Monthly Archives: April 2022

35. Graceland, Paul Simon, 1986

Posted on by

In my university days, I really only protested about two things (there were so many options; you had to pick your battles): education cuts (naturally – we had no effect, but we certainly enjoyed our library sit-ins), and the South African government. I went on marches, I sang the songs, I demanded victory for the ANC, I didn’t buy oranges – to be fair, fruit wasn’t a huge part of my student diet, but anything with the word ‘Cape’ on it wasn’t going in my shopping basket.  I also steadfastly refused to bank with Barclays, which wasn’t a major issue for a Scottish student, but it was the thought which counted.

Being vocally and visibly anti-apartheid might have been a controversial stand, but that’s not how I remember it; the people I hung out with, and the ones I studied with were all pretty much in the same frame of mind; by the time Free Nelson Mandela came out in the spring of 1984, I’m fairly confident most of us owned a copy, and if amplifying the reach of a pop song had an effect on the South African government (and it might have done), then I did my part.

Maybe – as my mother worried – going to the protest marches and rallies put my name on a list; it’s possible that I’m not a civil servant to this day because I once stood around in the freezing cold in Teviot Square shouting about Nelson Mandela and urging SWAPO on to victory.

So, you might be asking yourself, what is this album doing on this list?  How is it that only two years after leaving behind my student protest days, and with Mandela still in prison, I bought myself a copy of an album which I’m fairly sure would have seen me ostracised by my fellow protestors?

The answer is, of course, that – like all of adult life was proving to be – it was more complicated than it seemed.  Not at first, of course – I was still living and working in the north of Scotland, and didn’t exactly have my finger on the cultural pulse any more – no time for poring over the opinion pages of the weekly music press; no time for engaging with the subtleties of the arguments; I was newly married, and figuring out how this whole ‘being a grownup, paying bills and keeping my employer happy’ thing worked.  I heard stuff on the radio, I liked it, I went out and bought it, and only afterwards became dimly aware that there was some talk about the album and how it was made, and that not everything is as simple as it seems.

There’s no doubt in my mind that I owned this album because of the startling bassline in You Can Call Me Al– it soundedlike it had been recorded backwards, but it apparently hadn’t.  It sounded like some of the things I liked most about Remain in Light; it sounded – frankly – like nothing else I was hearing, and if I thought about the politics of the album at all, I likely settled on the idea that most of the musicians on it were exactly the people all that protesting had been designed to help; exposing the music of Ladysmith Black Mambazo to a wider audience was surely a positive thing.

But, like I say, it was more complicated than that.

And it’s still more complicated than that.  It’s easy for me to say that I’m not supposed to like this album because of the way it was recorded, and because – however you look at it – you can’t deny that the primary beneficiary of this cultural exchange was Paul Simon’s bank balance, rather than the political objectives of those opposed to the South African government.  It’s easy to say, but I did buy it, I did enjoy it, and – as far as I know – I still do enjoy it.  It’s a classic album, and rightly so; it did impact the wider music scene – it, and several others, paved the way to record stores having ‘world music’ sections, and changed a lot of opinions about ‘authenticity’ and what constituted pop music anyway.

I also can’t really take refuge behind the idea that it’s all in the past now; the good guys won, and that there is an argument to be made that this album played a tiny part in that process by exposing this music to the world.  I can’t do that because what seems obvious now – that Nelson Mandela would, indeed, be released, and become president of South Africa – wasn’t at all obvious in 1986, and those who protested this album were right to protest that Simon had indeed breached the cultural boycott of South Africa to get it made.

And, for what it’s worth, I don’t buy the ‘naïve artist’ line either – I think Paul Simon knew exactly what he was getting into, but I also hear what he heard – he took a gamble on the album’s success drowning out the protest, because he could hear what this music could sound like, and for him, the urge to get the music out there overrode the political considerations.  He also could point to his collaborators on the album, whose enthusiastic participation suggested that they, at least, had no issue with what was going on.

The more you thought about Graceland at the time, the more complicated the issues seemed to be, and time has not exactly eased things.  On one hand, you can look at it and see the controversy as a historical quirk; on the other, it does sound quite a lot like cultural appropriation; taking the music of another continent and presenting it to the world, saying ‘look what I found’ and profiting from it.

I hope you weren’t expecting answers from this, because I don’t have any.  I can, I think (I’ll find out shortly) separate the music from the context, and listen to it the way I listened to it at the time, able to appreciate the musicians and their craft.  I can also agonise still over whether this should even be in the list (Peter Gabriel’s So would have been the alternative, I think), but it’s here because it happened; it’s here because it caused me to face up to the fact that I didn’t have all the answers than, and I don’t now; it's here because I did that Smiths album a couple of weeks back, and I don’t want to skip over things and pretend they didn’t happen.

I bought Graceland when it came out; I loved it, and it was part of my life.  I never felt entirely comfortable with the fact that I enjoyed it as much as I did (it’s, I think, still my favourite Paul Simon solo album), and I’m OK with the fact that I still don’t know if I should enjoy it as much as I do.

Life isn’t straightforward,  and I think we should be grateful for any opportunity to examine our position on things, and be comfortable with the idea that we can be conflicted about something, yet still find it irresistible and worthy of comment.  All of which presupposes that I still love Graceland, and I’m going to have to listen to it to find out.

The Boy in the Bubble immediately drops us into the unfamiliar; the wheezing accordion producing an off-kilter rhythm before some more familiar elements begin to creep in; Adrian Belew contributes some of the same strange synthesised guitar sounds which tie back to Remain in Light and all the while Paul Simon is singing about – well, for an album which famously doesn’t attempt to address the circumstances under which it was made, this song does at least have some sense of South Africa and the tensions of everyday life about it.  It is a bit of a middle-aged white man’s complaint at the way the world is going, but there are enough universals in it that we can recognise that much of what’s bothering him bothers us today.

