Get down Shep

While on the subject of tributes, the Manic Street Preachers have paid another to McCarthy, making good for the third time on Nicky Wire and James Dean Bradfield’s avowed affection for the eighties’ finest exponents of Brechtian technique and exquisite jangle.  This time they have covered ‘Red sleeping beauty’ as a B side.  A single from 1986, and one of McCarthy’s finest moments, Gary Baker’s pre-post rock drumming forms the backbone of a song which mourns political dreaming and apathy in equal if ambiguous measure.  Previously the Manics have tackled ‘Charles Windsor’ and ‘We are all bourgeois now’, which shouldn’t leave you in much doubt about the concerns of a typical McCarthy song.

The McCarthy covers are unusual for the Manics, who have otherwise displayed their consummate refusal to obey the dictates of taste by covering Camper Van Beethoven’s ‘Take the skinheads bowling’, Art Garfunkel’s ‘Bright eyes, Primal Scream’s ‘Velocity girl’ (from their pure as opposed to their rawk phase, if you’ll allow those snap judgements in passing) and Wham!’s ‘Last Christmas’.  Whatever this sounds like – and I’m in no hurry to find out – it will have to go some to beat the re-imagining that another Manics favourite, Big Flame, gave to ‘Wake me up before you go-go’.

The Manics’ genuflections in McCarthy’s direction are touching, and their continuing affection for a group who helped form them politically is reasonably well known.  But I trust Malcolm Eden and Tim Gane, the mind and heart of McCarthy, are getting paid, because it seems a strange oversight not to credit the songwriters on the sleeve of the single on which ‘Red sleeping beauty’ appears (‘Autumnsong’), allowing the purchaser less well-versed in eighties indie-communists to assume it’s a Manic original.

As for their version, well, it’s as faithful as Shep was to John Noakes.  Save for the drumming, which doesn’t quite cut it.

The originals of all three McCarthy songs covered by the Manics are currently available on That’s All Very Well But…: the Best of McCarthy.

The B side

‘Essentially, this went on to color my whole life, I think… I mean, I always wanted to be different or something - always lived on the B side of life somehow.

If it was popular and glamorous (read: A side), I wanted no part of it.’

I am far from being the first to celebrate the humble flipside in the blogosphere.  Over at the B side, Red Kelly has been steadily building impressive, in-depth commentary on r’n’b, funk and soul flips since September 2005.  It’s reasonably safe to say that we’re unlikey to cover the same sounds, although I’m pleased to note one point of cross-over in the form of Dusty Springfield.

Feast your eyes on his artist index sidebar – the Meters!  Irma Thomas!  O.V. Wright! - and remember that beneath each link lies an mp3 (we’re still working on this here at Backed with).

9. Palm Skin Productions - The sunlight on the garden

/ In a silent way,  Mo’ Wax, 1993

While plenty of poetry has been set as Lieder in the classical world, I’ve always found it surprising that more isn’t set to pop music.  (Perhaps it is.  Perhaps there are endless prog epics which borrow Poe poems to deepen their effect or diminish their pomposity and dozens of obscure post-punk salvos which concentrate their discharge through vorticist stanzas.)  To a non-musician who wonders whether some instrumental work-outs might have been saved or enlivened both structurally and imaginatively by the addition of words, it seems an obvious thing to do, but I guess if you’re a musician working in the field of mood, atmosphere, beats, your instrument will dominate the final work and vocals are a non- or side issue.  Maybe you feel you have no facility with words, or no need of them, or never got exposed to poetry in a way that led you back to it on the shelves of second-hand bookshops.

There has always been plenty of talk about whether the lyrics of pop songs can be classed as poetry, how they stand when stripped of their music, or who would win in a no holds barred fight between Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas.  Indeed, back at the end of last century, the Poetry Society published The message: crossing the tracks between poetry and pop which went way beyond these staid discussions and addressed thornier issues, such as whether Morrissey is more epigrammatist than lyricist, let alone poet, and whether the meaning of pop is in any case to be found not in its lyrics but in its noise.  But even this little pocketful of ideas didn’t have much to say about the setting of poetry to pop music.  Off the top of my head I can only think of the Blue Orchids swirling use of Yeats’ ‘Mad as the mist and snow’ and Syd Barrett giving Joyce’s ‘Golden hair’ just the right touch of eerie strangeness, benefiting enormously from words we can be reasonably sure were not written under the lasting effects of too much acid.  2-0 to psychedelia.

