40. Intastella – The right experience

/ The night, Planet 3 Records, 1995

Combining the song title ‘Interlove’ from the Sensation number one LP and the forename of vocalist Stella Grundy, Intastella were Laugh expanded and rebranded.  But major label marketing failed to find the new brand a niche, let alone national or global dominance.  Intastella fell between two points on the pop continuum – too bubblegum for the dance crowd, too conceptual for the mainstream audience of the time.  Their cause wasn’t helped by taking an early wrong turn; their first LP, Intastella and the family of people only really peaked with its ‘Baby you’re a rich man’-referencing single, ‘People’, possessed of a wonderfully melodic bass line and an chorus which crossed pulpit, soap box and football terrace.  Those segments of the market remained indifferent, and MCA dropped them.

Subsequent years saw Intastella launch two further long players and a string of singles, some great, others fair, in an increasingly desperate search for the hit that a sympathetic observer might think they deserved.  Laugh’s open-to-anything optimism was still there in the lyrics – ‘Point Hope’ suggested that if you ‘just close your eyes and believe, the future is for you’ – but the power of Intastella’s own positive thinking wasn’t enough to secure public affection.  They were entitled to ask: if a similar sort of trick worked for Saint Etienne, why was it not working for them?  No matter how kittenish and seductive Stella strove to be, the songs must not have been sprinkled with quite enough angel dust to satisfy casual listeners to Radio 1.  Neither were Intastella the kind to sell their souls down by the crossroads for privileged time in the sun; drafting in Tricky for a remix of ‘Grandmaster’ and releasing a full-on dance-pop cover version of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ Northern Soul favourite ‘The night’ both failed to work a spell for them.

‘The night’ B side ‘The right experience’ reworked ‘The Wright experience’, one of the many fine songs on the Sensation number one LP; it was fitting that at least one should again see the light of day.  Stella’s languid vocal reinterpretation of Martin’s original growling combines to magical effect with an equally blissed-out groove and the oft-quoted psychedelic spiral of scales from ‘Dear Prudence’.

In terms of dance music, where once Laugh had been ahead of the curve, Intastella were a little behind it.  But they were also commendably unwilling to deliver slavishly to order; it might have benefited them to keep the beats on 1995 LP What you gonna do coolly trippy, but instead they went for variety.  In a pop sense, alongside fellow travellers like Paris Angels, One Dove and Sugar Bullet, Intastella were just a little in advance of the moment.  You could argue that they helped prepare the ground for Goldfrapp, and perhaps even for ‘Can’t get you out of my head’, which (obviously unwittingly) has something of Intastella in its evolved and perfected genes.

And if memory serves, Martin Wright was certainly ahead of the current fashion for pop folk to be twitchers on their days away from studio and stage.  I salute him and his two groups, as I might a pair of magpies.

• The right experience 
• 39. Laugh – It’s easy
• Intastella downloads at Madchester rave on

Sensation no. 1

A clamor went up for more Laugh, in the absence of a retrospective.  Over at A jumped up pantry boy, you’ll now find ‘Time to lose it’, the flexi version ‘Take your time yeah!’, and ‘Never had it so bad’; here you’ll now find both versions of ‘Sensation no. 1’ at the foot of B/w no. 39.

Alistair on Sensation number one from – my, how time flies – ten years ago.

And here’s a photo of a very camera-shy Laugh playing at the Falcon in Camden in February 1988:

39. Laugh – It’s easy

/ Sensation no. 1, Sub Aqua, 1988

Laugh were a group in a hurry, and as a unit if not in name, spent more than a decade journeying through the musical styles of their times.  Had the quartet from Manchester met with more encouragement, I suspect they would even now be travelling through the ever more subtle variations in 21st century pop.  But even with the addition of singer Stella Grundy and rebranded as Intastella, they were never quite able to sync with public taste.

The journey began with a triple A side, striking the kind of confident posture you’d expect from a group of Mancunians.  On ‘Take your time yeah!’ the group are in tearing haste, at delightful odds with singer Martin Wright’s ‘relax boy!’ lyric.  A wave of melody is also cut by skittering rhythms on ‘Never had it so bad’; Laugh would not have been Laugh without a gifted drummer, Spencer Birtwistle, who many years later would go on to take up the hottest seat in music, as drummer in the Fall.  ‘Hey! I’m still thinking’ offered up an eighties group’s version of a sixties beat group’s beat, only doubly urgent.  Again the lyric is charmingly self-critical, a comic admission of a young man’s inability to see what’s under his nose; what it is that, in the eyes of his girlfriend, he has done wrong.