The title track is perhaps the best exemplar of the strange dichotomy of this whole album.  It’s a fairly straightforward, vaguely allegorical, Paul Simon lyric which conflates Elvis with that mystical something which he believes we are all seeking.  As a simple acoustic song, it would be clever, but not particularly remarkable; another Paul Simon semi-confessional.  It is, however, set in a soundscape which makes you sit up and take notice; there are faint echoes of unfamiliar instruments, a liquid bassline, and a set of vocal harmonies and doubled vocals which just take it out of the ordinary, and give it more heft and meaning than is perhaps actually present.

The South African elements move from support to front and centre in I Know What I Know; this isn’t Paul Simon supported by African artists, it’s an African song featuring Paul Simon’s voice (which it has to be said, does fit perfectly).  It is around here that the listener (well, this listener, knowing what he knows now) begins to ask uncomfortable questions about authorship and just whose music this actually is. 

Which questions feed inevitably into Gumboots, which was even acknowledged on the sleeve (If I remember correctly) as being a pre-existing song which was the impetus for this entire project.  It’s simple, joyful, and troubling in retrospect.  Just what does this whimsical lyric have to do with the music underpinning it?  I mean, I can’t help singing along with a song so familiar, but I also can’t help wondering what exactly was going on.

On the other hand, the choral introduction to Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes, sung in Zulu by Ladysmith Black Mambazo is so overpowering and somehow truthful that it banishes doubt.  The singing is magnificent and elevates the rest of the song to the point of irresistibility.  I know I’m going to be singing this for the rest of the week, as it’s right around here that I let go of my reservations and surrender to the music; to the joy and try not to worry about anything else.

The lead-off single is, of course, in its correct place at the start of side 2, and is still the best-known of all these songs.  Having gone to such trouble to work with African musicians, and to record music in a South African idiom with all the issues that caused, it is still a source of mystery to me that the song which most people associate with this album is about an urban white man’s mid-life crisis, and featured a video with Chevy Chase.  And then I’m whistling along with the instrumental break and still unable to process exactly how that bass run is made to sound like it does – it’s not reversed; I’ve seen it done live – and once again I find myself lost in the music and understand that this is how it works; why it’s still considered a classic – eventually, the music just overrules your objections.

The loping rhythms of Under African Skies frame a song which – while ignoring the elephant in the room - does reflect on the common experiences of the Western and South African musicians; it’s a straightforward tale of the power of music to erase boundaries, spoiled only a little by having Simon’s voice doubled by Linda Ronstadt, an artist who breached the cultural boycott to play concerts at Sun City, which is – even by the fudged standards of this album – remarkably tin-eared.  You can make the case for the album as a whole as a way to expose this music to the rest of the world; including Ronstadt on it kind of eclipses that argument.

Then, while I’m still pondering that, back come Ladysmith Black Mambazo with the truly moving and irresistible introduction to Homeless.  The whole thing is magnificent, uplifting, and pretty much nothing to do with Paul Simon, save a few vocal lines.  It’s comfortably the best thing on the album, it appeals mightily to the linguist in me with the sounds of the Zulu language, and it has caused me to reflect that, had I boycotted this album all these years, I would never have heard a song which still causes me to sit open-mouthed in awe and admiration.  All other considerations put to one side, this is spellbinding music.

As is the sparse guitar work by Ray Phiri on Crazy Love, Vol. II  - it’s another song where the lyrics are disconnected from the thrilling pulse of the music as Simon whinges on about whatever is bothering him this time, it’s easy enough to tune him out and listen to how the music is constructed, and how it pays little or no attention to the singer while still supporting the song.

I’m aware that I seem to be somewhat grumpy about the words on this album, and that’s not entirely fair – there are plenty of great couplets, and lyrics I’d be happy to dissect in another context; it’s just that they do feel like a missed opportunity to say something about how this album was recorded, and what was going on around it.  It says something that the most affecting words I’ve heard so far are the ones in a language I don’t speak.

The final two tracks on Graceland head back to the US via the zydeco accordion of Good Rockin’ Dopsie and then the Mexican sounds of Los Lobos.  Those two tracks represent a transition back to western idiom, and to me, never quite worked.  They also have their own controversy surrounding them and how they were written and credited.  Both are fine songs, but  both seem to be trying to do something like demonstrating that American and South African music share common underpinnings, and I’m not sure I buy that argument.

Overall, Graceland is comfortably familiar to me, and that makes it hard to reappraise.  I do now – and perhaps always did – see the issues with it, and I’mprobably being harder on it than I might otherwise be, because I’ve spent time thinking about whether I should even have included it on this list.  But here it is; it was part of my life then, and I have enjoyed listening to it again, despite all the reservations I seem to have.  It is fun, it is joyful, and it is complicated.

A bit like life, then.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

I have a soft spot for the follow-up to Graceland, The Rhythm of the Saints, but acknowledge that it has just as many questions about cultural appropriation surrounding its construction.  For something less controversial, try Still Crazy After All These Years.

Compilations to consider?

There have been a few, of which Negotiations and Love Songs is the only one I know, so try that for an introduction to Paul Simon.

Live albums?

Concert in the Park covers pretty much all of Simon’s career to that point, and is also a record of the show we saw at Wembley in 1991 – I’m sure I could find out for certain, but the tracklist is pretty close to what I remember.

Anything else?

Pretty much all the Simon and Garfunkel albums, including the Concert in Central Park are worth your time, and I do remember seeing a film about the Graceland concerts in Africa at some point; that would be worth a look, if I could remember what it was called!

34. Steve McQueen, Prefab Sprout, 1985

Posted on by
The first eleven tracks are the album, but keep listening, because the acoustic versions are also excellent

This is the album on the list which has me most confused about its release date, and when I bought it.  I have a clear memory of hearing Faron Young on the radio in early 1986, and going into the Other Record Shop in Inverness to buy a tape of the album that same weekend.  It’s such a clear memory that it won’t be shifted by anything as trivial as facts, which suggest that not only had the album come out the previous summer, the single which was actually out that January was a completely different track, released under a different name (I’ll get to that), which I vividly remember hearing while parked in the car park of the Western General hospital in Edinburgh some time the following summer.

