Monthly Archives: June 2022

44. Flyer, Nanci Griffith, 1994

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A few weeks back, I discovered that a compilation album which I fondly remembered didn’t actually lead me to Lou Reed as I had thought.  However, it did lead me here, so now I get to talk about New Roots and its curious mixture of styles.

As I may have mentioned before, New Roots was – in my case, anyway – a double cassette, and I think the general idea was for it to showcase ‘roots’ music from all over the world, although I think the definition of ‘roots’ was a little loose, as the tracklist veered wildly between the obscure and the established stars.  It’s roughly split into four differing sides, although the themes can be tricky to pick out – side one, for example, leads off with the Americana of Ry Cooder and Michelle Shocked but it’s not entirely clear what the path to Enya and The Proclaimers was meant to be.

Side two was, roughly speaking, British folk-influenced music, and side four was firmly in the ‘world music’ camp, mainly African, but culminating in the traditional music of Bulgaria, which was a whole other rabbit hole we went down for a while.

But side three was devoted to a journey from folk into country – from Richard Thompson’s Turning of the Tide to Dwight Yoakam and Lyle Lovett.  Right in the middle of that journey was a live rendition of a song I’d heard before, From a Distance, delivered by the extraordinarily pure voice of Nanci Griffith.

I dug deeper into music by several of the artists on that compilation, but none more than Nanci Griffith, who clearly had something I hadn’t heard before, and threatened for a time there to turn me into a country music fan.

I say ‘me’; we both became Nanci Griffith fans.  This is, of course, partly because we lived in a tiny house and drove around in the same car; whatever one of us was listening to, we were both listening to for a lot of the time.  But it was also because great music is great music, and there was something about Nanci Griffith’s music which stood out for me – stood out from the other 27 songs on New Roots, but also stood out among all the new music swirling around in the early 1990s.

I started by grabbing a copy of the album the track had been lifted from.  I’ll talk a little about One Fair Summer Evening later on, but take it from me there could have been no better introduction to her music.

We were, by this stage, able to spend money on albums again, and we gradually worked our way through the Nanci Griffith back catalogue – I suspect we had different favourites, especially as the albums showed a clear progression from country / folk – in those early albums is the ‘roots’ music the compilation was alluding to – to something altogether more polished and produced to appeal to a wider audience.

What never changed along this journey from sparse folk to over-produced pop was her ability to tell a story.  Griffith’s songwriting ability never faltered, although she seemed to find writing harder and harder as the years passed.  Looking back at it now, I’m certain that what attracted me to this music was a combination of a remarkable voice and the stories behind the songs.  She was never shy of a cover version or two, and later devoted entire albums to other people’s songs, but it was her own stories which landed best for me, whether heartfelt tales of love and loss, or simple evocations of time and place.

By the time Flyer came along in 1994, I was as familiar with her back catalogue as I was with any other of my favourite artists.  Several of her albums could have made this list, but this one does because I think it’s the one which hits the sweet spot she had been looking for – all but one of the songs are originals, and she picks from the various styles and sounds she’s used through the years.  I might again quibble that a few too many rough edges have been smoothed off by the production, but these songs shine through regardless.

Opening track The Flyer sets the scene for the whole thing – tinges of country guitar and hints of banjo deep in the mix, but all in service to the story – an autobiographical (or autobiographical-sounding) tale of missed connections which I once based a short story of my own around.  It swings along merrily, with the ‘la-la-la’s around the chorus sounding at once joyful and wistful.

Nobody’s Angel is a straightforward ‘lost love’ song on the surface – Nanci is mourning the fact that her lifestyle doesn’t seem to lend itself to stable relationships, and is quietly and sadly beating herself up about it now.  What raises it above the ordinary on this occasion is the setting – the music is doing all kinds of unusual things in the background – I swear there’s a harmonium in there somewhere, and there’s definitely a dog barking towards the end.  The backing singers fade in and out, not always finishing their lines, and the whole thing has a broken-hearted feel which fits the words perfectly.