For Palm Skin Productions’ setting of Louis MacNeice’s 1938 poem ‘The sunlight on the garden’, we enter musical terrain governed by a different drug.  Let the sleeve notes, probably the work of Mo’ Wax founder James Lavelle, be our guide:

‘Midnight at Palmskin HQ and all is quiet.  Freshly brewed grooves bubble gently in deep vats and sweet clouds of herbal harmony fill the air.  The pinprick studio lights mix with flickering torches in a warm glow as the refrain curls out of the speakers in a hypnotic snake dance.  Chatter and noise flow like a tide through the city, but up in the pastures the music is heard in a silent way.’

Palm Skin Productions was essentially Simon Richmond, who also recorded for Mo’ Wax as Bubbatunes, and is currently a member of the Bays.  For tries at Miles Davis and Joe Zawinul’s ‘In a silent way’, he was joined by saxophonist Chris Bowden, who had already enlivened the fast and frantic ‘Spock with a beard’ (an earlier B side also available on the Mo’ Wax compilation Royaltie$ overdue) with breakneck, helter-skelter playing.

The version of ‘In a silent way’ on the A side is ‘phat’, to use the now quaint word inscribed on most every Mo’ Wax sleeve.  Palm Skin was typical of Mo’ Wax partnerships, which were forged and dissolved seemingly at random, like Rafael Benitez’ midfield and attacking pairings for Liverpool.  Bowden had already played with Talkin’ Loud’s K-Creative and would go on to lend his distinctive hand to the works of Jessica Lauren, Jhelisa Anderson, 4Hero, Basement Jaxx, and the Herbaliser.  He also recorded a solo long player, Time capsule for Soul Jazz and this year has returned as part of the Tomorrow Band on 3 to get ready with minimal interpretations of standards, including ‘Freddie Freeloader’, so coming full circle.

‘Sunlight’ is very much a counterbalance to ‘Spock with a beard’.  The garden comes into view with a skittering rhythm, a deep and thoughtful bass line, and a shooting flash of kingfisher colour across the established sombre shades as Rhoda Dakar, who also graced the Special AKA’s ‘(What I like most about you is your) girlfriend’, sings the opening verses of MacNeice’s poem.  In its easeful intricacy it manages to be both thanksgiving and ominous.

‘The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon…’

Then in with its lowest honk comes Chris Bowden’s soprano sax, a heavier fowl on the brook which meanders its way diagonally across the garden of the song.

Together with the meditative second take on ‘In a silent way’ into which ‘Sunlight’ feeds, you have a perfect slice of vinyl, to sit and listen to in the deep shade from the enchanted hundred year hedge of conifers surrounding your castle.  And before the music fades, depending upon how the poem lands, whether it soothes or cuts, you will find yourself entwined in ivy or wrapped in wisteria, perhaps also wondering why more poetry isn’t set to pop music.

8. Dusty Springfield - No stranger am I

/ I close my eyes and count to ten, Philips, 1968

Saint Etienne’s Stanley and Wiggs are another pair of musicians acting as curators, having been given the keeping of Universal’s archives, alongside their many other multidisciplinary activities.  The first bodies to be exhumed for their Eclipse label have been the Peddlers, Chris Montez, and none other than Dusty Springfield, so carrying on a tradition of rescuing unfashionable performers from the past that they initiated in their fanzine Caff twenty years ago.  Bob and Pete might however have given the Dusty compilation a less literal and more illustrative name than Complete A and B sides 1963-1970.  Why not have borrowed from the song which anticipated Dusty in Memphis as early as 1966 and called it Every ounce of strength?  In that phrase you have the vocal delicacy and muscular control, and in the song itself, the point when Dusty moved beyond a tendency towards balladry.  But the title is a small matter when the music is so consistently uplifting in its celebration of the misery love can bring.  Disc two’s B sides offer as much substance as the more familiar sounds of disc one’s hits and misses.  On both you can hear the ever-increasing sophistication in Dusty’s singing, its sombre tints and gentle sunlit exactitude.  Dusty possessed both the intimacy of Bobbie Gentry and the soaring dynamics of Scott Walker; neither of those singers quite had the opposing quality, but Dusty was able to sing one song for your ear alone and deliver another with that far-off Engel look in her eyes.  The accompaniment always strives to match the calibre of the singer – the overlapping staccato strings and drum roll which opens Dusty’s own song ‘I’m gonna leave you’ sound incredible.  Who could value a broken heart above the realisation of such a goodbye note?