I can’t account for any of the memory lapses; my recall of specific events, dates and places is normally pretty much spot on (just ask my long-suffering family), so I think I’m going to have to try to unpick all the things which happened between buying that Smiths album back there and heading off to work in Inverness in my company car, with Prefab Sprout blaring out of the fancy built-in cassette player….

I did eventually finish my dissertation on Turkish grammar, and graduated (on a Friday 13th in 1984, to my great delight).  I promptly went back to my summer van-driving job and pretended that I wasn’t going to have to decide what I was going to do with my life now that I had finally shaken off academia.  Some of my friends were going on to do a one year postgrad course, but I really was finished with studying and the student life – at least, I thought I was; looking back, another year of something a little more practical than Linguistics might not have been a bad idea.  My mind was made up, however – I was going to plunge headfirst into the corporate life – just as soon as I could find someone who would employ me.

After several false starts, and a half-hearted attempt to join the civil service, I found myself in possession of a full-time salaried job complete with company car (I missed the ‘company van’ phase by only a few months).  I started work for Bookwise Service as it was then known in January 1985, trailing round the supermarkets and department stores of Aberdeen, filling the shelves with Jeffrey Archer and Catherine Cookson novels, sending unsold copies back and generally passing myself off as a bookseller, when I was in truth little more than a sales rep for a book wholesaler.

I had, of course, impressed my new employers with my knowledge of all kinds of books, but being the kind of person who was easily distracted by a new book by a favourite author coming along proved to be as much a handicap as a benefit – I wasn’t always as efficient as I might have been in getting my day’s work done, as I might find myself idly flicking through this book or that for much longer than I needed to, especially when it meant I could delay as long as possible the inevitable drudgery of tallying the returns and finding someone to sign my paperwork.

And if that meant there was little time left to do the actual selling part of my job, so much the better – I wasn’t, at that stage of my life, a natural salesperson, and actively avoided getting into the conversations where I was supposed to negotiate extra space for the next bestseller, or ask for an larger than normal order for the new children’s book on the grounds that there was a new TV show coming along.  I enjoyed my time at Bookwise, and learned many basic truths about commerce and the retail environment which still serve me well to this day, but it wasn’t an actual career as far as I could see.

Still, I could pretend to be a bookseller, and swan around in my company Vauxhall Astra, so it had its compensations.

One of which was that, for that first year, my Mondays were spent in the enormous book department of the old Boots store on Union Street.  For some reason, it was the largest selection of books other than in the mainstream bookshops, and it took most of Monday to restore to order after the ravages of the weekend (if memory serves, I also used to go in there on a Friday morning to top things up before the weekend).  The book department was right next to Boots’ eclectic record department, and my Mondays were often accompanied by the sounds of whatever new releases the record department had acquired the previous week.  There weren’t many customers about on a Monday, so I could often place requests for rarities – I finally got to hear some of their extensive Frank Zappa collection that way – or just listen along to whatever was fashionable in 1985.

So, in all likelihood, I first heard Prefab Sprout in Boots; I can believe (but not remember) that I heard this whole album while filling shelves with Agatha Christie and Wilbur Smith back copies.  It seems likely that it inserted itself into my brain when it was a new release, and I only got round to getting my own copy much later.

Many things happened in 1985, including Zoë and I deciding to get married the following year, which threw up a whole new set of questions, including where we would live.  I think we were both keen to be out of Aberdeen; we’d both studied in Edinburgh, but found ourselves living ‘at home’, and I know I was chafing against it.  However, Aberdeen was a ruinously expensive place to live in the mid-eighties, so when the opportunity came up for me to relocate, we agreed I should go for it.

Which is how I eventually ended up in the car park of a guest house on the banks of the River Ness, clutching my newly acquired copy of Steve McQueen.  I’m sure I was supposed to be house-hunting or something, but buying records always took priority over the minor details of life, and I did find the first of three places I lived in in Inverness shortly afterwards – no more guesthouses for me.

There was a certain amount of discontent from my bosses at Bookwise when I declared that I was going to be living at the far end of my new territory – I was now covering everything from the outskirts of Aberdeen to Dingwall, with occasional trips to the far north and the Western Isles thrown in for good measure, and I’d been asked to find somewhere to live around the mid-point of the area.  Jobs for Zoë, however, were far more likely to come up in Inverness, so – stretching the definition of ‘middle’ somewhat, we took root in the Highland capital for a couple of years.

So when I put Steve McQueen on my list, I remember thinking ‘oh, that’ll be fun, to talk about living in Inverness and hearing Faron Young on the radio and so on’.  It has come as something of a surprise to discover that none of that was true – that I may well have owned the album months before moving up, and that I may not have bought it in Inverness that first weekend, after all.

I do, however, remember playing it while I drove round Inverness looking for somewhere to live, and I do definitely remember it being a fixture in my brand-new Astra (I broke the previous one just before Christmas in 1985; black ice and a lucky escape involving having to be pulled backwards out of a hedge by a grumpy farmer in a tractor; don’t ask).  I remember all these songs with great fondness, and how Prefab Sprout, in spite of their name, became one of my absolute favourite bands of the next few years.  This is one of those albums which has retained its freshness and familiarity for me over nearly forty years; I’m not rediscovering this one, because I know exactly how it sounds.

I’m still looking forward to it, though.

I mean, how can you not love an album which starts with a passionate cry of “Antiques!”?

Faron Young caught my ear because – like so much of the music in the mid-eighties – it didn’t really sound like anything else.  It’s a slice of faux-Americana, filtered through the cynical gaze of the outsider, who sees and hears all these things but isn’t much impressed by them.  It wasn’t a fond anthem of respect for a legendary country singer (who, I’ll be honest, I had never heard of); it was a clear denunciation of how his music was fake and insincere like so much of what appeared on the surface of a road trip across the US.

And then there’s a completely off-the-wall instrumental break which fits completely with the weird banjo-driven sound while simultaneously sounding like the band were just fumbling around blindfolded.