Say it isn’t So is a straightforward country song – Nanci’s voice, which generally rings pure and true, is as clear as you’d expect, but joyfully slides around those country-style slides and bends to lend this song an authenticity which you rarely hear in modern mass-produced country music.  I know which I prefer.

The only cover on this album, Southbound Train is a Julie Gold song, and fits the mood and themes of the album, but never quite reaches the heights of Griffith’s best-known Julie Gold cover, From a Distance.  Southbound Train pushes some of those same buttons, and reaches for many of the same tricks, but never quite makes it.  There’s also a single superfluous word in there, which still jars (the word ‘chill’ serves no purpose I can see, it just kind of sits there, throwing off the metre and stubbornly not rhyming with anything).

Fortunately, These Days in an Open Book comes along to get us back on track.  There’s a maturity to both the lyric and the vocals here which gives the delicate melody a real punch.  It also opens with a line I still use to this day, usually without remembering where it’s from (“Shut it down, and call this road a day”) – I haven’t listened to this in a few years, and it was a delight to be reacquainted with the source of one of those things I just find myself saying from time to time.

Nanci Griffith was not often openly political (in her lyrics at least; she would famously wear a giant “All The Way With LBJ” button on her guitar strap), so Time of Inconvenience comes as something of a surprise in among these wistful love songs. The message is clear and almost angry, but these days seems almost naively optimistic. 

Don’t Forget About Me invokes another album I covered a few weeks ago – it wouldn’t sound out of place on Gerry Rafferty’s  North and South album; the songwriting is very similar, and the accompaniment is constructed in a strikingly similar way, which has me searching the sleeve notes for Davy Spillane – he’s not there, but his spirit definitely is.  At this time, Griffith was poking around her Irish connections, and that comes over clearly in the way this sounds.

I remember little about Always Will, and it still strikes me as one of the slighter songs on here, so maybe this is the point at which I can confess to my somewhat inept attempts to recreate these songs on guitar – I always had more enthusiasm than ability on the guitar, but these songs, combined with the early internet and the sudden, surprising access to tablature and sheet music meant I could at least try to play along with all of these.

Haven’t done that in a while, but it’s another reason I love this album.

As is the standout track, Going Back to Georgia, which crackles and fizzes with life and showcases the voice of Counting Crows singer, Adam Duritz, whose world-weary voice perfectly complements the ringing bell of Nanci’s.  It’s a simply gorgeous song, one where the words perfectly fit the rhythm, and the loping beat invokes the weariness of the long-distance traveller.  Nanci Griffith wrote several duets over her career, but this one is far and away my favourite, and never fails to break me into a wide smile whenever I hear it.

Talk to me While I’m Listening is back in sad love song territory; there’s an honesty to it which is genuinely heartbreaking; the song is simple and effective, enhanced by the backing vocals, sometimes doubling, sometimes harmonising, sometimes wandering off on their own path – I don’t have the full sleeve notes to hand, but I’m absolutely certain that the female voice behind Nanci here is the peerless Emmylou Harris, who quietly lifts this song into greatness.

Fragile is the kind of song which finds itself being used over the end credits of a particularly emotional episode of a TV show.  That’s not a criticism, by the way – I could probably write several essays on the way that some television is lifted into the category of art by the music choices it makes (see the episode of thirtysomething which used Joni Mitchell’s River to devastating effect, for example)

Now we go full Irish with On Grafton Street, which starts with a drum track which could have come from Achtung Baby (yes, Larry Mullen on drums) before becoming more of a lament – a song about feeling at once at home and out of place in an unfamiliar city.  It’s also a song of lost love, as so many of these songs are.  I think it just about contains its desire to erupt into full Irish corniness, although at times the pennywhistle and autoharp combine with the fiddle to walk that tightrope a little uncertainly.

Incidentally, if you like this, you should look into the music of Eleanor McEvoy, from around this time, who did whole albums which sounded like this to tremendous effect.

The count-in to Anything You Need But Me still makes me laugh (“one, two, three…nine”) and the song itself is a welcome release from the inward-looking tone of the last few songs.  This one is defiant and self-confident, full of a quality which has seemed incidental so far, simple enjoyment at the act of making music.