If their debut threatened to skate out of control at any given moment, their next single was altogether more assured.  The significant lyrical intrigue of Martin Wright dreaming that he was ‘Paul McCartney’ was set to scratchy guitars and a stomping glam rock beat which gave way to varying pace as the song built to its closing peak.  On the B side was ‘Come on come out’, another fast and furious self-directed exhortation to get on with stuff, things, life, growling with energy, but notable also for the first signs of the group Laugh would become, in the form of a slowed down coda of hypnotic repetition that nodded to the freaky dancers with whom they shared a city and stage space.  By the time they re-recorded the song for their LP, that process would be complete.

Could anyone make a more urgent noise than ‘Time to lose it’?  Hard, relentless and heavy, their excoriating third single was the sound of a group in transition letting loose a volley of anger and frustration that their ambition was being so consistently scotched by disinterest.  A few people were interested, among them John Peel, for whom Laugh recorded two sessions, and former Factory press officer, Jeff Barrett.  In late 1988, Laugh released the first long player – Sensation number one – on Heavenly’s predecessor, Sub Aqua.  The LP’s arrival was signalled by a 12 inch of the same name.  ‘Sensation no. 1’’s impact was instantaneous, and, well, sensational.  The group had completely and rhythmically reinvented themselves, in the fine tradition of so many Mancunian groups.  Rhythms derived from the foot-stomping seventies funk of Hamilton Bohannon were steel-plated with the sequenced precision of house, and the change in style and tempo had beneficial effects on Martin Wright’s melodic lines too, allowing him more space to work with.  I must have played the two arrangements on the 12” and ‘It’s easy’, and then the equally inventive LP, more than any other records that year.  ‘It’s easy’ was just as good as the A side, combining human and machine generated rhythms for maximum groove.  It reappeared on the album in a slightly different mix.

Sensation number one was the sound of a group relaxing into their twenties, relaxing into the culture that the Hacienda had begun to foster.  (The Factory connection was further strengthened through Stockholm Monster Shan Hira’s presence as engineer.)  Guitars were still in evidence, but they were now adding flavour rather than leading the charge.  Relaxed, but not loose; Laugh retained and in fact reinforced the tautness of their earlier approach, attentive to the rhythmic dynamics, structure and detail of each track.  Neither were they noticeably druggy.  Songs like the ultra-baggy ‘Hearing sound having fun’, the South American flavoured ‘Good to feel good’ and the relentlessly upbeat ‘Up’ conveyed the euphoric flavour of the second Summer of Love without relying on what soon became bug-eyed, loved-up commonplaces.  Laugh’s positivity seemed more of a natural high, a rhythm-obsessed one.

Sadly Sub Aqua was John the Baptist to Heavenly’s Jesus, and with the stampede of interest in the Happy Mondays – whose Bummed LP was recorded after Sensation number one, but released at more or less the same time as it – few seemed to notice the warmth of Laugh’s glow.  As the eighties turned into the nineties, they regrouped, and re-emerged as Intastella.  [Continued here]

• It’s easy
• Sensation no. 1
• Sensation no. 1 (B side version)
• Take your time yeah!, Never had it so bad and Hey! I’m still thinking over at A jumped-up pantry boy
• Time to lose it over at A jumped up pantry boy
• Paul McCartney (YouTube)

The riverbank

In my piece on the Jam’s ‘Tales from the riverbank’, I neglected to mention the version that Paul Weller released in 1998, itself a B side to ‘Brand new start’.  Recorded at Black Barn studios in Ripley, a stone’s throw from the Wey, it’s a gentle and more properly pastoral recasting of the original, sung with a softness that is at odds with both the rough-edged passion of the Jam years and the mature vocal command of his solo work.  I’ve now posted it alongside the original at the foot of the piece.