The Memphis set isn’t the bolt from the blue that it might seem to be on first glance, nor is it exceptional in terms of the quality of Dusty’s output.  The lightness of touch and the sensuality developed throughout her recordings.  At the time Memphis must have been a concept which struck the world as novel – the ostensibly English rose recording in a place synonymous with Presley and soul – and that initial reaction has perhaps been handed down the listening generations.  But having first recorded in New York as early as 1964, America and its songwriters were already an established part of the Dusty make-up, and no songs better demonstrate the delicacy of her delivery than two by her American lover of the time, Norma Tanega.  ‘The colour of your eyes’ pinpoints the moment in a rocky relationship when you are parted and in a panic struggle to remember the beauty of a face you were only just beginning to know.  The swaying orchestration catches this plaintive uncertainty just so as Dusty sings ‘I can see, now that you’re leaving me, all the shades of autumn in the colour of your eyes’.

‘No stranger am I’ presents a perfect circle of absorption in love, being written by one lover and sung back at her by the other.  The aforementioned acoustic guitar and some low then rising gentle strings are all the backing Dusty needs to unfurl a vocal like a long slow stretching of limbs first thing in the morning or last thing before bed.  The solipsistic twosome are undisturbed by the world or its troubles, but in some magically unaffected way allow us this glimpse of what they have found together.

Presumably alluding to Dusty’s resurrection at the hands of the Pet Shop Boys, Maxϊmo Park’s Paul Smith tells us that ‘Mary O’Brien’ ‘came back – influence rubs off whether appropriate or not’.  With mere B sides the quality of ‘No stranger am I’, you can understand why she continues to pull in listeners born long after the decade when she was in her prime.  Long may Dusty keep coming back.

7. Maxϊmo Park - Mary O’Brien

/ Our velocity, Warp, 2007

Pop music may seem at first glance to operate in a vacuum of its own making, sealed off from the world and self-contained in a way that is calculated to irritate, but there is a strain of pop which has a frame of reference beyond its own tradition.  My shelves (if not my walls) are peppered with art sourced from a variety of songs.  ‘Absolute beginners’ inevitably led many Jam fans to Colin MacInnes’ London novels and a wider if not entirely problem-free understanding of the city which Weller also romanced.  Robert Forster’s ‘Karen’ helps him (and us) track down a more challenging reading list while simultaneously taking on the role as the object of his infatuation.  Malcolm Eden of McCarthy drew parallels between the meagre payments made to ‘Frans Hals’ for his portraiture and life as a musician on the dole in Thatcher’s Britain.  More recently Shack managed a hat trick of references on ‘Finn, Sophie, Bobby & Lance’: Edgar Allen Poe, Peter Weir’s supernaturally unsettling film of Picnic at Hanging Rock and Home and away.  What inquiring mind would not follow up these leads (give or take Australian soaps) knowing that they come from the same wellspring that watered a favourite song?  Assuming it avoids being didactic, music which acts as curator of its cultural roots is definitely to be welcomed.

Second generation post-punk assimilators Maxϊmo Park have recently developed an unusual approach to mapping their inspiration: the pop obit.  Singer Paul Smith – whose haircut has previously had something of the mortician about it – is working up songs from obituaries and pairing them with more reflective music from guitarist Duncan Lloyd.  Standing alongside each other in this emerging pantheon are Mary O’Brien, Robert Altman and photographer Don McPhee, with the still-fresh cadavers of London-based Trinidadian calypso singer Young Tiger (George Brown) and post-everything philosopher Jean Baudrillard currently being prepared for viewing.  While these biographical vignettes are initially and appropriately appearing as B sides, there’s talk of a compilation, which should surely be called The morgue, after what the newspapers call the filing system for the largely pre-prepared obituaries they are obliged to keep in readiness.

Robert Altman you know, but who was ‘Mary O’Brien’?  Well, we hear that her mascara streamed and she once threw a tea set down a flight of stairs.  She was ‘none of the above’ and ‘bottle blonde until the end.’  She ‘found fame, faded away’.  Can you see who it is yet?  I confess I needed the tip-off in this article.  Mary O’Brien became Dusty Springfield – a singer in terms of tradition as distant from what Maxϊmo Park are about as Robert Altman is.  After the bluster of A side ‘Our velocity’, ‘Mary O’Brien’ is a joy, with its mournful Momus meets the Montgolfier Brothers melody, and an acoustic guitar that echoes the intro to Dusty’s ‘No stranger am I’, which not entirely coincidentally, is the next B side on this blog’s record deck.