Goodnight to a Mother’s Dream is a magnificent piece of poetry, at once sad and uplifting.  It’s – like all the songs on here – a song from a woman’s viewpoint (we overlook this aspect too often, I think – how much rock music is male-oriented).  This is as much about a woman’s relationship with her mother as it is about the same themes which have been stitched through the whole album, and while I might complain that it’s a tad over-produced, I can’t shake off the genuine power of the words, which stand alone as poetry in a way few lyrics ever do.

But you can’t end an album that way – there has to be one more song full of joy and hope, and This Heart delivers.  Simple, fun and memorable, it closes the door on the introspection and points the way forward with curious noises and sparse instrumentation.  All the elements of the album are present, but repackaged and repurposed to send us on our way with a smile in our hearts and a skip in our step.

There are other Nanci Griffith albums which match this for quality, I think, and ones which are perhaps more uplifting and positive, but none which surpass it for songwriting and musicality.  I’d still start the way I started if you’re coming to her new, but this is a terrific album any way you look at it, and – like almost everything she did – deserves to be much better known.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Nanci Griffith’s career was a progression, so it’s hard to pick just one or two which are representative.  Having said that, Once in a Very Blue Moon does the country thing very well, and both Storms and Late Night Grande Hotel demonstrate how that sound evolved into this one, even if the latter is somewhat too polished and shiny to be a truly great album.

Compilations to consider?

The UK-released Best Of is a tremendous selection, and includes a track I’m in the audience for (although you can’t hear the audience, so it’s rather a moot point).  The much later From a Distance is more of a career retrospective, but perhaps serves also to highlight that her later writer’s block meant that most of her best work was done prior to 1995.

Live albums?

Oh, yes. As mentioned before, One Fair Summer Evening is a truly exceptional live album.  If you need convincing of the genius of Nanci Griffith, look no further.  Stripped of the layers of instrumentation which the studio versions sometimes suffered from, this is mainly voice, guitar and storytelling.  And no-one ever did it better.

Anything else?

There was a book published to coincide with Other Voices, Too, her second album of covers, and it offers some insight into her background, influences, and process, although I remember thinking that I still didn’t know much more about her having read it.

43. A Night in San Francisco, Van Morrison, 1994

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Yes, all of it…

Suddenly, we’re in 1994 (Spoiler alert, the pace is going to pick up now; I may pause to debate why that is at some point).  There was a lot of music in my life during the three years I’ve just cheerfully skipped over, but I no longer felt at the forefront of what was going on.  Madchester and the rave scene pretty much passed me by; I did like some of what I was hearing, but somewhere around turning 30, my musical interests changed.  I branched out into classical, and would listen to Radio 3 on the way home more often than not.  Being in close proximity to London meant I could go to the occasional Prom (and wonder how all those people with season tickets were able to go night after night); I gradually replaced many of the albums I’d sold on CD, and I started that slow merge into middle age by shaking my head sadly at the seemingly repetitive and unimaginative music I was hearing elsewhere.

The other thing which happened, as I slowly developed some kind of disposable income, was that I began to explore the back catalogues of artists I knew I ought to like, but had never quite got round to.

In my first few years at Ferrero, I worked for a seemingly endless stream of managers.  Some left and moved on to other things, some moved around the company as it grew and figured out how to expand into the kind of company the Ferrero family imagined for the UK.  It was a somewhat bewildering time in my professional life, as there was to a degree an empty canvas for me to figure out what I wanted to do.

Officially, Sales Operations was about providing the tools for the sales team to work with; in reality that meant an unending series of opportunities to develop not only brochures and flyers, point of sale materials and business reports, but also the newly emerging technologies, which I suddenly, and perhaps to my slight surprise, gravitated to.

If we were going to give our salespeople laptops and handheld devices (there was a period where we went through Apple Newtons and Palm Pilots, before laptop technology caught up with what we needed it to do), there was going to have to be someone in the office who knew how it all worked, and who could explain that to people whose primary function was to drive around asking people to buy things.