38. Guided By Voices – The pipe dreams of instant Prince Whippet

/ Everywhere with helicopter, Matador, 2002

‘I have this huge catalog of melodies in my head, and I’ve heard it all, the Merseybeat thing, late ’60s psychedelic, glam rock, prog rock.  I was there for it all.  So that’s all part of me, Guided By Voices’ name refers to all those influences.  That’s what the ‘voices’ are.’ – Bob Pollard, 2001, from Mouthing off: a book of rock & roll quotes, courtesy of GBVDB – Guided By Voices Database.

How do you get your head around the monstrous discography of Guided By Voices and Robert Pollard if you’ve not been lucky enough to follow them and him from the start?  This is after all a man who outdoes even Andy Partridge in terms of laying everything before the listening public, boxing up his unreleased material in accurately titled Suitcases; a man whose songs require not simply websites but a database as well.  And while Andy Partridge presented XTC’s offcuts retrospectively, Bob Pollard has also chucked things in as he’s gone along that might have better been left out, meaning that GBV LPs are a mixture of brilliantly realised songs and incomplete drafts, pop gems studded among dashed-off impressionistic works in pencil of the scenes immediately at the forefront of Pollard’s musical mind.  Music obviously pours out of Bob, but not always accompanied by meaningful lyrics; frequently he falls back on surrealism and nonsense, words chosen for their colour rather than their sense, mapping the territory between ‘I am the walrus’ and the Happy Mondays’ Squirrel and G-Man.

At least you need not trust the summary appraisals of others, or risk playing album-lucky-dip – the obvious place to start, if not with the mp3s below, is Human amusement at hourly rates: the best of Guided By Voices.  To judge from the albums I’ve subsequently invested in, GBV are pretty shrewd assessors of what constitutes their best work, a task in any case made easier by those rattled-off sketch-songs.  Though the inconsistency and sketchiness is frustrating, I think you have to live with and understand it as a necessary part of Robert Pollard’s pop art.  Besides, there’s a kind of joy to be had as fully-formed propulsive pop suddenly rears its head after a couple of so-so songs.

‘The pipe dreams of instant Prince Whippet’ is a miniature that was offered up alongside 2002’s Universal truths and cycles.  Its brevity is typically Pollardian – old English mod pop played with a North American looseness.  Play it twice and you have a perfect three minute pop song.

• The pipe dreams of instant Prince Whippet
• gbvdb.com mp3s 
• gbv.com mp3s 
• Robert Pollard mp3s

37. Revolving Paint Dream – In the afternoon

/ Flowers in the sky, Creation, 1984

I never asked you if you did
Sometimes feelings go beyond words
And now I cling to tender moments
And I don’t feel real at all

In the afternoon
In the afternoon
In the afternoon
We made love

I don’t want to say too much about this song (1).  Even though that’s why I’m here, writing this, I should resist the temptation, let you listen yourself, allow the song to settle in your own imaginations how it will, without too much corrupting knowledge of how it came to be and who was involved.

But of course I must say something.  And the knowledge has never quite corrupted me, or my affection for the song.

Her voice (2) and the words she sings capture such afternoons perfectly.  There are hints as to the psychological or psychosexual state of play, but ultimately the mystery remains intact, trapped in a swirl of keyboards, cornered by the echoing bass drum (3).  Like making love, the song is a vortex or void of time into which the listener falls, transported, to be returned at its end with the uneasy sense that no time at all has passed.

In memory the song is as slow as it is cyclical – conjuring repeated afternoons of repeatedly making love – but in fact the rhythm gives the song some sense of urgency, mounting a half-hearted struggle against its air of languid pleasure, or languid apathy.

I remember seeing her at the Falcon in Camden (4).  Hair bleach blonde.  She seemed apart from all the other people there, even those she was performing with.  ‘A man who never sees a pretty girl that he doesn’t love her a little’ (5) – so much the more so if she sings with a voice which has in it equal shades of heaven and the underworld.  In that voice, the look of the beautiful but seemingly disenchanted woman who appeared on the cover of Songs for the sad eyed girl (6) was converted into sound.

The song lasts for a little less than three and a half minutes, but it continues to prowl the corridors of your mind long after it ends, and long after you first heard it.

