‘Rock critics like to make a big deal about B sides but there are only maybe a dozen really great ones in the whole history of singles.’ - Dave Marsh, The heart of rock & soul: the 1001 greatest singles ever made, in the entry for Bob Dylan’s ‘Just like Tom Thumb’s blues [live]’.

Coming soon – the completion of the second dozen B/ws and embarkation on the third.

Perhaps we have more of a tradition on this side of the pond when it comes to valuing the contents of the B side, whether as artists or listeners.  Or maybe we’re bigger pop snobs with less rock and soul heart.

Perhaps it depends on your definition of the popular song, and how far you lean from the heart of rock and soul towards the spleen of the anti-popular.  Perhaps the question revolves around what in your view makes a great pop song, or a great anti-pop song.  Perhaps it centres on an acceptance or qualified rejection of the concept of the canon, and how seriously (or playfully) we take its overarching structure as a means of discussing music.  Perhaps it has to do with the exclusivity or inclusiveness of the canon in question, the individuality of its reckoning as compared with its willingness – or instinctive tendency – to take on board some sense of shared value.

In the end most likely it comes down to the fact that Dave Marsh published his personal canon in 1989 and that, even by his own admission in this 1998 postscript, ‘the Age of Rock & Soul is dead.’

However – assuming it’s the one recorded on May 17th 1966 at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester show, and played four songs before the legendary ‘Judas’ moment -  Dave is absolutely right about this version of ‘Tom Thumb’s blues’, which first appeared on the flipside of ‘I want you’ that year:

‘[It] came out before anybody ever thought of bootlegging rock shows, before anybody this side of Jimi Hendrix quite understood Dylan as a great rock and roll stage performer.  And so this vicious, majestic music, hidden away in the most obscure place he could think of putting it, struck with amazing force.

Today, it sounds like the reapings of a whirlwind, Dylan’s voice as draggy, druggy, and droogy as the surreal Mexican Beatnik escapade he’s recounting, Robbie Robertson carving dense mathematical figures on guitar, Garth Hudson working pure hoodoo on organ.  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.’

/ Grass, Virgin, 1986

‘A lot has been written and wrangled over with this song, and, you know, it hasn’t deserved it.  I just tried to wrestle with the paradox of God and the last dying doubts of belief that had hung, bat like, in the dark corners of my head since childhood.  I’ll just say one more time this song failed to crystallize all my thoughts on the subject in under 4 minutes.  Human belief is too big a beast to bring to the floor in such a short time.’ – Andy Partridge on ‘Dear God’ in the notes to Coat of many cupboards.

I was sorely tempted to pick something else.  After all, this is the group which as long ago as 1982 released a set of B sides, Beeswax – whose title this blog perhaps ought to have appropriated as its own – alongside the hits on Waxworks.  And that was at a point when we were less than half-way through the story, if we measure out XTC’s time in studio albums.  From across that range the offcuts have often been as strong as those LPs’ individual highlights, and in a parallel world might have unseated some of them.  The dubscapes of ‘Pulsing pulsing’ and ‘The somnambulist’; the brash attack of ‘Don’t lose your temper’ and ‘Limelight’ (twice outed as a B side and giving XTC’s official fanzine back in the eighties its name); twisted pop songs like ‘Smokeless zone’, and ‘Punch and Judy’ and straighter ones like ‘Blame the weather’ or ‘Desert island’.  One of the ‘Homo Safari’ experimental instrumentals even – ‘Procession towards learning land’, say.  (The Dukes of Stratosphear being an alter-ego, I consider myself free to do ‘My love explodes’ or ‘Vanishing girl’ at a later date.)

Most likely it would have been ‘Jump’ with its incredible surfeit of musical ideas, or the West Country pop art experimentalism of ‘Red brick dream’.  But Andy Partridge’s missive to the Almighty, inspired by books of children’s letters to God, continues to command attention, just as it generated attention at the time of its release, tucked evasively away on side B of ‘Grass’, Colin Moulding’s jovial and psychedelic double entendre.  It didn’t matter to the listener then that Andy feels he failed to put across a rounded and complete assessment of his own non-belief, and it doesn’t matter now.  What matters is that he captured headline messages from his own internal newspaper and put these across in a way which immediately connected with the readership.  Who has ever said everything there is to say on a subject in the course of a pop song (give or take Bob Dylan)?  The best you can do is put across those big feelings and personalise them with the kind of small detail which enlarges both their humanity and their artistry.  Andy Partridge was already a master of this craft when he penned ‘Dear God’ and I wonder if his coolness about the song reflects a sense that even after setting out his position, doubts about his doubt remained; because, where God is concerned, certainty is a fool’s game.  And though he has said that if the song upsets anyone, they deserve to be upset, perhaps he was worried – having just recorded in America with Todd Rundgren in a somewhat desperate effort to increase their attractiveness across the water – that it might lead to the kind of Stateside troubles that the Beatles unwittingly engendered when Lennon estimated the Fab Four’’s popularity as against Jesus’.  Indeed, when college radio stations started playing the song, it did upset fundamentalists, though of course nothing like as much as Lennon’s Jesus quote.  But such was the interest in the song that XTC’s American label Geffen were forced to re-press Skylarking, with ‘Mermaid smiled’ giving way to ‘Dear God’, and the album subsequently became a milestone for the group, selling in sufficiently healthy quantities to gift them another album or two of commercial lenience from Virgin.  So the infamous battles between producer and band, the belligerence of which may also have served to warp Partridge’s opinion of the sessions’ stand-out song, ultimately did XTC an enormous amount of good, as well as giving us their most atypical LP, up there with their more characteristic best (Drums and wires and Mummer in this fan’s opinion).

There are three versions of ‘Dear God’ available, which allow us to trace the song’s development backwards from the fully realised song to Andy’s earliest sketch of it.  First came the original, realised in the studio together with Todd.  Much later a release was granted to the blueprint band demo through the medium of the Coat of many cupboards box set.  The structure and lyrics are in place, but the recording – never of course originally intended to be heard – toots and parps a little, although Dave’s crunchy lead guitar, not dissimilar to that of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ (the Blues being an immediate signifier for God and the Devil), is more evident and gives the song a counter-cultural sixties feel distinct from the epic, string- and Todd-powered nature of the end result.  Finally, on the fifth disc of the Fuzzy warbles series, in which Andy trawled his archives in what some including Colin Moulding felt was a disreputably sea-bed scraping way, there is the ‘skiffle version’ – the sketchy Doneganesque beginnings of the song, its tempo, mood and lyric all yet to settle down into the serious shape of the demo and studio versions.  That Andy persevered – it took ‘several blacksmith-like bending and bashing sessions’ – suggests that the song was unusually important to him, and worth struggling over.

The earlier versions are for those whose musical sensibility was shaped or hard-wired by the sound of XTC, and still return to swim in their black seas, even after all these years.  All anyone else needs is the remastered version of Skylarking, which ‘Dear God’ now concludes. (The original sequencing idea was for it to appear between ‘The man who sailed around his soul’ and ‘Dying’.  But in the end it was left off in favour of ‘Another satellite’, a song much harder to love.)