Yes, of course we had an IT department, and technically, that kind of thing was their responsibility, but I wormed myself in alongside them, and  became the person who understood both sides of the coin.  It took a few more years for me to officially move in to IT, but it was a big part of my job from the first few months at Ferrero, and – somewhat belatedly – I discovered the thing I was actually good at.

I’m old enough now that I enjoy making my younger colleagues groan with my tales of how it was in the old days, but those days instilled in me a sense that anything is possible in a growing company if you have a vision and the patience to explain it to those higher up the food chain.  We figured out a lot of innovative stuff in the 1990s, and had a lot of fun doing it, even if maybe half of it worked as intended.

My job seemed to change every six months or so, but I was always able to hang on to the bits of it which properly interested me, and shake off the things which didn’t; I ran a telesales team for a few months at one point, for example, which really wasn’t my thing at all.  Thankfully, that passed into other, more capable, hands, and I was free to send myself on training courses, and burrow ever deeper into the IT team.

Anyway, managers.  The Sales Operations function was passed around for a while – I had a period working for the IT director, while having no official IT responsibilities – but I eventually ended up back in Sales, where my responsibilities came down to dealing with technology, and developing business reporting.  My Sales Director came to rely on my numbers to the extent that I was regularly hauled into the Monday board meetings to explain what was going on.  In return, I began – mainly out of politeness at first – to take note of his Van Morrison obsession.  I started to explore the back catalogue of an artist I’d had plenty of opportunity to hear before, but who had mainly passed me by.

I wasn’t sure that I was convinced by him for a long time, until one week in the early summer of 1994, when I was sent up to Scotland to test some reporting tools.

I say ‘sent’; I now wonder if I volunteered to go up, see my family, and then spend a few days driving slowly back south, visiting every Co-op, Kwik Save and Shoprite store in the Borders before heading home.

The ostensible reason for my driving tour of the borders was that Ferrero was testing a new chilled product, the altogether unconvincing Kinder Milk Slice, and I was working on ways of measuring and reporting not only the extremely short shelf life, but also the distribution in what was a new area for us – the discount supermarket.

I’ve deleted a whole essay here about how Kwik Save and Shoprite were the precursors of Aldi and Lidl; be grateful I did.

The net result was that I had a couple of days trundling around in the borders – the TV campaign we were testing was exclusively broadcast on Border TV, which was still a thing at that time.  I had a blast, working on primitive spreadsheets, and using little more than my wits and the position of the sun in the sky to figure out where the next shop was.  All I lacked was some music to listen to.

I stopped in Edinburgh – I think at the Virgin megastore in the Gyle shopping centre – and quickly scanned the racks.  I had a CD player in the car by now (how far I had come up in the world!), so I was able to choose whatever I wanted, and spotted a Van Morrison live album.  ‘ah, well’, I remember thinking, ‘maybe it’s time to figure out what all the fuss is about’.

There are better-regarded Van Morrison live albums, and several of the studio albums are genuine masterpieces, but none of his albums resonate with me the way this one does, because whenever I hear it, I’m returned to that first time, driving from Peebles to Galashiels to Kelso to Hawick and on to places I hadn’t properly heard of, finally connecting with all this spectacular music, and thinking “oh, now I get it”.

Over the years, A Night in San Francisco became our ‘driving home late at night’ music – something about it is perfectly suited to purring along country roads in the dark, and this found its culmination many years later when we drove back from San Francisco to our hotel in the Mill Valley, zooming over the Golden Gate Bridge in sight of the place where this was recorded, singing along to ‘Tupelo Honey’.

So, it went on my list without hesitation, and I’ve been looking forward to writing about it since the beginning of this process.  The one small thing I overlooked was that it’s well over two hours of music, and even I will be struggling to find new ways of saying that I particularly like the way the music does this or that by the time we get to the end.

So this is definitely not a track-by-track review; more a kind of edited highlights package from the punchy saxophone intro of Did Ye Get Healed  all the way to the loose and indulgent guest-filled encores.

The album was recorded on the tour to support Too Long in Exile, which is an album of exploration of blues and jazz, and some of the collaborators on that album such as Georgie Fame and John Lee Hooker, came along for the tour, and no doubt influenced some of the loose and free playing, which extends to the seemingly spontaneous (but no doubt carefully planned) excursions from  Morrison songs into the songs of his youth and back again which make this so irresistible.