Footnotes

1. This is an enigma played upon by the Revolving Paint Dream themselves in the sleeve notes to Rev-ola’s 2006’s Flowers in the sky compilation; I’m about to bust it with these factual notes, so look away now if you’d prefer the song to remain shrouded in mystery.  ‘In the afternoon’ was the AA side of the second single on Creation, CRE002.  Like Brogues over at Alex’s place, my path to it was via the sampler Wild summer, wow! (or Wow! Wild summer – you could read the title either way) where it featured alongside other early wonders of Creation like ‘Winter’, ‘There must be a better life’, and ‘Think!’  But the song I played most was ‘In the afternoon’, beguiled by its mystery, seduced by its promise.  Had the same singer sung the roughly contemporaneous ‘Stretch out and wait’ in place of Morrissey, the effect might have been the same.  (Think of Sandie Shaw and ‘Hand in glove’.)  As it was, the considerations Stephen raised always seemed to lean towards the intellectual and away from the physical.

2. Christine Wanless’.  Though she sang on many Revolving Paint Dream and Biff Bang Pow! songs subsequently, and many of those are great, I’m not sure she ever bettered this performance.  It’s something to do with how her voice merges with the mood of the instrumentation, giving birth to sonic qualities that some of the cleaner recordings of her voice do not have.

3. The Creation mafia are all over ‘In the afternoon’.  Joe Foster – Rev-ola’s director – produced it and so many of the early Creation records.  Ken Popple drummed for Biff Bang Pow!  Dave Musker also tooted his keyboards on the Jasmine Minks’ 1234567 All good preachers go to heaven.  It becomes easier to say who wasn’t connected with the Revolving Paint Dream.  But essentially they were former Laughing Apple Andrew Innes, and Christine Wanless, who also sang on Biff Bang Pow!’s The girl who runs the Beat hotel LP and the ‘She haunts’ twelve inch.  Biff Bang Pow!’s and Revolving Paint Dream’s members and songs were interchangeable, as occasionally their writing credits also seem to be.  The Andrew Innes footnote is that he became a member of Primal Scream while the Paint Dream was still Revolving.

4. A notebook tells me that on the 21st February 1988 I went to see an ensemble called the Revolving Brides – surely a conjunction of Wanless & Innes and the June Brides? – supported by the Sea Urchins; the following week Biff Bang Pow! played at the same venue, so it might have been either night; I don’t remember which.

5. The Sea And Cake must have nabbed this un-Prekopian title for an instrumental of theirs from someone, but I can’t establish who.

6. The LP released by Biff Bang Pow! in 1990.  And here’s the thing that turns ‘In the afternoon’ on its head: it was written by Alan McGee.  This might come as a shock to anyone who knows the song but has never seen a credit for it, so entirely does Christine Wanless inhabit it.  Much as I love Biff Bang Pow!, the version sung by Alan and included on their own Rev-ola compilation Waterbomb! doesn’t come close.

• In the afternoon
• ‘Flowers in the sky’ and ‘Green sea blue’ courtesy of The beautiful music
•  The Revolving Paint Dream at Last.fm

36. The Zombies – I love you

/ Whenever you’re ready, Decca, 1965

Anyone who came of age musically speaking during or just after punk would probably have had their first indirect exposure to the Zombies via the unprepossessing medium of the UK Subs, who scraped a top forty hit with the sixties’ act’s debut single ‘She’s not there’.  Released in 1964 while the Beatles were riding high with ‘A hard day’s night’, Rod Argent’s magical multi-paced original, its mystery enhanced by Colin Blunstone’s gorgeously cool voice, peaked at number 12 in the UK.  YouTube immediately allows the retrospective comparison that would have been tricky both logistically and financially in 1979, and of course there is none.  The Subs butcher the magic out of the song, while the elfin Blunstone epitomises an other-worldly understanding of it, his alien poise exaggerated by the relative normality of the groovy squares who are the other Zombies.  Blunstone’s singing is invariably described as breathy, but to my ears it’s the absence of wind – as if he has no need to breathe – which makes him such a unique singer.

