The flipside of the last flipside

‘Distance and deference balance in ‘Sunny Afternoon’: compromised bliss is still, after all, blissful.’

See this Popular post for a perceptive and rounded discussion of the A side of ‘I’m not like everybody else’.  The play-off between the two songs and the interpretation of each is striking - you could hardly call them two sides of the same coin.

6. The Kinks - I’m not like everybody else

/ Sunny afternoon, Pye, 1966

In the mid-eighties, when I first heard this, none of us were like anybody else.  We were, for example, fierce little fanzine writers who reviled mainstream taste, revolutionaries who knew that a situationist would never call him or herself a situationist, because if you named yourself so, you were conforming to a non-situationist’s fixed idea of what a situationist might be; slipping on an ideological straightjacket, and shooting your cuffs to see how it fitted.  Yet we knew that beyond the ‘I’ there was an ‘Us’ and a ‘Them’; we needed it to be so.  We needed friends and enemies were in no short supply.  Looking to the future, there was absolutely no chance that we would become, for example, middle managers in large corporations living comfortably in the Hampshire countryside.

This is the metaphysical notion at the heart of ‘I’m not like everybody else’, long-pondered ever since.  There is no-one like me, babe; because I don’t conform, these are the things you can’t expect me to do.  The law is being laid down at the outset.  It’s the reverse of the role that Grant McLennan adopts or inhabits when he sings ‘one light, one light’s all you need to keep the dark out’ on the Go-Betweens’ ‘It could be anyone’.  The Kinks’ song and title might be a more conceited notion but for the distinctly Kinksian essence of the music.  If ‘You really got me’ was the blueprint for garage guitar, then this is its apotheosis.  There’s the dramatic introductory sounding note and the figure into which it descends, brooking no argument.  The crisp focussed rhythm firmly and immediately established against a pulsing bass line.  Dave Davies’ fragile but determined vocal and the rousing chorus, perversely mixing a chant from the terraces with soft harmonising ooohs, bottomed off by Pete Quaife’s unique arpeggio on the bass.  Then a false instrumental ending of supreme craftsmanship, sonically seamless, an edifice on which to gaze for a lifetime, built to last beyond it.  And late on, Ray’s echoing of his brother’s words, gently reminding the listener, and no doubt his younger brother, that it was in fact he who wrote the song, he who gifted him the singing of it.

More or less universally recognised as one of the greatest ever B sides, ‘I’m not like everybody else’ is a timeless outsider’s manifesto, a paradoxical rallying cry for those who would recognise each other with a quasi-Masonic nod but, because outsiders, refuse to engage much further than that initial barely perceptible signal.  In the middle of the sixties, it must have made perfect sense as post-Elvis teenagers, exposed to influences and inspirations their parents never latched onto or had, left the straight world.  In the seventies, Johnny Rotten might have sung it, his vocal snarl engaged in humorous dialectic with one of his quizzical bug eyes.  In the eighties, against a backdrop of Thatcherite force, isolated voices set aflame by Lydon united in subscription to its notion, scattered pins on a map of Britain connected by criss-crossing thread.  By the mid-nineties, who in their right mind would not sing it, subscribe to it?  Who would declare themselves conformist, even if evidence existed to the contrary?

In the twenty-first century, it seems that the young person whose nature is not yet set has at his or her choosing and disposal infinite ways of being, endless ways of presenting a character; but how many MySpace personas map exactly onto another?  Hosts of angelic upstarts, herds of folk singers, flocks of soul songstresses.  All like everybody else.  It was easier to be different in the heyday of the Kinks, but harder to take the first step on the path away from compromise and conformity.  Now it’s easy to take that first step, but harder to attain distinction.  Though not impossible, in advance of experience to dissuade you from believing that you’re not like everybody else.

