45 45s #27 Jacky – White horses (Old Gold, 1990; originally issued by Philips, 1968)
A totally sentimental and possibly even a soppy choice, this one – a song from my childhood which I rediscovered when I found it in a charity shop in the form of a 1990 reissue. The UK theme tune to Slovenian and German TV co-production The white horses, it brings back my earliest televisual memories, although I can’t honestly say I remember all that much about the series. Written by Michael Carr and Ben Nisbet, it was performed by Irish singer Jackie Lee, who among other things was a member of sixties vocal quartet the Raindrops, had a song of hers covered by the Beatles circa 1962, and (credited as Emma Rede) sang ‘I Gotta Be With You’, beloved of Northern Soul aficionados. Not only that, but as a session singer she provided backing vocals for both Tom Jones’ ‘Green Green Grass of Home’ and Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Hey Joe’.
‘White horses’ has a lovely, cantering melody, sung breathily and with beautiful restraint by Jackie, who double-tracked her voice and added some gorgeously perfect harmonies. I’m not the only one who’s sentimental and soppy about it, for among those who have covered the song are Cerys Matthews, Kitchens Of Distinction, the Trashcan Sinatras, Dean & Britta, Sophisticated Boom Boom, and Trixie’s Big Red Motorbike, the latter two both for Peel sessions. Which makes the choice seem less soppy, or microcosmically characteristic at least of a certain generation of indie-pop. I guess they all grew up with it too.
45 45s #13 Arcade Fire – Cold wind (Rough Trade, 2005)
Claire: Why did you have to die? It really sucks. Everything’s unravelling since you’re gone.
Nate: That’s not true.
Claire: It feels that way. I miss you. I miss you so fucking much!
Nate: I miss you, too.
Claire: You know how I always used to tell you you weren’t Dad, after Dad died? It was such a waste of time thinking that way.
Nate: No, it’s just part of how you dealt with it. It kept you from missing Dad so much.
Claire: No, it kept me from ever knowing you as much as I really could have, and now you are so completely fucking gone! It’s just …
Nate: Claire –
Claire: What? It sucks!
Nate: Stop listening to the static.
Claire: What the fuck does that mean?
Nate: Nothing. It just means that everything in the world is like this transmission, making its way across the dark. But everything – death, life, everything – it’s all completely suffused with static. [makes static sounds] You know? But if you listen to the static too much, it fucks you up.
Claire: Are you high?
Nate: I am actually, yeah, quite high.
Arcade Fire are one of those groups about whom I feel the need to say, please leave your preconceptions at the door. I suppose they’ve only got themselves to blame though, getting all messianic with the gigantic misstep that was The neon bible. But either side of that, wherever you look, you see a great group. Their 2002 Arcade Fire EP (a.k.a. Us kids know) is especially good and includes the irresistible vehicular chugging and musketeer chanting of the original version of ‘No cars go’ and the sorrowful familial truth-saying and two-part orchestration of ‘Vampire / Forest fire’, while I also keep returning to 2010’s The suburbs in more or less the same way Win Butler keeps returning to his youth as a source of inspiration. That is, like a dog to a bone.
Their ferociously collective mind-set propels the songwriting of the core duo – Butler and Régine Chassagne – to the kind of heights it merits. Together, the emotional interplay between the two and the group’s committed performances allow them to create upwards momentum without necessarily hitting the switch labelled ‘crescendo’ or the foot pedal marked ‘rock out’. ‘Cold wind’ manages to be both understated and yet still to climax with a little of that rabble-rousing performance art meets circus troupe panache. I imagine it was their facing-down of death (or at least bereavement) on 2004’s Funeral LP which led to the song being featured in the consistently surprising and excellent TV series Six feet under, where it appeared in Static, the penultimate episode of the fifth and final season. In fact, it’s easy to imagine members of Arcade Fire drifting into Six feet under as characters; you certainly get that sense from their lyrical concerns. And that’s to nod also at the sense of humour and lineage which allowed them to record a version of Ary Barroso’s ‘Brazil’ as the B side of this piece of clear vinyl, as well as to issue a recording of swing musician Alvino Rey’s ‘My buddy’ as an earlier B side; Rey being Win and his brother William’s grandfather.
Nate: [as imagined by Brenda] I’m just saying you only get one life. There’s no God, no rules, no judgments, except for those you accept or create for yourself. And once it’s over, it’s over. Dreamless sleep forever and ever. So why not be happy while you’re here. Really. Why not?
(Quotes from Static.)
Wurlitzer jukebox
I could take or leave the BBC4 documentary Do it yourself: the story of Rough Trade last night (UK only, available for seven days after broadcast). The account – topped and tailed by the dismal Duffy – was largely of the inevitably jaded and drawn-out financial end of an undertaking begun with earnest idealism, and when Geoff Travis smiled after another quiet admission that his recollection of events was dim, he resembled nothing so much as a hairless John Major.