And then Bonny comes along and is just a perfect jewel of a song; it’s a metaphysical reflection on the end of a relationship delivered as a straightforward pop song, sung with real feeling and heartbreak. If you ignore the message, though, it’s just a delightful melodic confection which has you humming away merrily while the song bitterly regrets missed chances and lies awake wondering how things turned out this way.  It’s easy to sing songs like this as laments; much harder to do this and still sound convincing.

After thinking about it for several decades, I’ve decided that I still don’t exactly know what’s going on with Appetite; it sounds in some respects like a nonsense song – perhaps sung to an unborn child, but it’s clearly not that – it deals with broader philosophical questions around the more basic human urges.  None of the songs on Steve McQueen are disposable pieces of pop culture; they all have something to say.  It’s just that a song like Appetite needs a lot more study than you might at first think, hearing its cheery melody and its playful lyric.  It’s saying something profound about the human condition, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to work it out, given enough time.

On the other hand, you can read When Love Breaks Down – probably the best known song on here – as a straightforward ‘end of the affair’ song; this time, the tone is appropriately slow and mournful; it conflates autumn and sadness in the usual way, and then…

And then it kicks up into another of those bouncy choruses, and you wonder if you’ve read it all wrong again.  The second verse suggests all is actually well, but the conclusion is surely that both parties are lying to themselves and the truth is more painful than the upbeat attitude suggests.

And, I think, that’s part of the overall thrust of this album – you have to consider the medium and the message; nothing is as straightforward as it seems.

For example, the next track, technically known as Goodbye Lucille #1, was called Johnny Johnny when released as a single (which I’m certain – or am I? – I first heard on the radio while sitting in the car park of the Western General.  There was a good reason for being there, but this is rambling enough as it is; what I do remember is momentarily being excited at the thought of a new Prefab Sprout song, and immediately realising that somehow the name had been mixed up; only later discovering that it had been given a new, more radio announcer-friendly name).

Anyway, where was I?  Oh, yes.  It’s another breakup song, this time from the perspective of a well-meaning outsider.  Poor Johnny is being comforted and advised by someone determined to run through all the cliches in the book until he reaches “give it a rest” – thanks, pal.

But that’s not why this song sticks in the memory so powerfully – neither is it due to the committed singing, or the delightfully fluid bassline, or – again – the sheer catchiness of the whole thing.

No, Goodbye Lucille #1 stands out for the way it plays with the cliché of a missing heartbeat.  The first time round, Paddy McAloon’s vocals push straight through the beat that the band deliberately misses; the second time, he catches on and also pauses, causing my head to snap up in delight; I just love when a song plays with metre like that, and this is so understated and cool that it manages the same trick twice with only a subtle variation which keeps it fresh.  The fact that after the second missed beat, the song starts to crumble, and the veneer of politeness is stripped away to reveal the real raw emotions underneath is a bonus.  Again, it sounds deceptively straightforward, but there’s a lot going on under the surface.

It takes a certain degree of confidence to call a song Hallelujah in the wake of Leonard Cohen and all the cover versions out there; it’s braver still to invoke George Gershwin in the lyrics while protesting that  - in the words of someone else entirely – “this is not a love song”.  Fortunately, this is another work of genius, drifting along in that delicate tracery of 1980s guitar washes with snatches of woodwind and knowing backing vocals – it sweeps you up in its dishonesty and treachery and leaves you whistling a merry tune while it makes off with your loose change.

I’ve pretty much always believed that Moving the River is the best song on here, but I don’t think I’ve ever been able to explain why, even to myself.  Part of it, I know, is the half-spoken intro, full of twists and turns, where the clear impression is of someone only just able to keep up with his own thoughts.  He addresses his father as ‘kid’; he invokes the newfangled art of breakdancing; he is clearly complaining about the futility of his existence in the shadow of his parents, or of picking up the pieces after them, or – well, or something.  It’s another lyric of deliberate complexity which never quite comes out and says what’s on its mind, while beguiling the listener with its slippery precision.  Only after its done do you wonder what, exactly, that was about.

But it’s enormously satisfying to sing/speak along with the opening verse; it has a hand-tooled precision which just flows – this is not one of those songs where the writer has shrugged and said ‘good enough’.

Horsin’ Around has a whole different meaning for anyone who has ever seen the stunning BoJack Horseman and – only now am I seeing this – I think it might be connected.  I’d love to know if there is some germ of a connection here, because I now can’t help but hear this from BoJack’s perspective; it’s pretty much perfect for his character – the ‘worthless friend…or foe’.

Leaving that unlikely synergy out of it, I love the loping swagger of the confidently incorrect protagonist, and the way the song drops into an exaggerated swing to make the key point in the middle eight before coming to its inevitable, painful conclusion that it really was all his fault all along.

Look, it’s basically the plot of BoJack Horseman, and I’ll never hear it the same way again.

Desire As is the counterpart to Appetite – long before there were ’99 problems’ to worry about, Paddy McAloon had six things on his mind, and despite his protestations, the nature of desire clearly is one of them.

From a collection of songs about the fragile nature of love and the fickle nature of the human heart, this song stands out as the most ambivalent and – perhaps as a result – truthful about the transience of desire.  To point up the ambivalent quality of the words, the song itself never quite seems to get going, threatening to break out into something else but continually being pulled back by the uncertainty of the words.  It’s perhaps the key to the whole album, but don’t expect answers.

Blueberry Pies is inflected with doo-wop singing and strangeness.  It never quite says what it means, and swings along in a kind of woozy haze of half-truths and unremembered dreams.

I’m assuming the title is rhyming slang for ‘lies’ – if I’ve been wrong about this all this time, well, I guess I’ll spend the next few decades trying to figure it out again.

You can’t end an album like this on the down beats of woozy lies, though – there has to be some more fast-paced philosophy, and When the Angels delivers in spades.  It’s as religious as this album gets, with its church organ opening, and musings on the nature of angels, but it’s a particularly English religiosity, concerned with the kind of things William Blake pondered, and doesn’t have any qualms about calling angels ‘heart-faced little bastards’.