5. Del Amitri - Lines running north / Brown eyed girl

/ Hammering heart, Chrysalis, 1985

The vast and ongoing CD reissue programme, allied with and so far not significantly diminished by the availability of free and marketed mp3s, has been a blessing for the humble flipside.  Most reissued albums pick up the B sides associated with their recording.  So it is with Del Amitri, the Scottish quartet’s 1985 debut, remastered by Superfecta Recordings of Hollywood, California in 2003.  This was the one they made before they discovered (or at least conceded to) Neil Young, before they had hits, before they optimistically requested of the Scottish national football team that they didn’t come home from France ’98 too soon.  The one that inspired a fervency among its fans that they essentially disowned with their later moves, though it was always their prerogative to do so.  I should declare at this point that I could never bring myself to listen to anything Del Amitri recorded subsequently save by accidental exposure.  Prejudice becomes habit, and twenty years slip by before you admit you might just have been wrong, or at least unfair.  In his sleeve notes to the reissue, singer Justin Currie signs off by saying ‘too many fucking words though’ and, true enough, seeing them printed in the booklet, there are more than you’d find in the average Faber poetry collection.  But what words: ‘The things I say will soon make you swoon / I’ll point to the sun and say it’s the moon’; ‘So who was first? Obviously not me / she’s locked up inside herself and I can’t get anything free’; ‘Like a ticket inspector running for a bus / irony’s revenge surrounds us’; and ‘We are just starting luxurious lives / to be drunkards and diddymen / making Gulf wars and battered wives’.

These lines hovered about me, in the air above fields of wheat and barley, in the air above the market days and snakebite nights of a once monastic Suffolk market town.  If you want to know what precociously eloquent teenage yearning in the 1980s was like, listen to this album.  Its contrast with my own clumsily undertaken fledgling romantic experience seemed stark, which made listening to it not so much bittersweet as outright painful.

And the guitars are as articulate as the lyrics, managing to be both complex and sophisticated as well as energised and urgent; the sound of young Scotland taken to one logical end.  Says Justin: ‘Of course we had a philosophy so strict that it eventually strangled us.  No chords, no choruses, no distortion, no synthesizers and definitely no long hair.  Melody was God.  There are more tunes between the twin guitar parts and bass lines in one backing track from this era of Del Amitri than in every top-line melody I have written since.’

As for the B sides, it’s difficult to split these two, which first appeared together on a 12 inch (you’ll see I’m setting my rules for Backed With as I go along, and certainly doing nothing so foolish as write them down), so I’ve not tried.  ‘Lines running north’ manages to combine the two phases of the Monkees in having an intro not dissimilar to ‘Last train to Clarkesville’ and an experimental section like something out of Head.  It’s another lovelorn tale enriched by the imagery of all those rails and telegraph wires which ultimately connect the Sassenach south with the old country north of Hadrian’s Wall.

Del Amitri’s cover of Van Morrison’s ‘Brown eyed girl’ establishes what may become another theme of Backed With, the B side as an excuse to have a go at a favourite song.  Long before flash-mob performances in pubs, clubs, stations or clothes stores, the Dels hit upon the idea of afternoon busking slots in the towns and cities through which they were touring.  I caught up with them in Ipswich.  Aside from my friends, there appeared to be only a couple of other Amitri admirers in Suffolk, so two of the group and their manager were good enough to come to a café and chat with us.   Busking on the steps of the Corn Exchange, they finished with ‘Brown eyed girl’, its sing-along chorus of ‘Do you remember when we used to sing ‘Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la, sha-la-la-la-la-la’’ sadly failing to draw the small, celebrant crowd I had imagined might develop.  And perhaps now I should concede that here were the signs of what was to come, here was the root of it – this breezy cover of a nostalgic Van Morrison song suggests Del Amitri’s future, suggests the old-before-their-time country rock while more immediately offering the same youthful-joyful-despairing outlook to be found in the early songs of Primal Scream or on the grooves of the flexi discs from which Sarah Records grew.

At the time, a young man who felt betrayal too keenly for his own good – or perceived it where none could exist – I didn’t understand what happened to Del Amitri.  In retrospect it’s obvious.  If you stay young and intense beyond the time for being so, you risk burning out.  They grew up, they grew their hair.  (Though that still doesn’t explain ‘Don’t come home too soon’.)  So now I’m wondering what did happen when they threw away the dictionary and let the chords and choruses in.  Perhaps I should go and find out.

4. Spain - Phone machine

/ Dreaming of love, Restless, 1995

Of the many venues I grew to hate over twenty years of going to see live music in London, the Garage – upstairs or down – on the Highbury Corner end of the Holloway Road is only eclipsed in my memory for vileness by Kentish Town’s Bull & Gate.  Both were charmless, characterless, lowly points on the indie circuit, with poor lighting, limited seating and minimal circulation of air.  When full of smoke and bad skin, unbearable.  But there were points on the late ’80s spiral up to the Astoria and the Town & Country Club (now the Forum) which did treat you less like a perennially teenage mosher and more like a human being.  Acknowledging my North London bias, let me salute the venerable Sir George Robey in Finsbury Park, New Merlin’s Cave south of King’s Cross, Camden’s Black Horse and Falcon each under the residency of Heavenly Jeff Barrett, the Reverb acoustic evenings at the Market Tavern in Islington, and the ‘special nights of action’ at the Horse and Groom on Great Portland Street.