Unlike certain of the songs on Skylarking – ‘Summer’s cauldron’, the triptych of ‘Ballet for a rainy day’, ‘1000 umbrellas’ and ‘Season cycle’, ‘Earn enough for us’ and ‘Dying’ - ‘Dear  God’ is not flawless.  One or two of the rhymes are ordinary, and although it was sound lateral thinking on Todd’s part to have a child sing the opening and closing lines instead of Andy, and eight year old American Jasmine Veillette does a great job, it’s a shame that recording with Todd obviously meant that they were unlikely to have the wherewithal to fly a similarly aged kid from Swindon across the pond to act as Partridge junior for verisimilitude’s sake.  The idea ultimately works because it gives song the necessary low-key introduction from which Andy can then build its emotional and intellectual charge: 

‘and all the people that you made in your image
see them fighting in the street
’cause they can’t make opinions meet
about God – I can’t believe in you’

Colin adds a thrumming and melodious bass line to the glorious and quizzical middle eight:

‘Did you make disease, and the diamond blue?
Did you make mankind after we made you?
And the devil too!’

In come sweeping strings with which I would wager Todd meant to echo George Martin’s arrangement two minutes into ‘I am the walrus’, developing the orchestral tension then released at the song’s climax through some seriously thunderous kettledrumming and Andy’s impassioned, angry vocal:

‘I won’t believe in heaven and hell
No saints, no sinners, no devil as well
No pearly gates, no thorny crown
You’re always letting us humans down
The wars you bring, the babes you drown
Those lost at sea and never found,
and it’s the same the whole world ’round
The hurt I see helps to compound
That Father, Son and Holy Ghost
is just somebody’s unholy hoax
and if you’re up there you’d perceive
that my heart’s here upon my sleeve
If there’s one thing I don’t believe in
it’s you… Dear God.’

What an irony that the cover of ‘Grass’ reproduces Colin’s admittedly clever lyric to his song while ‘Dear god’ is listed at the end of them; an afterthought.  Even as a B side it played second fiddle to the shiny happiness of ‘Extrovert’.  But you can’t keep a good song down, and ‘Dear God’ was released as an A side the following year, although typically for XTC by then the moment had passed and it did not chart.  Nevertheless it has become one of XTC’s best-known songs, and in popular music’s everlasting swing between God and the devil, Andy Partridge’s epistle strikes a particularly human (as well as humanist) note that will surely continue to resonate down the years.

• ‘Dear God’ video
• Dear God demo
• Andy discusses ‘Dear God’ with Todd Bernhardt

Everything you could possibly want to know about XTC and aren’t afraid to spend a moment or two looking for:

• Chalkhills
• Optimism’s flames

/ Fool for you, Curtom, 1968

If it hadn’t been Paul Weller, it might well have been somebody else.  Past the two decades when he was in his prime, the songs of Curtis Mayfield could surely not have stayed long in the hands of soul aficionados alone.  But in the UK in the early eighties, it was Paul who doffed his cap to this particular inspiration, recording ‘Move on up’ (and the Chi-Lites’ ‘Stoned out of my mind’) for the ‘Beat surrender’ double seven inch and alerting spotty would-be mod youth everywhere to the genius of Curtis.  And when the Style Council went out on tour in 1984, the choice of the Impressions’ ‘Meeting over yonder’ made for a happy fit with Weller’s stomping soul direction and the increasingly confident expression of his political convictions.

Curtis himself grew into the times, beginning to make his mark on them while leading the Impressions.  In ‘People get ready’ he wrote a song as sure and true as ‘A change is gonna come’.  Both sound like spirituals that wrote themselves a long, long time before any mortal channelled either out of the ether.  Of the songs that followed in its wake, some were as spiritual but most were more human; more Mayfield-esque.

Arguably the point came early in Curtis’ life as a solo artist when he became the musician and lyricist who best reflected the times, pointing the way into the future with the far-seeing clarity of a visionary yet retaining the humility to empathise with the flawed sinners on every side.  Sure, he was a peaceable moderate rather than a militant firebrand, an Obama rather than a Malcolm X, but his purpose was as firm as his demeanour was gentle.

If you scan the history of pop and soul, there aren’t many with his persistence, with the natural ease he showed in gradually refining his compositions.  And after so long as an Impression, to have the desire and energy to reinvent himself as Curtis Mayfield, and then to pursue the same kind of process of refinement from one end of the seventies to the other, seems to me extraordinary.  Tom Waits is in the same league.  There aren’t many reasons to set Tom alongside Curtis, save for the pleasure of imagining them side by side; they are so utterly unlike, but for the artistic integrity that lifts them above less consistently creative mortals.

Curtis’ solo years are rightly celebrated and perhaps it’s over-familiarity with them which inclines me towards the earlier incarnation and the two volumes of Definitive Impressions (neither quite that definitive given there had to be two of them).  In the seven year stretch from 1963 to 1969 the Impressions averaged five singles a year, and more often than not it’s difficult to tell which side of the single was the lead.  You only have to plough your way through the lows among the highs of Madness’ The business collection of As and Bs to know how difficult it is to get both sides of a single right.  Perhaps the comparison is unfair on the Nutty Boys, since the Impressions began issuing singles in the days when 45s were not necessarily marked as side A and B, 1 or 2, in case the notional flip aroused more interest and radio play than the A, so perhaps they had more reason to come up with a matching pair.  (From this discography, it looks like ‘People get ready’ started out as the backing for the equally glorious full-range lead-swapping soulfulness of ‘I’ve been trying’ before it emerged as the front-runner.)

Over the years Curtis’ voice seemed to defeat the wear and tear that age brings to everyone else (particularly Tom Waits).  Its timbre became lighter, higher and sweeter – the sweetness that allied to the spring of his song writing enabled ‘Can’t satisfy’ and ‘You always hurt me’ to out-Motown Motown.  Fred Cash and Sam Gooden stood alongside Curtis, and together they sang like angels.  Neither should the contribution of producer-arranger Johnny Pate to the celestial nature of the end result be forgotten.  On ‘I’m so proud’, even a xylophone adds to the heavenly feel.  Such sweetness might be cloying were it not for the substance and strength typified by ‘Keep on pushing’, while in its finger-clicking groove ‘It’s alright’ encapsulates like no other song a kind of non-specific kind of earthbound happiness despite it all.  Sam Gooden adds full-stomached satisfaction to the reassuring delight of Curtis’ near countertenor, and the drums roll like drawn-out moments anticipating better times to come.  And has a more optimistic song than ‘We’re a winner’ ever been written, music and lyric breasting the tape together, arm in arm on the podium?

From ‘Keep on pushing’ onwards, Curtis kept saying what needed to be said, and such songs were necessarily the most immediately striking on 1968’s This is my country and 1969’s The young mods’ forgotten story (happily paired as a reissue by Charly).  While The young mods’ forgotten story is the lesser of the two LPs, in ‘Choice of colours’ it contains one of Curtis’ greatest pairings of verse and chorus, magical melodies both.  Lyrically he employs the Socratic method to build an unanswerable case against bigotry.  Bright and undaunted, This is my country was one side of a dime which when flipped in the air came down as Curtis’ finest solo LP, There’s no place like America today, wherein darker, harsher messages were delivered with greater coolness but equal grace and the same generous musicality.  Optimism defeated?  No, Curtis was just digging in for the long haul.  ‘Realising little could be achieved through the barrel of a gun, his chosen weapon was music and he carried nothing more threatening than a guitar.  With the Impressions, there was no macho posturing, no sage stroking of chins, no basilisk stare, only the steady candour of the gaze,’ writes Clive Anderson of the sleeve of This is my country in his notes to the Charly reissue.  By implication he is also describing the music, a concentrated accumulation of all the vinyl that came before it, ten slices of horn-powered soul, ten pieces of hook-laden pop.  The politically conscious songs in fact only top and tail the LP; the Impressions’ meat and drink remains the love song.  This is my country has a particular fine crop documenting the comings and goings of the heart.  The most unusual is ‘I’m loving nothing’ on which the man who had written so many love letters now puts himself in the character of an abruptly empty and frustrated man, a man who has become for some unspecified reason devoid of the emotion that ironically courses through another majestic Mayfield vocal.