I mean, how can you not love a song, an album, which ends with an upbeat discussion about the nature of the skin of angels, and whether they are jealous of us mere mortals?

Well, on the basis that the angels have probably never heard this album, I think the jealousy is justified.  Steve McQueen doesn’t just stand up as an album, it actually improves with each listening, and has done for nearly forty years now.  I’ve never tired of it in all that time, and while – as we’ll see – there’s another Prefab Sprout album I love even more, there was no way I was missing this off my list.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

I’m going to skip my usual ‘all of them’ recommendation, and point you at Jordan: The Comeback which is a great, sprawling, concept album covering all kinds of things no-one else would even think to write about, never mind trace a thread through, and culminates in the staggering Scarlet Nights, which is one of a select few songs I consider actually perfect in execution.

But the other albums, especially From Langley Park to Memphis are also great.

Compilations to consider?

When Life of Surprises  came out, I actually had a CD player in my car, and it lived in there for years.

Live albums?

For various reasons, Prefab Sprout weren’t really a live band, so – as far as I’m aware – there’s no such thing as a live album.

Anything else? Yes, and it’s apparently now classified as a Prefab Sprout album, so it should probably be under ‘other albums’ up there.  Paddy McAloon now suffers from sight and hearing problems, making his chosen profession a little tricky to carry on.  In 2003, as a direct response to losing his eyesight, he released I Trawl the Megahertz, which is a truly unique work of genius, but is sadly overlooked and unregarded.  You should try it; it’s not like anything else you’ve ever heard, not even Prefab Sprout albums.

33. Hatful of Hollow, The Smiths, 1984

Posted on by

I’m surprised it’s taken this long, to be honest.  At some point in this list I was bound to come to an album where I have to ask the question – is it OK to still like this, or even listen to it?

And, you know, I could say, well, I still listen to Wagner, and move on.  But I think this deserves a little attention, because it’s an interesting example of how, in 2022, I feel like we’re all supposed to have a black or white opinion on everything, and we’ve lost the nuance in so many arguments.

So, let’s start with this: in recent years, the lead singer of the Smiths has made public statements which make me profoundly uncomfortable, and which are about as far from my personal opinion on certain things as it is possible to get.  And, as I don’t know him or have to interact with him in any way, that’s just fine.  He is entitled to express his opinions, and I’m entitled to disagree with them.  I choose not to amplify those opinions, although I reserve the right to hear them and make my own mind up.

Which I have done, and – like I say – I don’t agree, and am in some part concerned that those opinions might influence people negatively, which is why I choose not to amplify them.

So much for that, but what about the songs he wrote and sang nearly 40 years ago?  Is my listening to them in some way complicit in something?  Well, first of all, it’s purely my business what I listen to, I think – I put headphones on and no-one else can hear, and me listening to an old Smiths album isn’t going to influence anyone to do anything.

But what about me writing about that album?  Does that run the risk of somehow legitimising the singer’s viewpoints?

Here’s the thing.  I don’t know.

I’m aware that’s something of a radical thing to say in 2022.  I think I’m supposed to not only have an opinion about it, but to be certain, even strident in my views.  I have a feeling that I’m supposed to leave this post blank with a note which says I was going to write about the Smiths’ album Hatful of Hollow here, but have chosen not to.  But I haven’t done that, as you can tell.

Two things about that decision, then I’ll move on to the reminiscing and dancing about architecture you all came here for.  Firstly, the internet isn’t the rest of the world.  Certain opinions and debates are blown up out of all proportion to how they affect the rest of the word, and being fearful that something I or anyone else writes down on the internet will somehow cause someone else discomfort, or lay me open to accusations of – oh, I don’t know, something about the oxygen of publicity, I guess – is the quickest way to self-censorship and being unable to articulate any of my opinions, so I’m not doing that.

Secondly, this is a Smiths album, and not only do I not have a problem with the opinions of three quarters of the musicians on it, I’d like to actively promote their playing, particularly Johnny Marr, as we’ll see.  They no more knew what their singer was going to say about things decades in the future than I did when I first bought and loved this album.

Oh, and just to complete all the controversies, I said way back at the start of this that there would be no compilations, and while I’ve already unwittingly broken that rule, this time I did it knowingly.  This is, indeed, a compilation, but as it’s largely a compilation of different versions of songs from the ones released elsewhere, I’m going to allow it.

I’m also going to allow it because, my rules, my list, and I want to talk about this music.

Back in 1984, I didn’t like the Smiths.  Not even a little bit.  I thought they were miserable (whatever happened to having fun in music, I wondered aloud at times), tuneless and vaguely silly.  All of which was down to the fact that I hadn’t properly listened to them, and was having my first moment of ‘there’s nothing new to be said in music; it’s all been done’.

I’d have a few more of those over the years, haven’t been right yet, and hope I never will be.

The scales fell from my eyes some time after hearing Sandie Shaw’s version of Hand in Glove, I think.  It is bright and while I don’t know that it suits her voice that well, I remember hearing it in an end of year roundup of some kind, and thinking that perhaps I should seek out the original, which turned out to be significantly better, played at a lower tempo and in a minor key.  I wasn’t sure about the voice, but it suited the song.

After poking around some other Smiths songs to see if perhaps I’d misjudged them a little, I decided I should try a whole album.  The trouble was that the majority of the songs I knew, which were the singles, didn’t appear on the debut album – yes, I was that shallow at that time.  I don’t know who alerted me to this album; probably an article in Sounds, but it could have been anyone.  However it happened, I celebrated having actual disposable income by going out and spending some of it on a compilation album by a band I thought I didn’t really like.

Yes, disposable income.  By the time I bought this, I was permanently and gainfully employed.  I’ll get round to the whole ‘not being a student anymore’ thing shortly.

The songs on Hatful of Hollow are actually terrific.  I may spend more time on the guitar work than the vocals and lyrics in the next few paragraphs, but that’s almost entirely because that’s what I focused on at the time.

Almost.