The first part is fairly straightforward – some Morrison ‘deep cuts’ interspersed with a medley where It’s All in the Game eventually bleeds into Make it Real One More Time.  The highlight of the early songs is undoubtedly the explosive start to Did Ye Get Healed, but it’s all joyful and straightforward.

Then there’s a second medley; the band merge Vanlose Stairway into Trans-Euro Train and introduce guest singers – only later do we find out who else is singing, but the contrast with Van’s familiar smoky growl works really well, with Morrison name-checking Sam Cooke and Ray Charles before fading into a quick excerpt of Charles’ A Fool For You.  This sets the template for pretty much the rest of the album, as we either get Brian Kennedy (so that’s who it was) singing a Van Morrison song, or the band stomping their way through a headspinning run of classics – some appear only as snatches of melody; others – like Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again) – given the full treatment.

Van brings his daughter Shana on for a duet with Kennedy, during which he apparently wanders offstage to let his band get on with it (they seem to do just fine without him), and we head into the more mellow part of the first disc as each guest and member of the band is introduced and given a chance to shine.

 The medleys keep coming – the second half of the first disc is as much a quick potted history of the blues as it is a Van Morrison album, and everyone is clearly having a blast keeping up with whichever blues standard Van feels like playing next.

There’s even a – possibly unplanned – burst of Green Onions in there somewhere, while Jimmy Witherspoon and Junior Wells help out and make the whole thing sound like an end of the tour party, before we are reminded who we’ve come to see by a side-ending double of Tupelo Honey and Moondance – the latter interpolated with My Funny Valentine, because why not?

Over an hour in, this would have been plenty for most live albums, but we’re only halfway through.

By this time, I’m almost certainly in Duns or Coldstream, peering at the shopfronts to see if I can spot the Co-op, but caring little if I’m successful, as I’m enjoying this way too much.

The second disc starts with Georgie Fame Jumpin’ With Symphony Sid while Van takes another break, before returning for another of those deep cuts – It Fills You Up – which were giving me so many albums to uncover.  From here, it’s medleys all the way, as more and more guests arrive to perform blues and soul standards with the occasional Van Morrison song here and there.  The man himself hands over singing duties to his guests from time to time, and evidently goes off to watch from the wings every now and then.  It all thunders along magnificently, and there’s a genuine sense of fun as even the famously hard-to-please Van Morrison seems to be enjoying his band.  The end comes with about 45 minutes of music still to go, as everyone tries to outdo each other through an extended, never-ending encore, but the real high point is still to come.

There’s a version of So Quiet in Here which is so laid-back as to be positively horizontal, which slides imperceptibly into Sam Cooke’s That’s Where it’s At, and everyone takes a deep breath.

Then without warning, the band launch into an irresistibly high-energy, uptempo version of In The Garden, and I remember pulling over so I could listen to it properly; it turns a meditative and spiritual song into a proper barn-burner, careering through snippets of Real Real Gone, You Send Me,  and even Allegheny before hurtling into the conclusive ‘No Guru, No Method, No Teacher’ line delivered as a rousing singalong chant.

Every time I listen to this, possibly my favourite version of my favourite Van Morrison song, I’m transported back to that extraordinary first time – hearing a song I was aware of as something contemplative and calm reinvented as a rabble-rousing call to arms.  There is no way not to sing along with the ending – if I hadn’t quite been sold on Van up to that point, there was no turning back after this.

Oh, now I get it.

To be honest, I could live without the straightforward rendition of Have I Told You Lately? which follows; it seems to drain a lot of the energy which then has to be restored during actual set-closer Gloria which gets exactly the treatment you’d expect at the end of such a free-form and energetic performance; everyone – even saxophonist Candy Dulfer – encouraged to step up and add something to a song which fits right in with all those older blues numbers.

It’s a huge beast of a thing, this album, and there are easier ways to get to know Van Morrison, but surely none which are as much straightforward fun.