This then was the constant, from ‘Gypsy woman’ in 1961 through to 1980’s Something to believe in – the return time and again to minor key melancholy, the counterpoint to the Impressions’ bursts of brassy joy and Curtis Mayfield’s unshakeable belief that even long odds can be overcome.

/ Direct hit, Labels/EMI/Mute, 2007

‘It’s the sort of thing I don’t want you to see
So I hide it on side B
…
Everybody has a sad side
I’ve hidden mine on the B side
…
It’s only fair before you decide –
that you should have a listen to my B side’

Ah, that little-practiced form, the concept B side.

Like a desert from a grain of sand, a garden from a flower, is it possible to infer the rest of Art Brut’s output from this one conceit?  Work out that they must necessarily have another B side entitled ‘I found this song in the road’, or that inevitably their debut A side for the archetypal indie label was called ‘Formed a band’ and that it was destined to make it to number 31 in the final, posthumous Festive Fifty?  That they would move sideways to a label with an appropriate degree of mild (read indie) notoriety for their first LP Bang bang rock & roll – and that as with so many before they would therefore be playing with guns at their heads?  And might we even work out that the singer would have to be called something as artfully proletarian as Eddie Argos, and that he would, three or four years after forming his own band, collaborate with Black Box Recorder under the obvious portmanteau name of the Black Arts to record a Yuletide single called ‘Christmas number one’?  And who was surprised when – its archness set against its ambition – that single fell seriously wide of its indicated mark?

Could we further infer that during the time they were operational their B side would be covered on a blog dedicated to B sides by a writer who can’t decide whether to grimace or smile on discovering that a song on their first album goes:

 ‘My little brother just discovered rock and roll
 There’s a noise in his head and he’s out of control
 He no longer listens to A sides
 He made me a tape of bootlegs and B sides’

I think we could.

Eddie Argos must have been the kid who was too smart for school.  If his approach has a fault it’s that it’s perhaps too frequently Peel-lite conceptually; lyrically and sonically a throwback to so many obscure slices of vinyl that saw the light of day only by being played late at night by Peel.  I’m thinking Yeah Yeah Noh, I, Ludicrous, Bob, Half-Man Half Biscuit, Colorblind James Experience, and Camper Van Beethoven; the beat of ‘Take the skinheads bowling’ could easily have informed that of ‘I want to be double A-sided’.  But there’s also sincerity and a youthful excitement in Art Brut’s grooves that has more to do with Buzzcocks, and a refined sense of the righteous irony whose parameters were first tested by Mark E. Smith.

Art Brut is a group politicised enough to pitch their web tent in the org.uk rather than co.uk domain.  And yet this single was not released by a 21st century equivalent of In Tape or Probe Plus but by EMI, to whom Mute was sold in 2002 (in any case a considerably different label to the one set up by Daniel Miller in 1978 when he self-released his own concept single as the Normal, ‘T.V.O.D.’ / ‘Warm leatherette’).  Despite the properly independent edginess of Eddie’s worldview, that Art Brut are issued into the mainstream by the currently downsizing ex-purveyor of military hardware proves how generically middle of the road the indie genre is in the 21st century, and the severance of any meaningful connection to Mute’s origins.

The cuteness of Art Brut’s concept is also undermined a little by the A side.  Although it’s titled ‘Direct hit’ – no doubt informing the choice or even the very writing of its B side – it doesn’t have the melodic vim and vigour of its predecessor ‘Nag nag nag’, so that what we effectively end up with is no ‘Day tripper’ / ‘We can work it out’, ‘Hip Hip’ / ‘Flowers’, or ‘Sensitive’ / ‘When morning comes to town’, no ‘All out to get you’ /’ Drowning’, ‘The flood’ / ‘Disney boys’ or ‘Horrorshow’ / ‘Adult/ery’, no ‘Thank you (falettinme be mice elf agin)’ / ‘Everybody is a star’, ‘What goes up’ / ‘Five day morning’, or ‘Sunday’ / ‘Sporting life’, but a double B side.  Oops.

And of a gently funny B side that wants but fails to be one half of a double A, we might ask a final question: why would you want to lose that humble, hidden cachet?

The grass is always greener, I guess.

/ Onye nzuki, EMI Nigeria, 1973

A while back, in the days before it was possible to download my way to knowledge, I did something I would not normally countenance, and bought a couple of Rough Guide CDs in an attempt to get to grips with the music of Africa.  Aside from the obvious routes in via the groups most frequently played by John Peel and Andy Kershaw back in the day – Bhundu Boys, Four Brothers – I was at a loss as to where to start my exploration of that vast continent’s sounds.  And so I found myself before the African music compilations in one of the chain stores on Oxford Street.

Rough Guide’s ‘world music’ series tends to cover a range of styles and are not limited to the golden periods of any particular country, which is a good thing or bad depending on your point of view.  I can never quite escape the feeling that this might be like listening to an equivalent guide for Scotland and discovering – with the recent BBC4 documentary Caledonia Dreamin’ in mind – that it contains not only the music of Orange Juice, Teenage Fanclub and Belle and Sebastian but also Hue and Cry, Deacon Blue and Wet Wet Wet.  But ears can’t be deceived – they like what they like, and when a Brazilian compilation goes soft and diva-ish and the sheen of a modern production replaces the fresh acoustics of that artiste’s earlier recordings, I skip to the next track.

To give the Rough Guides their due, Congolese soukous contains Kanda Bongo Man’s ‘Saϊ’, which has a glorious guitar sound at least as humdinging as your favourite indie picker’s and singing to match, and kicks off courtesy of ‘Cooperation’ by Franco and Sam Mangwana with ten plus minutes of equally glorious guitar, brass and deadly deep subs.  Nigeria and Ghana offers the skittering rhythms and choral harmonies of King Sunny Ade’s ‘Maa jo’, Sir Victor Uwaifo (more of whom later) and recent directions in music from Fela Kuti’s drummer Tony Allen in the stretched and lunar form of ‘Asiko’, which you could seamlessly segue into ‘Bug in the bassbin’ by Innerzone Orchestra (Carl Craig) or any one of its remixes.

I remain very much a novice on the subject of African music.  But anyone wanting to undertake their own investigations could do no better than start with Nigeria special: modern highlife, Afro-sounds & Nigerian blues 1970-6 (Soundway) , where the unfamiliar bends until it is familiar, and the familiar – calypso, A love supreme, the organ of Jackie Mittoo, Scratch playing the studio, the scratchy funk of Sly & The Family Stone, the foot-stompin’ disco of Hamilton Bohannon, even motorik Neu! – is charged with the celebratory energy of a West African perspective, built on the foundation of the brassy big band highlife style of the sixties.  With the ante subsequently upped by the emergence of Fela Kuti and James Brown’s first tour of West Africa in late 1971, there followed an explosion of musical experimentation and stylistic hybridisation, and it’s this which Nigeria special so spectacularly documents.

Let’s consider for a moment the music of our own sceptic isle during those years.  I’ll let you have Nick Drake, John Martyn, Bowie, Kevin Ayers, and Robert Wyatt, and at a push, Roxy Music.  I don’t have to remind you of the prog, soft rock and dead-carcass-in-the-road pop crimes committed after Plastic Ono Band and before punk’s tabula rasa inspired or allowed minds and hearts to work differently, and no amount of recasting these crimes as guilty pleasures will force me to concede the point.  Those years were without doubt British music’s darkest hours.  Across the pond and elsewhere in the world, innovation was in full swing; boundaries were being pushed back, destroyed.  It would be a while before that was happening again here.