The thing about guitar was that I’d spent years equating brilliant guitar work with distortion and speed; power and pyrotechnics, and it wasn’t until I really listened to how Johnny Marr made his guitar do extraordinary things on this album that I really shook off my ‘louder and faster is better’ mantra and started to listen to the rest of the world.

In the back of my mind, I was convinced this was a double album, but it turns out to have been a really tightly packed single album – a whole hour of music on a standard sized 12-inch disc.  I’m listening to a digital version today, so I can’t tell if the original suffered in any way from just how much music was crammed on to it.

The first couple of tracks – William, it was Really Nothing and What Difference Does it Make? - zip by, partly due to their familiarity and partly because these are short pop songs.  I’m struck that these are indeed slightly different versions to the ones I’m so familiar with, and I’m really hearing the rhythm section, so often overlooked, driving these along. 

These Things Take Time is the first really interesting song to me, because I’m so much less familiar with it.  It’s very definitely an early Smiths song – the sound isn’t quite fixed yet, and you can hear Marr playing with the guitar line, working out what he wants it to sound like, while the lyric is a kind of proto-Smiths set of words.  All in their correct place, just less convincing than others here.

This Charming Man, on the other hand, is fully finished, and although again it’s a different version to the well-known one, it bounces along convincingly.  I think I may actually prefer it to the single version – it feels slightly less polished, and more like a band figuring out how to play it.  Right here is where I first properly heard how complex a simple guitar line can be – it’s breathtaking, even at this slightly slower pace.

How Soon is Now always seemed to me to be a deliberate attempt at a psychedelic wig-out.  I’m not sure anyone told the lyricist, as the words are rooted in the usual concerns; deliberately or otherwise, they are squarely aimed at the ‘teenage boy suffering from tumultuous hormones’ market – the one I was definitely in a few years earlier.  My remedy was Jim Steinman, but this was it for an entire generation, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is by far the most played track on the Spotify version.

It's also nearly seven minutes long, which seemed to me the opposite of what all this indie music was supposed to be about, but I don’t know where you’d trim it – the guitar drone which constantly shifts channel hypnotises you and defeats all critical faculties.  It’s definitely the centrepiece of the first side, probably of the whole album.

I didn’t immediately remember Handsome Devil, but it’s an archetypical Smiths song – and then there’s the line which rhymes ‘hands’ with ‘mammary glands’ and while I cringe now, I recognise the way it’s specifically written to provoke that kind of response.  The nearly 60-year-old me laughs and shakes his head; the 22-year old me probably laughed uproariously.

I can now confirm that this version of Hand in Glove is, indeed, better than the Sandie Shaw one.  The voice is better suited to it, and it all sounds more polished and confident.  It’s also in the right key, but that’s probably down to familiarity as much as anything.  And it ends properly with the Beatles-invoking harmonica.

Talking of harmonica, the beginning of Still Ill really doesn’t sound like the Smiths at all.  Until the guitar and voice shove the intro out of the way, and then it doesn’t sound like anyone else at all.  I’m listening closely to the way the song is structured, and – as with a few of these, but it’s clearest here, I think, the guitar line is sparse and clean, but somehow fills out the entire centre of the song.  The bass work is splendid, and lays a foundation, but where most bands would lay down a sequence of chords, Johnny Marr weaves a delicate tracery of guitar under the vocal line, yet still manages to make it sound complete and full.

Side two starts with the stereotypical Smiths song Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now, which is saved from being outright parody by – guess what – the stunning guitar work.  I know exactly why the lyric worked and presumably still works for a certain kind of listener, but I’m a little cynical about it now – I like to think I always was, but I suspect not.  It’s written in a way which carefully ticks all the teenage angst boxes, but I don’t know how honestly felt it was, or was ever supposed to be.

The lyricist says certain things for effect, is what I’m saying.

This Night Has Opened My Eyes is much more like it from a lyrical point of view – it’s a properly told story, and remarkably close to Tender Blue from last week’s entry by EBTG.  Hearing these two albums back to back, as it were, reveals that they were much closer in spirit than I think I understood at the time.

You’ve Got Everything Now is another one which only came back to me once I started listening to it; it’s another one which is a little Smiths-by-numbers, but it has a forcefulness to it which works; it’s a perfect example of what a Smiths album track sounds like – not quite catchy enough for wider exposure, but does all the things you’d expect it to.  It goes without saying that the guitar work is remarkable and propels the whole thing along.

I remember liking Accept Yourself at the time, and I see why now – it’s only the voice which makes it sound particularly Smiths-like; musically, it’s unusually rock-like, and serves to demonstrate how the same building blocks can be used to make something different; it even provokes a slightly different vocal treatment for most of its length.  Love the final chord, too.

Which all set us up nicely for Girl Afraid, bouncing in with an irresistible hook which holds the vocals at bay as long as it can, then only reluctantly accepts that the words require a slightly different tone, but which keeps pushing its way to the front.  I like to think that it’s the guitar line which wins the battle, and has me singing along by the end.

I have only now remembered that the reason I loved this album was that it pulled me in with the familiar songs at the beginning, then surprised me with this run of songs on the second side.  After the two previous tracks shifted the sound a little, Back to the Old House rips up the template entirely; a delightful fingerpicked acoustic guitar track underpins a properly mournful lyric, sung without most of the usual layer of ‘performance’ over it.  It’s a masterpiece of simplicity and likely the best track on side two.

Reel Around the Fountain was controversial then, and remains so today, thanks to its deliberately vague suggestiveness – I think it may have been intended as a commentary on, or reaction to, all those seventies songs of ‘boy becomes man after one night with woman’ songs (Maggie May, anyone), but it’s clumsily done, and felt slightly icky at the time, and probably more so now.  And I’d like to say it’s a shame, because the music deserved more, but I’m afraid even that isn’t quite true either – it’s a bit plodding, in truth.

Fortunately, it’s not the last memory of this album, as the final track is the curiously joyful Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want, which always seemed to me to be self-parody, but is musically just gorgeous, and is surely intended to make you laugh rather than nod thoughtfully, which is a strange way to end a Smiths album, but is definitely part of the reason I wanted it in this list.