And, yes, I’m just ignoring the more recent fuss about Van’s political opinions.  Sometimes, you just have to set those things aside and listen to the music.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Ah, where to start?  It’s fair to say that not every Morrison works equally well, and the most famous ones like Veedon Fleece  or St. Dominic’s Preview; Astral Weeks or Moondance are famous for a reason.  But I’ll also suggest later albums like Inarticulate Speech of the Heart and No Guru, No Method, No Teacher.  And I retain a soft spot for the pair of Avalon Sunset and Days Like This.  I’ll admit to not having heard much of the more recent albums, but those should get you going.

Compilations to consider?

The first two Best Of albums cover a lot of ground, and will give the casual listener pointers to where they should go next.

Live albums?

Astonishingly, this isn’t widely regarded as the best of them, although I disagree.  Too Late to Stop Now and Live at the Grand Opera House, Belfast are also excellent.  Neither of them has the same effect on me as this, though.

Anything else?

There’s no definitive biography, although there ought to be.  You should watch Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, though – it’s shot through with Van Morrison music which is perfectly pitched, if not always chronologically accurate.

42. Achtung Baby, U2, 1991

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I look on this album as a turning point, both in the way I listened to music, and in everything else in my life.  We had owned a CD player for a couple of years by the time I bought this, but the various changes and challenges in life meant that the collection was a little thin.  By the time I picked this up everything had changed and – possibly for the first time in my life – I was able to hear music the way it had been intended to be heard.

The part of my life where I drove madly around Scotland pretending to be any good at selling things came to an end in the summer of 1990, when I was recruited into an office job – Sales Operations, we called it – and had to figure out how to afford life in the south of England.

There was a certain amount of culture shock being so close to London and having to figure out the slightly different way many things seemed to work at the time; in the first few days, we encountered a giant grocery store which didn’t accept credit cards (yes, really), and discovered that while you could buy alcohol on a Sunday, pretty much everything else was closed.

We quickly figured out that on one salary, we wouldn’t be living particularly close to where I worked, and after a couple of weeks in a hotel and a few months in a poky flat overlooking Chorleywood underground station, we found a house we felt sure we could just about afford.

Our little house in Tring was about half the size of the flat in Perth, and cost almost exactly twice as much.  It wasn’t exactly spacious, but we made it work, and in the end spent the first half of the 1990s making it work.  I figured out just what it was I did want to do with my career, Zoë slowly recovered and got herself fit enough to work, and I started buying music on CD.

I mean, I did other things, too, and I still belonged to a library with a record collection which I could tape things from, but more often than not, I would find myself buying CDs and marvelling at the clarity and crispness of the sound.

At least, that’s what I told myself.  How much of the difference was down to the digital format, and how much was down to the fact that I wasn’t listening to it either on a cheap plastic record player, or in a noisy vehicle via a second-generation tape isn’t entirely clear.  I certainly thought I was hearing music as it was supposed to be heard, but in my dotage, I have come to doubt whether CDs were always as wonderful as we thought they were, just as I often prefer nowadays to listen to older records on vinyl than in digital format.

The truth is, of course, that nothing can exactly replicate the sound of being there, so how you hear something comes down to personal preference.  I suspect that electronic and digitally-created music works better in a digital format, while acoustic instruments respond much better to the warmth of the analogue sound, but what do I know?

In one other respect, CDs were essential to our situation in the early 1990s, in that they took up way less space.  My carefully curated record collection, which had begun in my tiny bedroom in Aberdeen 20 years before, was now stuffed into boxes in the attic (from where I constantly worried it would emerge through the ceiling one night), as there was literally nowhere to put it in our little ‘starter home’.

I’m not entirely convinced I had any means of playing them either – I know the first CD-capable device we owned in Perth had a record deck, but memory suggests it was replaced by something much smaller in our new house; something which played CDs and tapes, but had no room for the giant slabs of vinyl.

One day, just before we would have had to move it again, the collection was sold.  I like to think I mourned the loss of my precious albums (and I definitely do now), but I suspect at the time, I was all about embracing the future and listening to all my music on a much more portable format.