Still, the Highbury hellhole that was the Garage allowed the odd celestial moment, and none more so than the appearance there by Spain in 1995.  The icing on the cake?  They gave away this single as you came in the door.

Spain were Spanish only in limited senses – more siesta than fiesta.  A dream of Spain, or sketches of it.  Laconically cool.  I don’t recall them saying anything much between songs, although on another occasion at the same venue, singer Josh Haden (son of jazz legend Charlie and brother of Petra, herself notable for recording the whole of The Who sell out a cappella) went so far as to explain what certain songs were about, as in ‘this song’s about polygamy’ and ‘this song’s about having sex without condoms’.  But in 1995, they looked and sounded well and truly stoned.  Competition is fierce when it comes to deciding which drug has been responsible for the production of the worst music, and cannabis has always been a strong contender.  But that night Spain took stoned to new extremes and made of it something stretched out and beautiful, spacious like dub.  A cat laid out on a flat asphalt roof in the sun, occasionally raising a paw to swat away a fly.

Spain’s sequence of albums dealt diminishing returns.  As the songs on their later long-players approached a gentle mid-tempo, it was less easy to tell them apart from the rabble.  Nothing they did was finer or more extreme than their first, The blue moods of Spain, and this B side of the same era could easily have shared space with ‘Untitled #1’ , ‘Ray of light’ , and ‘I lied’ from that album, with their unhurried self-portraits of a messed-up romancer.  Drowsy tortoise-paced bass and shimmering cymbals set the mood for Josh to tell us about a message on his answer phone.  Come on over, said the girl, I’m waiting for you here in bed, the lights dimmed and the air hot.  Josh’s yearning is palpable even through his typically Mogadon vocal, but for all the sultry atmosphere he conjures, you have a presentiment of the frustration revealed in the second half of the song – he’s got the message too late, and very possibly too drunk (or stoned).  In cut the bittersweet and ringing notes of a truth-telling guitar to emphasise the disappointment.  If you were unfortunate enough to be wearing a shirt and tie,  you’d have to loosen your collar.  There aren’t enough songs about sexual frustration, and the mood of this one suits the subject just as well in its way as ‘(I can’t get no) Satisfaction’ does.

Invariably when I dig this B side I play it at 45 rpm, and have to wait until the singing begins before I am sure of my mistake.  It’s a 7 inch which plays at 33.  At 45, it shuffles along still slower than most, but Josh has turned into a kittenish female soul singer, suggestively altering the tenor of the lyric.

3. Young Knives - Guess the baby’s weight

/ Weekends and bleak days (hot summer), Transgressive, 2006

There’s no denying the aesthetics of the 45 on geometric and graphic design levels, but that would be of little consequence without the relationship of the form to its content.  In the late 1940s, the pop song demanded a medium through which it could flourish, and it was this overriding commercial imperative which fostered the 45’s development as format wars broke out between Columbia and RCA Victor.  The former evolved the 33 and a third Long Play record, forcing a piqued RCA to retaliate with the 7 inch 45.  We have J. P. Maxfield of the Bell Laboratory to thank for the chosen size.  The 7 inch’s label was half the diameter of the vinyl as a result of his scientific analysis to determine the best pay-off between sound quality and playing time.  It has become something of a golden section to fans of pop music, spellbound since the fifties as the needle set in the groove of the two, three, four minute pop song has repetitively spiralled towards the spindle hole.

Spare time ebbs and flows, and just now it’s at a premium, so for me personally the song comes to the fore and the set of songs recedes, just as at a socio-technological level the song has risen again, conveyed by downloads to players which can mimic the effects of the ball-shaped transistor radio I had when I was a kid.  Attached to a metal chain, with two silver dials, it was sky-blue and totally pop.  I listened to it through a single earphone.  There was no sequence to what I heard, just as now nothing need ever be sequential again.  And let’s not worry about diminishing attention spans, for that’s a false spectre when whole libraries of music can be carried on a player smaller than a C90 tape.