I definitely loved it back then; it opened my eyes not only to the Smiths, but to a whole scene I’d been neglecting.  I’m not able to listen to it now with the same ears I had back then, but I’m not going to stop listening to things because I no longer see one of the band members in quite the same light I once did, and I’m pleased to have revisited it now, and been reminded of the tracks I’d almost forgotten, but which turned out to be the reason I liked it so much in the first place.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

If I had to pick one, it would be The Queen Is Dead, and only partly because of Douglas Coupland and the lightbulb moment in his novel Girlfriend in a Coma where I realised he was peppering the text with Smiths lyrics.  The other studio albums are all worth exploring, if you have decided that you are comfortable listening to the Smiths.

Compilations to consider?

Well, this one.  I think I’m supposed to say Louder Than Bombs, but if you really want a Smiths compilation, there’s a Best Of from 2001 which I used to play a lot back then.

Live albums?

Do you know, I had to look it up.  It’s called Rank, and it had entirely slipped my mind.  Make of that what you will.  I do remember, having thought about it, that it didn’t feature any of the early singles.

Anything else?

So many books, of which I think Johnny Rogan’s The Severed Alliance is probably still the best.  As always, I’m prepared to be enlightened.

32. Eden, Everything But The Girl, 1984

Posted on by

This album is a touchstone for me.  It came out during the year I was living in Edinburgh still, but had finally moved out of halls of residence and into a proper student flat, conveniently situated above the famous (and sadly no longer there) Aquila Bianca chip shop. The change in my living conditions coincided with the change in my musical tastes, and I had most definitely moved from the ‘only buying stuff I already know I’m going to like’ phase to….

Well, to Eden, which is an album by a band I had decided I was going to like before I’d heard a note of their music.

I’m really not sure what that says about me and where I was musically at the time – I know I was ready to move on; I was listening to albums by bands I’d previously ignored, after all, but why did I suddenly start to take risks on things without having any clear idea of what I was about to get into?  It might, after all, have been forty minutes of industrial noise terror or worse, unimaginative and bland pop music.

It might have been, but it wasn’t, and on some level, I knew it wouldn’t be.  I had seen the name ‘Everything but the Girl’ in the music press, and it stuck with me – whimsical but intriguing without being deliberately ‘wacky’, it promised something out of the ordinary; it suggested artists who knew what they were about, and were in control of their music.  Again, I could easily have been completely wrong about all of this, but something about the name worked for me.

Then I read an interview with them, and discovered that one of the band shared my last name.  It’s not a particularly unusual last name, particularly if you’re Scottish, but it’s unusual enough that it doesn’t crop up every day, so seeing it in print like that also caught my eye.

I still didn’t have a clue what the music sounded like, though, but that really didn’t matter.  You couldn’t exactly tell from the reviews in the music papers; they were always more about the reviewer than they were about the music, and in any case, I was ready to move on.  I’d had my head turned by Talking Heads and The Cure and so on; I as ready for anything.

Even as a cool album-oriented kind of listener, it was still a weekly ritual to listen to the singles chart rundown on a Sunday evening – the singles chart in the early 1980s was a wild and lawless place, where you might hear the next big thing rubbing up against a novelty act or the kind of single Woolworths marketed to your granny.  Dedicated fanbases could get singles by cult bands into the charts for a week or two, while established middle-of-the-road acts regularly sold millions of singles to people who had no idea of and no interest in what the NME or Sounds thought of their favourites.

So for a new single by a new band with no back catalogue to make the charts at all was something of an achievement; and it meant that I would finally get to hear what this music I liked actually sounded like.

The Sunday chart rundown wasn’t the place to hear your favourite songs in detail with a considered appraisal of their merits; there were 40 pieces of music to get through in two hours, and – allowing for the chat between each song, and breaks for news, weather and travel (but not for ads, this being the BBC), each single got around two minutes to show off what it could do.

In the case of Each and Every One, however, it was enough to convince me that I had been right all along.  I don’t, at this remove, remember if I was surprised to hear this cool, jazz-inflected music coming out of my ludicrously large and bright red “portable” stereo; there had certainly already been music by the likes of the Style Council pointing the way towards this kind of thing, so I doubt I was stunned into silence by it, but I do remember thinking to myself that I was right; I did like this music, and I’d be buying the album as soon as it came out.

From that decision came one of the most rewarding relationships with a band and its members I’ve ever had.  I mean, I say ‘relationship’; they produce, I consume, but there’s something about having a favourite band whose members turn out to be good people and – even better, from my point of view, accomplished and entertaining writers. It has meant that as Ben and Tracey have aged (and I have aged right along with them, we are pretty much exactly the same age, the three of us), I have stuck with them, reading their books and their Tweets, listening to their music, having a couple of friends with whom I go back a long way, although we’ve never met.

And – let’s be clear – if I was ever to be in the same room as either or both of them (delightfully, and somewhat unusually, they remain a couple to this day), I can’t imagine I would know what to say, and would likely pass on by.  I like to think I’d offer a silent nod of appreciation, but I’m way too British for anything more.

It nice, though, this kind of ‘friendship’.  With real-life friends, the best we can ever do is ask each other if we remember this or that event, some conversation we may or may not clearly remember; with Ben and Tracey, I can – as I am about to do – go over to the shelf, pull put an album like Eden and enjoy those conversations all over again, as fresh as the first time they happened.

Some music – maybe most music – you consume and move on; some – the best kind – stays with you through decades and miles, and can always be turned to for enjoyment and reassurance.  Eden is one of those albums; I don’t have to wonder what I’ll make of it now, because I’ve been listening to it for nearly 40 years at this point, I know how I’m going to react, and that’s a big part of the joy of it.

As I pull it out of its sleeve, I’m briefly detained by the fact that it feels different; the sleeve of Eden has a texture to it.  I don’t know the reasons for that, but I love that it doesn’t feel like the other albums on this list.