Talking of embracing the future, here was a U2 album which didn’t really sound like anything they had done before.  U2 had, until this point, always been more Zoë’s thing than mine – I mean, I liked a lot of their music, but the U2 albums in our collection were hers, not mine.  I remember being encouraged by someone while still at university to come and see this new Irish band people were raving about, but still being in my ‘noisy metal’ phase, and not bothering.  Maybe I’d have seen them differently if I had gone along, but they were always just on the periphery of my interests.

I did buy Rattle and Hum, but I know I was buying it for us, not just me.  It weas one of the first CDs we owned, and – I’m sure I’m not imagining this – those early CDs were thicker than the ones which came later.  I remember the disc being quite substantial, and I remember poring over the whole package trying to figure out what was going on with it.  I listened to it again a couple of years ago, and it’s quite a curiosity really; neither one thing nor the other, a sort of live album-cum-compilation-cum-half a new album, and I suspect that in the end all it did for the band was clarify that this wasn’t the direction they wanted to be going in.

I heard The Fly on the radio.  I have a clear memory of being in a hotel room and hearing it for the first time, but I have no idea why my memory thinks I was in a hotel in Dundee, since I definitely can’t figure out why on earth I would have been there – I certainly did occasionally come up to Scotland for sales meetings at this time, but they were always in Edinburgh, and I’d fly up and back in the same day – I’ve been thinking about this all week, and can come to no other conclusion than that I’ve completely misremembered the whole thing.

Which kind of nudges this whole project a little closer to ‘fiction’, I think.

However it actually happened, I heard The Fly, and recognised that this was really interesting.  There’s no doubt that mainstream music was changing and perhaps fragmenting a little around this time; I was certainly exploring lost of unfamiliar areas and reaching back into classical music, listening to albums I’d overlooked – I went through a Frank Sinatra phase for a time there – and as a result, was buying much less new music, a trend which definitely explains how we’re not yet halfway through my life so far, but have already sailed past the two-thirds point in the list.

One other significant change had happened in my life, of course – instead of listening to the radio on my own in the car all day, I now worked in an office with colleagues – many of them a similar age to me – and we talked about music in a way I hadn’t done since leaving university.

We recommended things to each other, and while we didn’t agree on much, I found a lot of things I wouldn’t otherwise have done just by being in an environment like that again.  When the new U2 album came out, though, several of us bought it, and debated it keenly for weeks, unsure if it was iconic or just another passing phase.  I decided I liked this smart, cynical way of looking at the world, and certainly preferred it to the earnestness of the earlier albums.  I haven’t listened to it all the way through for many years, though, so I don’t know how that view will hold up.

It looked different to anything they’d done before, and starts with noises off and distortion, announcing itself as not what you were expecting.  Zoo Station does flirt with the familiar U2 guitar tone briefly, but the heavily treated vocal throws us off the scent; it’s a driving, danceable beat, but a cryptic and strange lyric which seems to be looking at the unfamiliar European landscape which had suddenly emerged and scratching its head.

Even Better Than the Real Thing is on much more familiar ground; the open landscape of older U2 songs is present, as is Bono’s unique vocal tone. But there’s a hustle to it which is less U2, and the doubled vocal is strange,  lending it a kind of eeriness which I’m not sure was the original intention, but which is striking to me listening to it closely now.

I would have sworn One was the final track on the album for some reason – not sure why, as it fits perfectly here, and I was anticipating it as the previous track faded out.  Memory, eh?

Anyway, it’s the song I remember most strongly from the album (although it turns out I remember it all clearly so far); it’s the song I’d identify as carrying the spirit of what this whole project was about – reinventing the U2 sound without obscuring the fact that there are some impressive songwriters in the band.  The lyric resonates and is of its time, the energy of the recording is clear, and it highlights something for me I hadn’t really thought about so far – this album sounds like it’s from the 1990s; there has been a shift away from the sometimes sterile eighties sound.  In spite of its digital construction, the recording sounds warm, which I’m not sure I remembered.

Until the End of the World (you should watch the film, incidentally) is back in the mix of old and new – the familiar U2 tropes, including the religious imagery in the lyric, battle with the new feel and sound which envelop them without ever completely obscuring them.  It skips along; a hummable song about betrayal.