And now to a confession: the Subs’ version was the second single I ever bought, after ‘Here comes the summer’ by the Undertones.  While I loyally followed Feargal and the boys to their end and beyond, I somehow swiftly intuited that the UK Subs’ sole moment of imagination was covering a great sixties pop song; they never made it into my developing record collection again.  And with every week throwing up a new group to care about, neither was I going to go out of my way to track down such traces or remnants of the Zombies as might have existed in the late seventies, nor even in the early eighties as a result of the exceptional voice of Colin Blunstone resurfacing alongside Dave Stewart (the Hatfield And The North one rather than the Tourist / Eurythmic) for a synthesized cover of Tamla Motown classic ‘What becomes of the brokenhearted’. 

My next encounter with the Zombies was the definitive one, and it came courtesy of the fourth issue of Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs’ Caff fanzine.  They only mentioned Odessey & oracle in passing, but the glowing praise was enough to encourage me to borrow what may have been the 20th anniversary vinyl reissue from Islington’s Central Library.  And I was as wowed by it as so many others have been with each successive decade’s re-release.  I never thought to check out what preceded it, partly because I supposed that nothing could top it, and partly because I never came across any encouragement to look a little further back.

It took a chance meeting in a charity shop with a dirt cheap copy of The singles collection: As & Bs 1964-1969 to complete the picture (give or take their covers-heavy debut LP Begin here) I had of the Zombies.  Here finally was the way ‘She’s not there’ should be heard, plus 19 other cuts from singles preceding their canonical classic LP, itself represented by five songs, with a further three dating from after their demise.  And it just may be that I’ve lived too long with the most famous spelling mistake in the history of pop, and that I’ve come to tire of the kitsch excesses of late sixties baroque pop, for the preceding singles, more straightforward, less flowery, though recognisably the same group and hardly to be described as raw (except on out-and-out raver ‘She does everything for me’), seem to me at least Odessey and oracle’s equal, and yes, occasionally do indeed top it.  True, the influence of the Beatles looms too large early on, but more often than not – Chris White’s ‘I must move’ is the prime example – the tints of Scouse sweet and sourness that originated in Lennon’s quarter of the Beatles work to the Zombies’ advantage.  That minor chord moodiness verging on drone has been a staple of Liverpudlian pop ever since; you start to wonder if Shack and the La’s took as much from the Zombies as from the Fabs.  Yet the Zombies’ origins could not be much further from the Northwest, culturally speaking; they were school boys from St Albans, which possibly accounts for their choral purity, but not much else.

Discographically book-ended by two big hits, ‘She’s not there’ and the posthumous ‘Time of the season’, it’s a surprise that almost all of the rest of their singles were misses.  Perhaps, as happened to sixties groups desperately looking to rediscover a magic formula, some fatal hesitancy was exhibited about which side of a single was which; ‘I love you’’s structural inversion of chorus and verse makes it both a dramatic and memorably harmonic B side, trumping ‘Whenever you’re ready’’s more traditional delights and wig-out organ, while the ice-cool Beatles mannerisms of ‘I must move’ easily give it the edge over the big beats and Spectorisms of ‘She’s coming home’.  Lennon wasn’t the only one who could portray male reserve, impenetrability, lack of susceptibility, and nonchalance, all embodied in – and  sweetened by – melody and mood.  (On the 1966 single ‘Indication’, Rod Argent’s opening lines are: ‘It’s not that you’re wrong / It’s just that I’m right’.)  Commitment is the problem on ‘I love you’, but at least on this occasion Chris White admits it.  Of all the many songs which share its title, there can’t be many which focus on how difficult it can be for a young man to say those words.

Certainly Odessey and oracle offers a more rounded view of the world alongside its bewitching mix of melody, harmony and mellotron.  The school boys from St Albans had grown up, and impatient to stretch their wings after an ultimately frustrating five years as Zombies, they put their liberated all into that last hurrah together.  Put the beginning and the middle together with that end, and you have what salvage operation Big Beat had every right to call Zombie heaven.

• I love you
• I must move
• Zombies MySpace

35. Eddy Arnold – Bouquet of roses

/ Texarkana baby, RCA Victor, 1949

So, for sanity’s sake, I’ll concede that 45s are a product of a bygone era, beautiful and desirable as they are.  The heart of a cultural revolution, though, they will survive in the collective memory as more than just the snuff boxes of the mid-20th century.

