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.

• I’m 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.

• Lines running north
• Brown eyed girl