I have to confess, on sizing up Nigeria special as a purchase, that I balked at the air of kitsch attaching itself in my mind to group names like St. Augustine & His Rovers Dance Band, the Nigerian Police Force Band, and Dan Satch & His Atomic 8 Dance Band Of Aba, but I needn’t have worried.  The names reflect the traditions of Nigerian music, and its recent history, with many musicians learning their trade in army or police force bands.  And cuts like ‘Feso Jaiye’ (‘Take life slowly’) by the Sahara All Stars Of Jos have musical space and rhythms as generous as the best funk of the time, the best conscious jazz of the previous decade, and (generalising it to an archetype) a guitar sound that stands against any style of music, any place, any time.

The Semi Colon on the other hand immediately presents itself as a great name to possess; one imagines that Lasbrey Colon really was born with that surname, and was therefore bound to punctuate the name of any group he formed.  His self-congratulatory Afrobeat foot-stomps like Bohannon and speeds with the urgency of ‘Time has come today’ by the Chambers Brothers.  Miles Cleret’s notes state that ‘Nekwaha Semi Colon’ ‘doesn’t sound much like anything else from the time’ – nor since, I would add.  There’s an argument to be made on this basis for flipsides as a staple of the archival collection or retrospective, for it was in those shadowy, dusty vinyl corners that possible paths were experimentally pursued.  Often these were paths not subsequently followed, or they were simply dead ends, but when history casts its eye back, it occasionally sees what was missed at the time, and this collection delivers on that remit.  A number of the tracks are culled from the flip or from EPs, demonstrating the thoroughness with which Miles Cleret carried out his research, and making this an essential purchase not only for the novice but listeners who already know their way round Africa.  On ‘I want a break thru’, the Hykkers anticipate the rough desert licks of Tinariwen with an instrumental as funky as anything released in the US that same year (1972).  The compilation even presents – from the B side to his dad’s A – what is thought to be the only recorded work by the Tony Benson Sextet.

The A sides and album tracks are equally delicious, offering songs as varied as the languages in which they are sung, and infinite in the unique patterns – the ceaselessly ingenious repetition and variation of fuguelike arabesques – that are sprung from the strings seemingly of any African who picks up a guitar.  That they should be set against similarly inventive rhythms stemming from ancient tradition is part of why Soundway are right to append the word ‘special’ to Nigeria.  The first three tracks on the compilation (by the Anambra Beats, Celestine Ukwu & His Philosophers National, and the Don Isaac Ezekiel Combination) are typical in having awesome guitar and rhythm which at any given moment has the quality of seeming to be without end, which is just how the listener wants it to be.  The fourth is ‘Akula owu onyeara’ by The Funkees, which blends James Brown with ‘Popcorn’-style Lee Perry, a mad echo-laden vocal about a madman, and, as the notes suggest, ‘a bassline that sounds like it was produced in Detroit about fifteen years later.’

And so it goes on – there’s barely anything that you wouldn’t want to listen to repeatedly, and always something that connects with your non-African listening.  On the intro to ‘Osalobua rekpama’’, Sir Victor Uwaifo’s guitar chimes out a melodic line that is spookily reminiscent of Paul Weller’s guitar on both ‘Liza Radley’ and ‘Mr Clean’.  Perhaps the biggest name on Nigeria special, and one of the most consistent to judge from his appearances on other compilations, it’s great to hear that a Soundway retrospective dedicated to Sir Vic is forthcoming.  Soundway’s production values obviously owe a debt to the consummate repackaging of archive material espoused by Soul Jazz, with fabulous graphic design and comprehensive sleeve notes – as thorough as the often sketchy local knowledge of individual artists allows, that is – and recordings you would swear come from the original masters rather than cleaned-up transfer from vinyl.

Treat yourself to Nigeria special and keep your ears peeled for more.

/ Therese, Creation, 1986

After our Dunedin detour, it’s time to get Backed with back on track with a proper B side by a group who almost had it all, but never quite managed to build on the bright and shining promise of their early recordings, and so lie relatively forgotten in a few ageing vinyl collections of Creation Records vintage.

Recorded for Creation in 1986, and also appearing as the flip of their major label debut ‘Skankin’ queens’ the following year, ‘I feel’ is a tour de force of jangle, a Cartesian affirmation of the self via the four-piece pop group and the three minute pop song; or, maybe, a fuck off note delivered to the establishment, or God, or the stifling limits of a small town.  Singer Michael Ryan delivers his somewhat enigmatic lyric with a surety that tips its balance from the vague and meaningless towards the emotionally wise.  What’s being sung sounds important to the singer.  You feel obliged to take note, and when the plectrum-plucked treble strings insist on the point, you are won over to the cause.  Michael Ryan’s is an essentially 21st century voice; not unique, or idiosyncratic, but one which without much forcing conveys emotional weight, freighting the words with a hint of melodrama that he may have learnt from Ian McCulloch.  ‘Paradise’ on the first single bears this vocal influence most strongly, while its double A flip ‘God bless’ enters the fray with a riff that might have been stolen from the Bunnymen’s ‘The back of love’.  By the time ‘Skankin’ queens’ appeared not much had changed, and yet everything had.  The Bodines had cast aside notions of influence, and played with the swagger of a football team on the rise, certain of victory, surprised when they were held at bay or beaten.  So here we have yet another dream featuring four lads who wanted to shake the world, but that dreams are the lifeblood of pop culture is beyond dispute.  The songs of the Bodines come wrapped in dream textures, are performed in the same dream bubble as enveloped the Beatles or the Monkees, and with no less dream accomplishment.  In contrast to the innocence of those sixties templates, they exude an arrogant but brittle cool; the (relatively) sophisticated side of Creation, besides whom Oasis are a crude and oafish caricature.  With their handful of singles and a solitary LP, the Bodines felt their way towards the two moments of glory given us a decade later by the Verve.  And in ‘Therese’, they minted their own classic pop 45, complete with a dream pop pun and a dream pop reference: ‘It scares the health out of me / I’m weakening, I’m shakin’, rattlin’ and everything’.

Michael Ryan – an earlier incarnation of Richard Ashcroft – was described in the pages of the NME as ‘sex on a stick’ and I remember friends concurring with this.  They recorded two sessions for Janice Long before their solitary date for Peel.  They played a sell-out show at the Astoria (footage here comes from their earlier show at the Astoria supporting the Go-Betweens), and the house moved.  Truly, they could have been contenders.  They signed to a major, issuing releases on their own Pop imprint via Magnet (part of BMG) in a guileless attempt to defuse the unexploded bomb at the centre of the then contentious move from cottage industry to corporation – and the LP flopped.

Like Shack’s Zilch, Played was produced by Ian Broudie, and while it’s tempting to saddle him with the blame again, it’s not actually fair.  On this occasion little or none of the production damage reportedly inflicted by Broudie at the time of release is now visible.  If there are limitations, they are of scope rather than engineering.  Like the truism about everyone having a novel in them, perhaps the Bodines only had one set of songs in them, and all of a type.  But what a set, what a type, and how well and how consistently they managed to realise them.  ‘Therese’ aside, if you were presented with their song book as a folder of mp3s, it would be difficult to tell A side from B, or B side from LP track.  By today’s standards, the songs sound like mainstream pop, with their timeless melodicism and a sense of purpose underlined by a fondness for dramatic intros – the exclamatory clanging guitars at the top of ‘Tall stories’ and ‘Clear’ being two of the finest.  The delivery of their songs shows an ambition beyond Creation, beyond indie, but being ahead of the time when such talent stood a chance of being more carefully nurtured and much better exposed – not to mention better recorded – they found themselves beached as major label rejects.  If not damaged goods, then goods without long-term value.