That’s the conclusion of Bob Stanley’s excellent article celebrating the 60th birthday of the 45 rpm vinyl single.  The piece taught even this vinyl fetishist a few things he didn’t know, though Bob’s notion of a mid-eighties ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ 7 inch vs Brothers in arms CD format face-off seems a little revisionist – not many people round my way were such early adopters of the shiny new technology.  A sentence from Bob’s opening paragraph is also on the contentious side: ‘Few would argue that [the 45 rpm single’s] rise and fall mirrors pop’s golden age.’  Few vinyl fetishists of a certain age would argue that, Bob.  But a fourteen year old beginning their exploration of 21st century pop’s vast multiplicity – or a twenty-four year old already deep into it – might well beg to differ. 

The first ever 7 inch, ‘Texarkana baby’ by Eddy Arnold, was released 60 years ago today by RCA Victor – on green vinyl.  ‘RCA figured that, in the format wars, they needed a novelty, and so they pressed country music on green vinyl, children’s music on yellow, classical on red, and ‘race’ music – rhythm and blues – on ‘cerise’, or what looked like orange to the average Joe.  Straightahead pop was released on straightahead black.’

The flip of ‘Texarkana baby’ was ‘Bouquet of roses’ – the first ever 7 inch B side.  Both songs had already been US country chart number one hits in their own right on 78 rpm.  And both still sound great, each with sharp, simple couplets or quatrains delivered in Eddy’s solidly-textured vocal, underwritten with steel guitar possessed of a Hawaiian degree of freshness and sinuosity.  The format could not have had a finer beginning.

• Texarkana baby (YouTube)
• Bouquet of roses (YouTube)
• More on the early history of the 7 inch in B/w no. 3, ‘Guess the baby’s weight’ by the Young Knives
• Guardian blog on the 60th birthday of the 7 inch single by Owen Adams

34. The Jam – Tales from the riverbank

/ Absolute beginners, Polydor, 1981

I know I come from Woking and you say I’m a fraud
But my heart’s in the city, where it belongs

- The Jam, ‘Sounds from the street’

If in 1981 you were to pick one group which epitomised fantasy, and one to oppose them on the side of reality, you could probably make no better pairing than Duran Duran and the Jam.  Despite the young Paul Weller’s faux pas in his first NME interview as to his voting intentions, it was clear by the mid-point of the new Conservative government’s first term that – stung into politicization by his gaffe – he was developing a red core, while Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes and the unrelated posse of Taylors were seemingly unconcerned about the state of the nation, and were therefore Thatcher’s perfect children.  While Duran Duran went swanning on beaches in Sri Lanka (as the very reverend Pete Wylie would later put it in ‘Weekends’), Weller concerned himself with the double-edged joys of working class life as inventoried in ‘That’s entertainment’ and ‘A town called Malice’.  Obviously Le Bon et al were seeking – and found – fame and fortune, while Weller chose to make musical art, often as pointed as it was pleasurable.  What he sought was artistic perfection, of a kind – the instinctive desire and lifelong dedication required to craft a pop song that could not be improved upon.  Reaching for something tantalisingly out of grasp; the creative equivalent of naïve political idealism.  Except that what Paul Weller reached for, he often came to hold in his hand.

It was a surprise to be reminded recently that he participated in both Band Aid and Live Aid.  But compare the sequence of songs that the Style Council aired at Wembley (‘You’re the best thing’, ‘Big boss groove’, ‘Internationalists’, and ‘Walls come tumbling down’) – with those that Duran Duran performed in Philadelphia (‘A view to a kill’, ‘Union of the Snake’, ‘Save A Prayer’, ‘The Reflex’).  True to form, Weller did not let party spirit get the better of him.

You could take this contrast as far as the women each sings about – on the one hand ‘Girls on film’ and ‘Rio’, and on the other ‘English rose’ and ‘Liza Radley’, with Weller charmingly croaky on both and famously bashful enough about the former not to let the song be listed on the sleeve of All mod cons.

So how do we explain that it was fantasists Duran Duran who were mundane, ordinary, everyday, while the songs of Paul Weller, though more than occasionally heavy with the ballast of social realism and idealism, were exciting, extraordinary and magical?