7 inch vinyl has survived the march of technology, but we should not flatter the format by kidding ourselves that this is merely to do with its romance.  The vinyl release is a player in the marketing battery, a loss-leader enticing record-shop ghosts to purchase the money-generating CD album.  Extra heavy vinyl, ever-varying sleeve design, B sides unavailable elsewhere; both the fan and the casually curious chainstore habitué are easily tempted by the weekly 99p deals.  I’m sold.  What I’m less sold on is that we should ignore the ongoing harvest of post-punk influence, because it was all so much better first time around.  That didn’t seem to apply when the early Creation groups were busy processing the inspiration provided by the garage and psychedelics of the second half of the 60s.  Despite Andy Partridge’s satirical name for the average group aping or diluting the sounds of the avant-garde element of the previous generation – Future Dogs Die in Kaiser Ferdinand’s Hot Hot Car Party – I think we should be charitable souls, and give the odd one of Paul Weller’s ‘little fuckers’ a chance.  There’s always the possibility that what they and time passing add amounts to more than the source ever delivered (take a bow, Gang Of Four).  So it was one week I bought samples of the work of the Young Knives, with their gatefold sleeves, themed postcards, clear vinyl and ‘Buy all three formats for £3’ stickers, counting the gauche and geeky provincial intellectual image portrayed in the press in their favour.

Often an A side will show up a group which is trying too hard.  ‘Weekends and bleak days’ is just such a case.  Bellicose and bellowing, its hooks irritate rather than charm.  When less is at stake, less of a statement is being made, and a group relaxes, it can help their cause no end.  ‘Guess the baby’s weight’ is very possibly too trivial a song in its subject matter for it ever to have been in serious contention either as an A side or an LP track, but its ringing, propulsive chords and freakish suggestion of the scene of an English fete is touched with the Young Knives melodic gift and the observer’s comic sense of displacement: ‘Feels just like a rat-trap / But it’s a tombola’.  This is a group as archetypally English as XTC, though more inclined to celebrate the country’s culture by denigrating it.  When all that youthful spleen and vigour subsides into something more considered, I hope – as happened with XTC – that the Young Knives, and others of their ilk such as the Futureheads (whose yearning and earnest Mackem tone calls to mind the great moments minted by their Geordie neighbours and antecedents, Hurrah!) might retain their spark and write crafty and crafted pastoral or urban pop songs in the best of the English tradition.

But enthusiasm for a B side is still not quite enough to make an old sceptic buy the Young Knives’ album.  Not until it’s discounted further.  There’s nothing to beat the surprise of great pop songs at bargain prices, and nothing more irritating than an album that falls flat in the face of hype.  I’m sticking with the 7 inch.  For now.

2. The Shangri-Las - It’s easier to cry

/ Remember (walkin’ in the sand), Red Bird, 1964

I’ve never been a big fan of the wall of sound.  Phil Spector, the Ronettes, Righteous Brothers, Joe Meek, Johnny Ray, and, in another age, the Associates.  It all owes too much to melodrama; there’s a lack of space which is suffocating, constricting, over-fertilised, and at this distance, it smacks of kitsch.  (An exception is the Walker Brothers, whose orchestral and melodic sophistication matches the faux siblings’ studied cool and doomed romantic asides.)  So it is with the Shangri-Las’ ‘Remember (walkin’ in the sand)’, written and produced by George ‘Shadow’ Morton.  Its tidal wave of sound does break down for whispered moments against a backdrop of squalling seagulls, a use of effects preceding the Beatles’ experimental phase, but its fate in my mind is sealed by the rumoured presence on the recording of a young piano player named Billy Joel.

The B side is much more exciting, much less stifling.  It sounds like it got recorded rather than produced, that time was limited in what was already a time-limited, production line environment.  Rudimentally mixed together are squiggling organ, a rough pre-garage guitar, drums punching out a raw and seemingly under-practiced beat, and the voices of the Weiss sisters and Ganser twins clear against this spacious racket, not lost in one of Shadow’s ornately constructed edifices.

I’m no sound engineer, but this record – at least my scratchy, fucked-up copy of it – is surely conclusive proof of the superior dynamics of vinyl as compared with later formats, whose advantage in terms of quality and clarity isn’t questionable.  But listen to the sound of the rising notes of the chorus of ‘It’s easier to cry’ tearing like paper; it seems to capture the hair-rising spirit of the recording at the instant it was performed.  What does this sound like on a CD?  Or as an mp3?  I’m not sure I want to know (but if a charity shop never yields the 7 inch, and CD is the only option, you’ll find it on the exquisitely named Myrmidons of Melodrama compilation).  I presume the dynamic has to do with the physical nature of tempered metal tracking its way through scored plastic, though I’m sure there’s a more properly scientific explanation.