There was a 1989 single for Dave Haslam’s Play Hard label, ‘Decide’, which featured Laugh’s Spencer Birtwistle on drums, and two decently baggy-sounding run-outs on the B side.  Despite trying to catch hold of Happy Mondays’ coat-tails, all three songs were on a par with the earlier set, and belied the view that they were stuck in a dimension from which they could not move on.  But their heart mustn’t have been in it, for this was the final word from the Bodines.  Played out.  Having been leaders, albeit briefly, they evidently did not want to be followers.

There are however two postscripts.  One in the shape of Medalark Eleven, the group subsequently formed by Michael Ryan, who released an LP on Creation in 1994.  The other courtesy of recordings made in 1988 and issued by German label Firestation in 2007.  ‘Shrinkwrap’ is redolent of what came before, although its melody does seem to have wandered away from the studio at the crucial moment.  But the B sides see the Bodines actively searching for the direction that would be more evident on ‘Decide’, expanding their envelope with gentle reference to what was happening in Madchester by grinding out a guitar-flanged letter to a girl in a league above the writer’s own on ‘With you’, and punching out naivety with the élan of Lowlife-era New Order on ‘Wake up and smell the coffee’.

With a second-hand vinyl copy of Played currently retailing on Amazon for £100, it surely won’t be along before someone is astute enough to put out a collection that brings together everything that the Bodines recorded – B sides and all.

Matthew Bannister has just released an album as One Man Bannister called Moth.  You can hear songs from this and by his group The Weather here.  It’s striking how Matthew appears to have given his singing voice a Dylanesque reinvention.

For anyone whose thirst for the music of New Zealand has not been slaked by this blog’s Dunedin double mini-series, The big city looks to have all bases and groups covered.

‘In love with those times: Flying Nun and the Dunedin sound’ is a quixotic Stylus piece which focuses on the period from 1977 through to the release of the Dunedin double.  It also gives quick potted histories of Flying Nun groups down the years.  It’s good on metaphorical bio-geographical reasons for the fabled sound, but is another instance of this peculiar anti-Sneaky Feelings sentiment that crops up.  The Sneakys get some of the credit they deserve in the even-handed Flying Nun piece in the November 2007 issue of Plan B, which also goes beyond the lionised trio of the Clean, the Verlaines, and the Chills to flag up lesser-known Nunsters.

from the Dunedin double EP, Flying Nun, 1982

If the Verlaines represent romantic compositional craft, the Stones brutal pop noise, the Chills the sonic possibilities of pop, then the last of the Dunedin Doublers major in the pop tune.  It can’t be any coincidence that alongside the group’s two main song writers – Matthew Bannister and David Pine – both drummer Martin Durrant and bassist John Kelcher (who replaced Kathryn Tyrie in 1984) also contribute songs to their second LP, 1987’s Sentimental education.  It appears that they were much more of a democracy than most quartets, where the power usually resides in the polar balance between the singer and the lead guitarist.  I say this without having been able to read Positively George Street, Matthew Bannister’s account of the ‘Dunedin sound’ and his time as a Sneaky Feeling.  But I have been able to read his academic text, White boys, white noise: masculinities and 1980s indie guitar rock (Ashgate, 2006).  There was a time – it was, of course, the nineteen-eighties – when I would have dismissed an academic reading of any ‘outsider’ music as destined to fail to spot the nub of the matter, or likely to make out that the matter was simpler or more complicated than it actually was.  But when we reach a decade in which the practitioners of independent music have become the practitioners of its musicology, psychology and sociology (for want of a better way of encapsulating the approach taken in White boys, white noise) – when we pass a year in which Johnny Marr has been made a visiting professor of music at the University of Salford – then it becomes a redundant argument, if it wasn’t already one.  There is something to be gained from any kind of in-depth analysis, whether that of journalist or amateur, socio-cultural commentator or academic.

So this final part of the Dunedin Double mini-series, slightly past my self-imposed deadline of 2007, attempts both to celebrate the songs of the Sneaky Feelings and weave in the echoes of their music that sound in White boys, white noise.

As it was for the Verlaines, the Stones and the Chills, the Dunedin double 12 inch gave the Sneaky Feelings their first chance to set out a musical stall.  Of the four groups their songs are the most tentative, possibly because each has vocals by a different member of the group.  These were blueprints for types of songs that they would bring to life on 1984’s Send you, the record on which Sneaky Feelings became distinctly themselves.  Not that in 1982 anyone yet sounded like the Sneakys do on Dunedin double – it just seems that way in retrospect.  They started off with a sound of the kind that many British indie groups settled for at their peak.  Very few of those could match the quality of song writing that would be apparent on Send you and the following year’s Husband house EP.

‘Pity’s sake’ is sung in the sardonic, slightly sneering fashion that David Pine refined into an instrument of character on later songs.  It has a country rock chug which pre-dates those late eighties practitioners of alt. who sprang up in the States.  The upbeat, minor chord melancholy of Martin Durrant’s ‘There’s a chance’ has you scratching your head as to just who he sounds like.  His later songs ‘Strangers again’ and the 1986 single ‘Coming true’ clearly reveal him to be Barney Sumner’s antipodean twin.  The resemblance, which extends to a certain lyrical vagueness, is uncanny.  There’s nothing else about Sneaky Feelings which suggests New Order, so we have to assume that it’s a happy coincidence.  ‘Backroom’, sung by Matthew Bannister, is pitched somewhere in the unlikely zone between the Nightingales and the Pastels, resemblances which would never again surface in the Sneakys’ music, and which were quite gone from the confident version of the song that appears on 1986’s Sentimental education, where additional cello and organ give it a grand orchestral edge.

Had they been combined, Send you and Husband house would have constituted a classic debut LP.  Pine’s singing on ‘Waiting for touchdown’ and ‘Throwing stones’ is as convincing, impassioned and dramatic as the slow-burning guitar work, while Bannister has hit his stride as a writer with a great pop sensibility, his voice more angelic than Pine’s, his melodies more inclined to the McCartneyesque.  He transforms the harmonic influence of Brian Wilson into incredibly taut guitar pop, occasionally employing a horn section to give a song the lift that was also characteristic of Dexys.  With references to Rubens and George Bernard Shaw and a vocal ghostliness, ‘Major Barbara’ is not your typical Beach Boys pastiche – its shadow or inverse, perhaps.  And in ‘Husband house’ Bannister wrote a Desert Island Disc, a song whose rising melody gives heart to all the mental debates about settling down, and is capped with a beautiful arrangement and twanging, plangent guitar.  At the right time and in the right place, it might have been a worldwide hit rather than simply a number 17 in the NZ charts.  For Sneaky Feelings, the song marks the point at which the tension between pop and indie, between major and minor, between accessible and inaccessible, between wanting above all a place in musical history and wanting above all to remain true to oneself, was greatest.

How to follow ‘Husband house’?  ‘Better than before’ seems the obvious answer, a bracing pop song which speeds away from the ballad to which it is discographically moored, attempting in passing to overcome self-doubt and petty jealousy.