At the time, and throughout the eighties, the decade which saw new heights of political conflict within modern Britain, no fan of the Jam or the Style Council would be likely to admit that Weller’s songs as much as Duran’s were an escape from precisely the reality that he often wrote about, or at least the intimation of the reality that was waiting for you upon leaving school.  Even as he reeled off his list of doubtful delights in ‘That’s entertainment’ – ‘sticky black tarmac’ and ‘slashed-seat affairs’ – we dwelt not so much on the portrayal of reality as on Weller’s wordplay, his melodic gifts, the liberty espoused by his vocal delivery, the heights that his guitar could reach when set against the solid foundations of Bruce’s bass and Rick’s drums.  These were things which on one level had nothing to do with external reality, nothing to with the world.  They were cerebral, and of the heart.  Consciousness and emotion – the essence of what it means to be alive.  They set many of us dreaming of a time when we would have the confidence to express ourselves in the same way; about what, it almost didn’t matter.

Yet conversely it took me a long time to come out of the bellicose mindset the eighties bequeathed me, a long time to drop the notion that music must be connected to reality to be meaningful, and well, real.  I got there in the end.  There is of course a place for mental escape, a place for escape from drudgery and the harshness of reality.  There’s possibly even a place for Duran Duran.

‘Tales from the riverbank’ was certainly a step aside from social realism.  Recorded in August 1981 alongside its spectacular if over-fussy A side, it’s a water-coloured slice of Rickenbacker-fuelled psychedelia, and after so many sounds from the street, one of Weller’s first paeans to nature (they’ve come thick and fast over the years since), specifically an early eulogy to the countryside of childhood, to the particular Wonderland rabbit hole that the young Paul fell down.

That open space you could run for miles
Now you don’t get so many to the pound
True it’s a dream mixed with nostalgia
But it’s a dream that I’ll always hang on to
That I always run to
Won’t you join me by the riverbank

Bruce walks his bass through the song while Paul’s guitar meanders in perfectly executed oxbow curves.  Initially Rick’s rhythm seems to be rather too urgent, but it transpires that urgency is required to back the oncoming message; the song writer could not yet let himself entirely forget his somewhat self-inflicted role as spokesperson for a generation.  So he anticipates and defends himself against a charge of nostalgia, that heinous crime in the eyes of punk, before finally – masterstroke – turning the argument around and going on the attack:

Now life is so critical, life is too cynical
We lose our innocence, we lose our very soul

Weller throws his stone into the smooth surface of the current; waves of sustained guitar lap the banks of the river in response.

The original riverbank in question almost certainly belongs to the Wey, which runs eastwards to the south of Woking before heading north to join the Thames at Weybridge.  Though we have led very different lives – I went to school with boys who went on to become real-life Eton Rifles – I was also born in Woking, a Gemini ten years younger than Paul Weller.  That connection has always felt to me like it counted for something, even though I would almost certainly have been no less a Jam fan and Weller follower had I been born anywhere else in Britain.

There’s a not dissimilar notion at work on the Go-Betweens’ ‘Caroline and I’, on which Robert Forster sings about the Princess of Monaco, with whom he shares the same year of birth:

It gave me something small that I could feel
That maybe as you grew you knew how I’d feel

So you could say that Paul Weller is my Princess Caroline of Monaco.  Now there’s a line you thought you’d never read.

• Tales from the riverbank
• Paul Weller – The riverbank (Island, 1998)

Testament to the slow death of youth culture

Some extra retrospective additions of tune to text.

First, the B side that wasn’t – Durutti Column’s ‘For Belgian friends’.  The text is over at A jumped-up pantry boy.

‘Slurred and obtuse as Little Richard reading Ezra Pound, there’s a magnificence here so great that, if you had to, you could make the case for rock and roll as a species of art using this record and nothing else.’ – Dave Marsh’s verdict on Dylan’s ‘Just like Tom Thumb’s blues’ in as described in ‘Not the heart of rock and soul’.

I wrote about the Manic Street Preacher’s cover of ‘Red sleeping beauty’ under the title ‘Get down Shep’.  Compare and contrast with the McCarthy original.  And since I mentioned it in the post and because everyone should have the joy of hearing it at least once in their life, here is Big Flame’s ‘Testament to the slow death of youth culture’, recorded for their last Peel session in May 1986.  In it you may notice an uncanny resemblance to Wham!’s ‘Wake me up before you go go’.  (Because of the poor quality of my mp3, you may need to turn your player up to 11 to get the full effect.)