But the hour of archive performance, Rough Trade at the BBC, was a dream. Finally forced by the subject to show all the bits of The Old Grey Whistle Test and the like that are typically dropped from retrospective compilations, we had the pleasure of seeing in action Young Marble Giants, the Raincoats, Delta 5, Weekend, Robert Wyatt, Microdisney – Cathal Coughlan magnificent in ill-fitting trousers and a green jacket borrowed from the US Masters – Violent Femmes, James performing ‘Sit down’ on Wogan, and even Camper Van Beethoven doing – you guessed it – ‘Take the skinheads bowling’. These may be more or less available via YouTube but here it was all nicely packaged into as pleasurable an hour of music television as I ever remember seeing.
A time of gifts
This review of the third part of Travellers’ century by the always entertaining TV critic Nancy Banks-Smith deftly sketches the charismatic character and life of Patrick Leigh Fermor (although it isn’t true that he wrote A time of gifts and Between the woods and the water entirely from memory fifty years after the journey across Europe that the books recount). But she omits any mention of the key moment for anyone who has read both books, kept back by presenter Benedict Allen until last – the moment when he braves asking the 93 year old author how he is getting on with the final part of the trilogy. It was heart-sinking but not entirely surprising to hear him reply that it was about half-done; at which rate – given that the second part was published in 1986 – he will have to retain both his breath and his marbles until he is 115.
It was time to admit what PLF admirers have no doubt long since guessed – that his publisher will offer us an unfinished draft only after he is gone, assuming he hasn’t left Larkinesque instructions to burn everything. Unless, that is, the complete draft that he professed in the programme to have slashed remains extant and salvageable. His severe estimation of his own work suggests that this version wouldn’t be far-off the previous parts in terms of crystalline lucidity. Hope springs eternal – and in its ongoing absence, there are always Mani and Roumeli, his books about Greece, strangely overlooked by Benedict Allen.
Remember boy you’re a superstar
Tricky was back performing on Later last week. Stripped to the waist, his torso covered in hieroglyphics (in addition to the underlying tattoos), and with hair which sprung pineapple-style only from the top of his otherwise shaven scalp, he resembled – presumably was intending to resemble – nothing so much as a native American. But the war cry delivered by this Iroquois or Apache was called ‘Council estate’.
I could take or leave the music, which leaned a little too much towards the electro-metallic for my taste (though it sounds less like punky Hawkwind in its recorded form), but he remains the convincing, deeply focussed, pugilist performer he revealed himself to be on the same show thirteen years ago. Then you could almost see inside of Tricky, see the exact point from which the dark articulations of ‘Black Steel’ and ‘Suffocated Love’ were emanating; not because he was being invitingly transparent, but because he was forcibly sucking you in.
Back then I thought he would gradually retreat into the studio, the role of producer being the ideal way to extricate himself from the diminishing returns of his records (though each has had at least something going for it). But that was to underestimate the force of his character, which subsumes both the natural awkwardness / awkward naturalness of his rhythms and the uncharitable bleakness of his sound. My guess is that Tricky needs to put himself in the line of fire. And this time around, with a roots-referencing album entitled Knowle West boy, his battling will be serviced by Domino’s bespoke career rescue service.
Why pamper life’s complexity…
For his BBC 4 programme Pop! What is it good for?, Paul Morley asked Simon Armitage to dissect the lyric of ‘This charming man’, one of six songs chosen as a handful to illustrate the greatness and (im)perfection of pop (the others were ‘Can’t get you out of my head’, ‘Ride a white swan’, ‘Lola’, Adam Faith’s What do you want’ and ‘Freak like me’) – a first draft for the slot on Desert island discs that he may never quite receive as due reward for years of service to the BBC.
Armitage described the line ‘this man said it’s gruesome that someone so handsome should care’ as ‘glittery and swanky and luxurious’. Sadly the lit crit stopped short of the borrowed line which gives this blog its title, so issues of quotation and allusion weren’t discussed. I chose the line because it extends the sequence of titles of fanzines I wrote in the eighties, but also for something like the same reasons PM chose ‘Ride a white swan’ – for the transformational impact it had on my life. I can’t claim that A jumped-up pantry boy is consistent with any of those three adjectives, but hey, even a writer with spartan tendencies has time for a little glittery luxury in his blogging life.
PM’s enthusiasm for his subject, spinning off from the six chosen songs into many others, made me want to catch up with Words and music: a history of pop in the shape of a city, the book in which I guess some of these ideas were first espoused: pop as ‘a sensational metaphysical adventure’; ‘all great pop songs are great because you can imagine them sung by Elvis’ (a notion backed up by a half-decent impersonator giving three of the songs a go). But he could have tried a little harder not to engineer the subject of the Art of Noise being brought up if he was going to be so bashful about it. Nevertheless the programme is well worth catching via one of the many repeats BBC 4 content gets (the next is 1.10 a.m. on Sunday 13th January) or the BBC’s iPlayer.
A jumped-up pantry boy 