‘Every Sunday night at ten
we’d sit and watch the music show end
and we’d discuss just how it was
that they got on instead of us’

A familiar scene for groups the world over, but particularly poignant in New Zealand where it took just a few thousand sales to have a hit.  There is obviously a fair degree of arm’s length self-analysis going in White boys, white noise, and a sense that Matthew Bannister’s experience as a Sneaky Feeling remains unfinished business, evident in the contrast he draws between the archetypal indie groups of the period – particularly their rivals for affection in New Zealand – and the musical choices his own group made.  You get the sense that there is ongoing irritation at the ‘the triumph of polysemy over authorial intention’ and hangover frustration that Sneaky Feelings weren’t better loved.  Based on the music alone, which until now is all I’ve had to go on, you can understand that, because they wrote some classic pop songs in anyone’s book, not just indie’s.

White boys, white noise corrects my misconception about the relative isolation of New Zealand being a factor in why the Flying Nun groups sound so distinct.  In terms of formative influence, they were lighting upon the same sixties sources and inspirations as the groups recording for Creation, and going through the same deep-mining process of discovery.  As a specialist in the indie discipline, I probably took the common ground for granted, and only noticed the differences, not discernable to the generalist’s eyes.  And yet I still can’t kick the feeling that there was something particular in the Dunedin water, just as there was in the Scottish water.  The Celtic connection, for Matthew Bannister was born and lived the first part of his life in Scotland.  Or perhaps it was simply the tendency of young male pop obsessives the world over to cast themselves as outsiders and seek out their friendships under its cover.  ‘Canonism, archivalism and connoisseurship are… central to cultural legitimation in popular as well as high culture.  I suggest re-envisioning indie as a history of record collectors – the importance of rock tradition to indie, of male rock ‘intellectuals’ and secondhand record shops; a narrative suppressed because of the normative emphasis on rock as a folk discourse, spontaneous, instinctual, closely allied to a ‘natural’ masculinity.’  Matthew’s subsequent discussion actually highlights record shop owners and label founders more than collectors and writers, but it’s an attractive notion to a bit-playing fan.  It certainly felt true in the eighties that ‘to uncover a ‘lost’ 1960s classic from the bin of a secondhand shop represented a small victory against the forces of modern capitalism, which were only interested in selling you the latest Dire Straits album.’  And what is Backed with but an alternative canon, archival in nature, written by, er, a connoisseur?

As a slightly discomforted individual variant of the archetype dissected in the book, I found that often Matthew Bannister was explaining my own life to me, at least in terms of the young adult I was.  But only the young adult – in important respects, I didn’t recognise myself, more aspects of the scene of which I was a part.  Matthew has many thought-through things to say on a lot of issues which underlie how my friends and I lighted upon independent music and stuck to it like limpets – on the masculine / feminine split, on the relation between black music and white, and on the Byrds (‘drone and jangle can function to obliterate time and space’).  He even finds the time to diss Brian Eno - ‘not so much androgyne as android’.  Neither is he afraid of saying something with a sentiment as unfashionable as ‘when I look at the various alternative music subcultures and associated models of masculinity, it strikes me that, of all of them, only the counterculture offered any kind of serious threat to establishment values.’  But I think he underestimates the effect in Britain on non-mainstream music that mainstream black music-influenced artists (Paul Weller in the Jam, Kevin Rowland in Dexys) or indeed mixed race groups like the Specials and others on the Two Tone roster had, both in terms of approach and an increasing eclecticism listening-wise.  Of course, the attraction of Weller and Rowland in particular may have been their own demonstrable ‘purity’ (in terms of the way each portrayed themselves), their particular codifications and taboos – precisely the attitudes Matthew Bannister rightly says indie scenes typically espoused.  But without wishing to make excuses for their fixed ideas, puritanism or callowness, the relative youth, immaturity and inexperience of the participants – both artists and fans – isn’t accounted for, despite the visible way in which the author himself has with time escaped the straightjacket that indie ideology forced one to wear.  I can’t think of any music-obsessed friend of mine whose listening did not get swiftly broader in their twenties.  Some of us may have begun in narrowly marked territories but we all became and remain internationalists, admittedly with our favourite countries and cities to which we return again and again.

I would also take issue with Matthew’s argument that inexpressive singing is typical of indie.  Drawing on my taste, I grant him the June Brides, McCarthy, Josef K, Felt and the Field Mice.  But the other groups I warmed to most in the eighties all liked to express themselves – the Jasmine Minks, Hurrah!, James, the Wolfhounds, the Esurient trio of the Claim, Emily and Hellfire Sermons, and indeed the Verlaines, Chills and Sneaky Feelings.  I had indie tastes, but I also loved the mid-eighties expressiveness of the Pale Fountains, XTC, Prefab Sprout and American Music Club, though I guess the first two also owe the traditional indie debt to the Byrds.  By the late eighties there were so many different species of independent music, so many shades of influence.  The Jasmines recorded for Creation but were definitely influenced by soul as well as garage.  The Claim too laid a soulful voice upon updated sixties garage and pop sources, while Emily ended up sounding more like Hendrix if they sounded like anyone.  It seems to me that in pop music, especially in the 21st century, there is almost always a group (or even a scene) to prove or disprove any argument or concept, and I think this holds true when discussing independent music in the eighties.  But perhaps Britain (and America?) were especially prone then to polarity, to defining yourself by spelling out what you were against as much as what you were for.  If someone took a position, standing proudly above the parapet, it wouldn’t be long before opposing ramparts were fully armed and ready for a musical war.

Perhaps what it comes down to is that you can talk about tendencies, but there are always exceptions.  The Sneaky Feelings balanced on the knife’s edge, being both typically indie and atypical.  They rarely if ever hid behind white noise.  There was no obvious leader; Matthew Bannister says of David Pine that although he was the most charismatic member of the group, ‘he did not feel comfortable in this role.’  Which may be why they never got the recognition their song writing deserved – there was no-one to catch the eye, no star to hold the attention of the mainstream.  A common enough reason why groups fail to move on from song-centric independence to major label success.  With ‘Take me out’ Franz Ferdinand made great play of the notion that it’s not enough for just boys to like your music – girls had to be able to dance to it too.  They wilfully overcame their indie tendencies.  Back in the eighties, few had that kind of drive.  In Graeme Downes’ judgement, ‘to like the Sneakys you had to appreciate the songs first and foremost, and had to be prepared to forego all the other aspects that are usually the hallmark of the successful rock and roll package.’  Even the Sneakys’ sleeves didn’t help their cause, bashfully and pointedly opting to hide behind rhododendrons for the cover of Sentimental education.

The egalitarian tendencies of the group also show themselves in the subject matter of the songs, which assess relations between the sexes in a more even-handed manner than was typical in the eighties – ‘watching the spaces between all the people’, as Matthew Bannister sang on ‘Broken man’, and frequent enough references to marriage to make it a thematic concern of his – ‘let’s get married!’ is the lyrical coda to ‘Hard love’ (see also ‘Husband house’ and ‘Better than before’).  Not only between the sexes, but between each other – with Matthew writing ‘Not to take sides’ about ‘the increasing alienation I felt in my relationship with David’ and Pine writing ambiguously about Bannister on ‘Now’.  ‘It seems rather odd, this displacement of emotions into songs, this communication by proxy, but I don’t think it is atypical’, Bannister writes in White boys, white noise.  Meanwhile on the other side of the world, Jim Shepherd of the Jasmine Minks was writing ‘Living out your dreams’ about the recently departed Adam Sanderson.