The swooping tails of the soaring harmonies of ‘It’s easier to cry’ are abruptly closed with melodic exclamation marks, and the listener revels in the mismatch between the short sharp electric crackle of the music and the wallowing lyric, which in contrast to the Undertones’ ‘One way love’, tells of the bittersweet pain to be had in stringing out a broken romance.

Take this version of the Shangri-Las, mix in a little Talulah Gosh, add something definitively 21st century and I think you arrive at the Pipettes.  I doubt they will be the last to revive the model of pop perfection that was accidentally arrived at with the recording of ‘It’s easier to cry’.

1. The Undertones - One way love

/ Here comes the summer, Sire, 1979

At a small English boarding school in 1980, a boy sits on one of the serried pine benches in the TV room watching a video on ‘Top of the pops’.  He is absorbed in the music and its performers, but not so entranced that he doesn’t notice the appearance of the headmaster in the doorway, the massive bulk of his shoulders filling its frame.  Instantly on edge, the boy’s eyes are torn between the screen and this fearsome presence.  On the screen, a bug-eyed Feargal Sharkey is part-way between emoting and leering into the camera which has been set up to show the group performing in their natural element – a housing estate, possibly in the Undertones’ home town of Derry.  To any adult observer born to a generation which reached maturity before Elvis and the Beatles, he must look crazed; but the boy knows that Feargal is crazy with the joy of singing a John O’Neill tune.

And then comes the line that sends a boy of ten red in the face, because there is considerable room for argument as to whether Feargal sings ‘She’s gone to school with her best friend’ or ‘She’s gone to screw with her best friend’.  The boy braves a glance at the headmaster, known to all below the age of fourteen as Trad.  On his face is a look.  Not the kind of thoughtlessly dismissive one that the boy’s grandfather would habitually give pop music in its sum total, but a look so stern that it was as though in the space of a minute, a withering analysis of the implications of ‘Wednesday week’ for the future of society were taking place in the old naval commander’s grey cells.  He took in which of his charges were held captive by this degeneracy, and left the room, saying nothing.

At the end of the Undertones’ short life, Feargal Sharkey had amassed barely any song-writing credits, but his importance to the Undertones cannot be underestimated.  Few singers at the time were gifted with true singing voices; voices for delivering what was necessary over the top of their racket, yes, but none had the successor to the pure choirboy voice Feargal must once have had (he won a singing competition as a boy), since rendered impure by the yearning urgency of adolescence and the grit and dynamics of punk.  His notes were always delivered from well within the lungs, near the heart, and to see him sing was to see the leaping effort of springing those notes true from their deep hiding place.  The group and its members were in perfect balance, the happy result of school friends coming together and playing themselves into shape against a backdrop of the Troubles, seeming more distant than you’d think possible.  Take Feargal away and ‘Teenage kicks’ might not be the celebrated song and fitting epitaph that it has become.

For this blog’s inaugural B side, it’s not the r’n’b romp of ‘Wednesday week’ B side ‘I told you so’ that I’ve chosen, but the gentler approach and melodic classicism that the Undertones first aired – after ‘Teenage kicks’ – on the flipside of ‘Here comes the summer’.  Backwards cycling guitar launches ‘One way love’, its tempo relaxed in comparison to the A side.  Feargal’s singing may never have sounded finer, so perfectly at one is John O’Neill’s melody with his register.  As they do on the track sharing the same side of vinyl, ‘Top twenty’, the group’s backing vocals add an endearing pop goofiness to the song, which is in fact a mournfully beautiful account of a girl’s weariness with the attentions of her boy, given finesse by the increasingly subtle guitar playing of the O’Neill brothers.

‘One way love’ also has what may be the closest approximation in pop to an exclamation mark (at the end of the middle eight), and it inevitably holds a particularly high place in my affection, for it is the B side of the first single I ever bought, second-hand from another boy at the boarding school presided over by Trad, shortly after seeing that clip of ‘Wednesday week’.  When you’re young, the walls of your brain are freshly rendered, and sound bounces off them as if it is the first electric scream ever to burst from the swamp of the world, witnessed by its only recently sentient inhabitants.  I knew from the moment I heard Feargal scream that my life would revolve around music.