girl- or boyhood dreams, influences and life of the mind of a future musician. And as with the gliding narrative lyricism of his songs, he gives the reader enough to generate the universal from the specific, letting us draw our own conclusions and parallels.
Certainly I’ve a greater curiosity to hear Let it be having read Colin’s memoir, but its immediate effect has been to send me back to the Decemberists first three albums, reflect again on the slight disappointment of the fourth, The crane wife, on which their lightness of touch deserts them from time to time, and hope that this is restored on the fifth. While we await that, there’s the self-explanatory Colin Meloy sings live! to look forward to.