Alongside Positively George Street the book, a CD collection of the same name was released, updating and expanding the vinyl compilation Waiting for touchdown that I had to make do with in the eighties when money and distance militated against the fan of New Zealand music.  It loses two great David Pine songs in the title track and ‘Someone else’s eyes’ but gains songs from Sentimental education and 1988’s Hard love stories, particular highlights being Pine’s ‘Trouble with Kay’ and ‘Your secret’s safe with me’, about both of which you could use the non-indie description ‘rollicking’.  With ‘Maybe you need to come back’ and ‘Levin dream’ David Pine made good on the promise of Dunedin double’s ‘Pity’s sake’ and the pedal steel country blues of ‘Better than before’ B side ‘Wouldn’t cry’, arguably fulfilling the natural trajectory of any group which owes a debt to the one which earlier travelled from Mr Tambourine Man to Sweetheart of the rodeo.

As ‘Hard love’ suggests, Matthew Bannister’s songs got stonier and his voice less angelic as he went along.  Not surprising then that he should set Larkin’s ‘This be the verse’ (‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad etc) and adapt George Herbert’s ‘Discipline’.  But he also branched out by writing a great character song in the form of ‘Dad and the family dog’ – ‘if it’s not an awful trial, perhaps you could take them off our hands for our while’.

If his family hadn’t moved from Scotland to New Zealand, might Matthew Bannister have been a central player in the sound of young Scotland, possibly becoming the better-known singer-songwriter of the Rough Trade or Creation group that never was?  Since the moment at which this alternative course of history was foiled, the world has shrunk, and twenty years on, the music that Sneaky Feelings recorded retains the freshness that follows from the suggestiveness of the group’s name – not sneaky feelings so much in the confessional sense as ones which have snuck up to surprise you, newly emergent from the dim recesses of emotional computation.

Bannister and Pine were song-writing equals, and though together they were never quite the pairing that Forster and McLennan became, individually their best songs are a match for the many highs of the Go-Betweens repertoire, and the group performed them as dramatically as the Australians’ classic four-strong line-up.  Like the Verlaines and the Chills, the music of Sneaky Feelings deserves a place in your own personal canon.

• Video of ‘Husband house’

from the In time for Christmas Day EP, self-released, 2000

Put down your Sufjan Stevens xmas box sets, lower that collection of carols by Low, stop the Ze Christmas record spinning, and laugh off the high concept of the Black Arts’ ‘Christmas number one’.  Pour yourself a glass of port and draw a chair up to the fire while I tell you a seasonal tale of the Pines.

From what I gather, Pam Berry and Joe Brooker’s meeting had a sinister quality to it, but from the beginning it was clear that the Pines were on the side of the angels.  An early scene in the duo’s life sees them sitting round another fireplace, this one in Greenwich, where Pam, the Ella Fitzgerald of American indie-pop, works up a set of songs with Joe, soon to reveal himself as the Irving Berlin of British indie-pop.  The songs are then played at parties in south east London living rooms, as well as at shows in church halls, the upstairs lounge bars of pubs, and on one memorable occasion, alongside the stellar line-up of Future Bible Heroes, the Clientele and Harvey Williams at the Black and White Ball at Bush Hall.

What you noticed first at these irregular appearances was Pam’s voice, as perfect as a cup of gently swirling café au lait on a mahogany table.  Then the sparky and erudite guitar playing of Joe, underpinning and punctuating the vocals in one man band style, like Billy Bragg if he predominantly played an acoustic and had more of the Marr about him.  Then you fell prey to the striking choruses with lyrical touches that stuck in the mind long before it was possible to hear them in recorded form and on repeat.

The Matinée compilation It’s been a while brought the best of those recordings together and proved that the Pines were consistently able to write songs that sound like standards – ‘Baby, you’ll do’, ‘Please don’t get married (without asking me)’, ‘A rainy day’, ‘I see stars’ – songs whose timeless air is only troubled, or given added charm, by the tinges of 21st century Thames estuary in Joe’s singing.

The songs are peppered with parting shots, one-liners and verbal slapstick, often as part of a sung conversational exchange between Joe and Pam, a device that few if any songwriters have better utilised.  Neither could many writers artfully and verisimilarly get ‘copy-editing’ into their lyrics, yet songs like ‘Marie Claire’ and ‘Seven clubs’ are literate rather than literary, wearing their learning (and their pop culture) lightly.

For all their wit, the songs never stray far from sorrow; the melancholy mists wreathing them suggest that at the end of the night and after a few too many, jokes will fall flat and the characters will have to face up to their lot.  They do so with vision that remains sharp.  ‘I always said that you put me in mind of a movie star; I never said which one.’

But before we have a collection of their songs, before they were released via a variety of record labels of mostly diminutive stature or smaller, what the Pines did first was give away an EP of Christmas songs, knowing – possibly from bitter experience – that melancholy is intensified over the festive season.  The EP is topped by the first of three originals, ‘Chalet’, and tailed by the American classic ‘Silver bells’ (which appeared on A Christmas gift from Fortuna Pop! that December).  Proving the standard of the Pines’ own standards, the tinselly glint of ‘Silver bells’ shares their company quite happily.  ‘Chalet’ is a lonesome Christmas blues, impossibly sad, while ‘Miracles’ has that particular pre-xmas melancholy generated by the wearying search for a token that says something – anything – to the one you love.  ‘Don’t listen to me, I can’t give you miracles / Just packets of tea and bars of soap’.

‘High Street’ sees things from a parental point of view.  The young adult to whom the song is addressed is either far away across the sea, or deliberately striking out for him or herself, spending Christmas with a boy or girlfriend for perhaps the first time, in a necessary rite of passage for both parent and progeny.  Mum and dad sing, ‘This time of year without you here, the table’s incomplete.’  Cue a weeping blues harp.  Torn paper crowns have long since been cast aside, and a couple of crackers remain unpulled.  The tree drops its needles to form a green carpet around the remaining few unopened presents.

These are tales worth telling and moods which merit their capture in song.  They bring a kind of comfort to those slugging their way through green bottles and a blue Christmas, and they stand as a deeply evocative reminder to others of Yules that were considerably less joyful than the one they are about to celebrate.

from the Dunedin double EP, Flying Nun, 1982

If the music of the Creation is ‘red – with purple flashes’, then the music of the Chills is blue – with purple flashes.

Shikoku baby (Side B)

Layer an organ on top of the noise the Stones made, give it a Martin Phillipps tune, a cantering rhythm and a Japanese feel, and you have ‘Satin doll’.  The satin, the blossom and the keyboard melody’s gentle to and fro are as stereotyping of Japan as hanging Hiroshige wood-block prints in your bedroom, but the song transcends this and becomes memorable because Martin Phillipps’ NZ-accented singing – so soft and quiet on the Dunedin double that the song was remixed for reissue on the Kaleidoscope world compilation – betrays no trace of irony, while the line of his guitar ascends beautifully, scything its way like a samurai through any number of competing warrior songs to stand alone and undefeated at the end of the fight; the second of many of his songs to do so.

Salvaging boyhood

Martin Phillipps has a gift for songs which might be taken as themes for the Chills’ entire body of work.  ‘Kaleidoscope world’ is one such, lyrically portraying the bright-eyed wonder of late boyhood and first girlfriends but also capturing in the music the melancholy those lost days generate.  Floating with his girl in a space capsule, Martin declares that ‘we’ll never die in our kaleidoscope world’.  The organ meanders like the shifting patterns of a suitably psychedelic optical toy, and an electric guitar purrs out its riffs low in the mix, turning the occupants of the capsule into outsize feline astronauts of Bagpuss colouring.

Sonic beauty

‘Flame-thrower’ – the flipside of debut single ‘Rolling moon’ – set the tone for the Chills’ uncanny ability to meld the theme of their songs with their sound.  Recorded live, it captures the group at full force.   At first the flame is powered down, barely visible, but then as Martin urges ‘Talk with me – it’s not too late’, the handle is depressed, and all within range are scorched.  Martyn Bull’s brilliantly dynamic drumming and the Morse code beeps of Rachel Phillipps’ keyboards are the fluid that this flame-thrower burns.