It starts with the singe, Each and Every One, which is just wrong, I’m afraid – the single goes at the start of side two, as I’m sure I’ve pointed out once or twice before.  I’ve already mentioned the whole ‘cool jazz’ thing, and it’s immediately apparent that I’m in quite different territory to the music I’d been listening to before this.  It’s still one of my favourite EBTG songs, partly because it is so different to the usual guitar, bass, drums thing.

I also love the lyrics on this whole album, they are much more like stories than songs; each of them painting an exquisite little portrait of a situation – Bittersweet is a bright bossa nova of a song, but it’s a proper grown-up lyric about  - I think – a woman’s relationship with her parents, although you can read it as a breakup song.  The tone of the music and the tone of the words are at odds, and it’s that kind of thing which has kept me coming back over the ears.

I have a complex relationship with Tender Blue – it’s a perfect short story of a song, sung in alternating voices, about an unsuitable and incompatible relationship.  I used it as the inspiration for a story of my own, back when I was going through the inevitable ‘short story’ phase of my writing life.  Every time I think about it, I say to myself that I really must go back and polish it, but in the end, I think me putting flesh on those bones doesn’t actually add all that much to the story.  And I’ve never been sure I interpreted it correctly, anyway.

In one of her books, Tracey Thorn remarks that she may not, in fact, be much good at writing choruses.  To which I say, when the song is of the quality of Another Bridge, who needs choruses.  The power of the song is that it doesn’t recapitulate a trite chorus, instead it slowly (well, in truth quickly) builds to the statement of the title, which finally releases the pressure we hadn’t even noticed was building.

Choruses are over-rated.

With my usual youthful enthusiasm, I interpreted Spice of Life as a song from one woman to another after stealing her boyfriend – I think there may have been things going on in my circle of friends at the time – but looking at it now, and with the hindsight provided by Tracey’s book Another Planet, it’s clearly another look at her relationship with her mother.  Looking at it from that angle, it takes on a whole new life and meaning.  Of all the songs on side one (we’re still on side one), it has stayed with me the longest for its lyrical ambiguities and sense of frustrated communication.

I’ve been ignoring the music as I pore over thew words, so let’s just acknowledge that The Dustbowl features some superb guitar work which allows the song to weave its magic unhindered.  It’s closest, I think, to the Aztec Camera stuff from a few weeks back, and perhaps indicative of where EBTG actually wanted to go.

Six tracks in, and we’re only halfway done – each track a breath of fresh air and a delight, partly because none of them overstays its welcome.

Side two opens by going back to the soundscape of the opener. Crabwalk is a jazzy instrumental, heavy on the trumpets and saxophones, underscored by the stand-up bass.  It’s a late-night jazz club of a track, and a million miles from what I had been listening to.  It definitely opened some doors for me.

Even So returns to the Spanish influences.  It’s a melancholy tale of fading love, again propelled along by a cheery rhythm and occasional castanets – I love the contrast, and it fades perfectly into the next track, Frost and Fire, which replaces the cheery guitar with mournful Hammond organ and subtle percussion, as the lyrical themes carry over – it’s still about a love gone sour, but this time more bitter and certain about where the faults lie.

However, Eden isn’t just a sad breakup album; it also features Fascination, which is a kind of ‘sad new love’ song. Tracey laments that we all carry the baggage of past relationships into new ones, and does it again without a chorus, which again suits the subject matter very well.  It’s a more straightforward guitar song, although the saxophone solo is delightful.

If I was listening to a concept album, by the time we got to I Must Confess, I’d be trying to plot out who all these people are, and how they relate to each other.  I don’t think these songs really relate to each other in that way, but it’s intriguing to me to be listening to this set of songs after re-reading Lawrence Durrell’s Justine with its shifting views on inscrutable love affairs and betrayals and its non-linear approach to time, and feeling echoes of that in how these songs relate to each other.

The final track, Soft Touch is short and to the point. It’s a Ben Watt meditation on a turbulent relationship – again, having read his books, I can’t hep but impose his parents onto this lyric – simple and spare, it ends the second side much the way the first side ended, with no horn or saxophone arrangements, just guitar, bass and a quite piano line under Ben’s plaintive voice.  The two halves of this album follow a similar trajectory and come to similar conclusions, that under it all it’s the hard things in life which make the best songs, and stripping away the extra instruments leaves you at the core of what the album has been about all this time – just people, ordinary people and the way they interact.  It’s what all the best songs have always been about, and it’s why Eden still works after all these years.

I don’t think it’s a particularly ‘eighties’ sounding record, but I’m not sure it could have been made in any other decade.  Listening to it again has only reinforced for me that – aside from the nostalgia – it is still one of my favourite albums of all, and while I’m not sure why, I like that I’m not sure why.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Closest to Eden in feel would be the next three, although they very quickly moved away from the laid-back sounds of this, and on to something closer to what was going on elsewhere in the music scene. I’ll recommend Love Not Money in particular, but, honestly, every EBTG album has something to recommend it; the last of them move firmly into the dance-influenced world which the giant hit single Missing hinted at, but they remain Ben and Tracey albums nevertheless.

You should also listen to their solo stuff – every Christmas in this household is enlivened by Tracey Thorn’s delightful Tinsel and Lights album, and there’s a lot of good stuff to be discovered beyond that.

Compilations to consider?

The Best of album feels like a strange hodge-podge of an album to me; I’d stick with the earlier Home Movies, but I’m not convinced there’s a truly representative collection out there.

Live albums?

Not that I’m aware of, no.

Anything else?

All the books.  If I have to pick favourites, Ben’s Patient is harrowing but ultimately uplifting, and his portrait of his parents, Romany and Tom, is absolutely terrific.  Tracey’s Bedsit Disco Queen is highly recommended, but the previously mentioned Another Planet is one of my favourite books of any kind ever, and resonates so deeply with me because of how it describes what growing up when we did was like.  It may have seemed unremarkable from the outside, but she absolutely nails what it was like to be a teenager as punk happened and we all felt we were missing out.