If the Chills had only ever recorded ‘Pink frost’, then they would have stood a very good chance of being remembered for all time.  The essential pink frostiness of ‘Pink frost’, the evocation of deeply iced ground tinged with shepherd’s warning sunrise redness, is remarkable.  It’s one of few songs of which I never tire, and yet I try not to listen to it arbitrarily or routinely, for fear of it finally losing its power over me.

As I recall the Chills were able to reconstitute the studio brilliance of ‘Pink frost’ live in London in the late eighties.  Even the sight of Martin Phillipps’ curly-toed jester-minstrel boots could not detract from its emotional force.  The Secret box collection gives a sense of how they developed that fire and ice sound through live performance – the seven minute instrumental, ‘Balancing’ provides the best evidence.

Under ‘Sonic beauty’, we might also file another theme song, ‘Night of Chill blue’, whose crystalline guitar is as clear as the scene in which Martin sets ‘Twinkling stars over a foreign land / Silent camel train on desert sands’, and ‘Effloresce and deliquesce’ which shows a Cocteau Twins-like delicacy in creating other-worldly sound-worlds.  Aquamarine is also the colour of the title song of the album on which ‘Effloresce’ appears, Submarine bells.  Once again, Martin makes a perfect match of lyric and sound, conjuring up a submersible sibling for the space capsule of ‘Kaleidoscope world’.

The contemporaneous ‘Wave-watching’ didn’t make it onto Submarine bells, but its sonic attempt to depict rollers crashing are notable, even if ultimately they are as unsuccessful as any painter’s endeavour to capture the motion of water on canvas.  Another song, ‘Water wolves’, which first surfaced along with ‘Wave-watching’ as a skeletal B side, conclusively proves that Martin’s cap was at that time set at a jaunty nautical angle.  It later reappeared on Soft bomb with a typically sumptuous string arrangement by Van Dyke Parks.  We can only imagine what a record that would have been if, like Joanna Newsom, Martin Phillipps had had funds enough for a whole album of VDP arrangements.  The music on Soft bomb was no longer quite so chilly, yet aside from the love at first sight of ‘Double summer’, the Californian sun seems to have failed to warm Martin right through to the core.

Soliloquizing bogles

There’ll surely be a lot of footfall on Martin Phillipps’ grave when he’s gone, if all the involuntary shivers captured in his music are totted up.

‘Pink frost’ may have been the first of his songs to face up to death, but it was far from being the last, and soon spirits – chills – were teeming through them.  ‘I love my leather jacket’ is the most celebrated of these, setting lines as weighted with insight about surviving the loss of a friend (drummer Martyn Bull) as those penned by the best poets to music which takes its lead from the archetypal rock’n’roll article of clothing of the title.  Then there’s ‘Ghosts’, ‘’Sixteen heart-throbs’, Dark carnival’, ‘Creep’, ‘Dead web’, the haunted music of ‘House with a hundred rooms’ and ‘Whole weird world’ from the Lost EP – the Chills have written the songbook of the Lost, and lure you into believing that the spirit world is a place you’d like to be trapped in, like the mother and her children in Alejandro Amenábar’s super-creepy film The Others.  For if nothing else, ghosts have longevity.

And that’s before we mention the ghosts of those still living, close at hand but out of reach, or on the far side of the world.  The homesickness of ‘Part past part fiction’ and ‘Come home’ and the separation of ‘Don’t be – memory’ fall into this camp.

Swirling breeze

There’s a lot of weather in the Chills’ oeuvre.  Rain is never far away, and it’s often very cold, if not frosty.

Their first Peel session in 1985 presented a couple of meteorological moods, and ‘Wet blanket’, itself more than a little rain-sodden.  All are of equal brilliance, or chilliness.  Alongside the aforementioned ‘Night of chill blue’, there was a re-recording of ‘Rolling moon’, the tune of which I like to think is a whistling staple of such milkos as still float the delivery of milk round early morning Dunedin.  Milkos of independent and psychedelic leaning, obviously.

Sharing its punning theme with the La’s ‘Doledrum’, ‘Doledrums’ made a lot of sense to a student on the other side of the world, with a commitment of eight timetabled hours a week.  Sense perfected when the student graduated virtually unemployable and started signing on at the Medina Road social security office in Finsbury Park.  ‘The benefits arrive and life goes on and on and on.’

‘Wet blanket’ also shared a lyrical conceit, this time with Smiths’ ‘I want the one I can’t have’, music being no different from science or fiction when it comes to people in different parts of the world reaching the same experimental or artistic conclusions at the same time.  While Morrissey marries it to tough-knock Mancunian upbringing, Phillipps makes you think of camping – the one with whom you want to be sharing a tent is sharing it with someone else.  ‘’Cause you’re so so so beautiful – why aren’t you mine?’

The Brave words LP brought a wet front with it in the form of ‘Rain’, a typically lovely Chills song which made you suspect that Martin was the sort who likes a good soaking.  But by 1996, the Chills were experiencing the effects of global warming, and titled that year’s album Sunburnt (though there was still occasion to tell of ‘Swimming in the rain’).  Temporary Chills of the calibre of XTC’s Dave Gregory and Fairport Convention’s Dave Mattacks were drafted in for Sunburnt, recorded over the previous English summer on the banks of the Thames.  By and large it maintains the consistency and avoidance of filler that had been the strength of previous Chills albums.

Sunburnt isn’t the last record Martin Phillipps has made – another phase of the Chills is up and running, the Stand by EP was released in 2004, and a new LP due in the near future – but it leaves the listener feeling that he had come to terms with his lot.

Songwriter’s blues

Despite the strength of the Chills’ identity, despite the fit between the group’s name and their music, despite all the brave words, there is a questioning ache at the core of Martin Phillipps’ song writing.  On ‘Bee bah bee bah bee boe’ he sang ‘You’d think that self-discovery / is really rather easy / I mean I’m standing right here / but the real real me is never very clear’ but to his credit he kept up his search throughout.

The sleeve notes to Heavenly pop hits: the best of the Chills say that ‘the perfect line-up was never secured’.  There had been fourteen phases of the group by October 1992, making Phillips seem only marginally less inclined to hire and fire than Mark E. Smith, but in fact the majority of the changes were forced on Martin rather than being at his behest.  So many changes spoiled the chance to develop the ‘Pink frost’ sound.

As it became more ‘Martin Phillipps and the Chills’, the sonic quality of ‘Pink frost’, ‘Hidden bay’ and ‘Flame-thrower’ was set aside, with minstrelsy (in the medieval sense) taking its place; the songs were more artful, but the overall sound was a shade less exciting and unique.  And yet, when Martin posed perplexed questions in songs like ‘Brave words’, ‘Singing in my sleep’, and ‘Song for Randy Newman etc’, you couldn’t mourn the fact that he had moved on.  As a meditation on his chosen trade and some of its most celebrated practitioners (‘Wilson, Barrett, Walker, Drake’) ‘Randy Newman’ is hard to beat.

Sweet benediction

Finally, in ‘Heavenly pop hit’, there was a trace of irony Martin usually so assiduously avoided, but as it came encased in a confection so angelically light – despite the church organ wheezing for breath as it tried to keep up with the happy-go-lucky pace – that you barely noticed it as you sang along to the chorus.  But after all the fretting, how good it was to hear Martin sing ‘I’m growing in stages and have been for ages / Just singing, and floating – and free’.