From the first time I heard this album, Who’s Gonne Ride Your Wild Horses stood out for me, I think because of the soundscape which takes us all the way to the chorus before resolving into something recognisable – until that point, it’s a swirling echo of a thing, but gains focus as the bass asserts itself and the vocals take centre stage.  I think I hear this in its layers now – some things which are buried in the mix occasionally pop out into focus, and make me think I’m hearing them for the first time.  I don’t exactly know what appealed to me so much about it back then, but I thoroughly enjoyed listening to it closely this time – part of the appeal of music to me is the ability to hear it differently each time, and this delivers on that score.

So Cruel is stripped back as befits its pained lyric; it shuffles along without really ever finding its stride and leaves you slightly unsettled as you listen to it wrestle with its subject matter without resolving anything; the spirit of betrayal and loss weighs the song down but never brings it to its knees – it’s strangely defiant and uplifting in spite of itself.

The Fly, as already noted, sounds like nothing which had gone before it; I’m not sure I ever completely bought in to the whole alter ego thing Bono had going on, but it definitely fits this song, whatever it turns out to have been about.  All the pieces which go into making up a U2 song are here, but are jumbled and distorted or hidden in the mix, and while it served its purpose at the time of alerting us to how different this was all going to sound, I think it is somewhat overshadowed in the full context of the album.  It’s a bit lightweight and throwaway now, but maybe that was the point all along.

I love the fluid and relaxed feel to Mysterious Ways, the bass tone in particular leaps out and grabs the attention while the drumming propels what might otherwise be an ordinary melody into interesting and attention-grabbing places.  It’s a lot of fun, this track, even after all this time.

Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World starts with a beat which is very early nineties; this kind of thing was just beginning to come to prominence, and it’s intriguing to hear it here, under a song which is pretty much all vocal, with only the faintest hint of the old U2 sound pushed back in the mix.  The bass again carries a lot of the structure as Bono revisits some of the aphorisms which presumably didn’t fit into the already packed lyric of The Fly.  I think they work better here, to be honest – it’s a better and more open song, and it’s curious to me that one of the highlights of the album from a songwriting point of view is somehow less regarded than the ones around it.

For example, Ultra Violet has three times as many listens on Spotify, but I’m struggling to find anything to say about it beyond it being a memorable melody.  It’s otherwise much more like an old U2 song, with the insistent guitar line pulsing away without ever resolving to anything, until it crashes out into a slightly more raucous final third.

On the other hand, I still love Acrobat, partly for the way it co-opts that familiar U2 rumble and turns it into something altogether newer-sounding, and partly for the lyric which expresses much of the same anger and frustration as Lou Reed was grumbling a few weeks back.  Unlike Uncle Lou, though, Acrobat manages to be hopeful and looks to the future with something like optimism.  Alongside the optimism is a soundscape which feels less like a traditional U2 open sweep, and more like an angry anthem.

Again, memory fails me, as I was sure that was the final track, but of course it isn’t, because we leave with the church organ and genuine despair of Love is Blindness.  It may still be up for debate just exactly what the ‘love’ of the title is referring to, but I think the tortured guitar solo is pretty clear that whatever it is, it’s toxic and unwelcome.  It’s not exactly an uplifting or anthemic way to round out a classic album, but I think it suits the strange, uncertain mood of this album perfectly.

I’m not sure if it’s my favourite U2 album, or even if I have one – for a while there, they were an important part of what I was listening to, but I never did quite latch on to them the way I did other bands.  I’ve been looking forward to reviewing this all week, but I’m not sure I’ll be going back to it the way I have with several others in the list.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but while it’s as familiar to me as any of these, I feel like maybe it’s an example of an album you had to be there for – it’s undoubtedly a classic album, but perhaps of its time.  Maybe it’s that unsettled mood of the whole thing, or maybe it’s me.  Either way, I’m glad I left it on the list, but I’m already looking forward to the next one…

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Well, naturally, I’m expected to say The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, and they are both splendid.  Myself, I think I always enjoyed Zooropa more than I was supposed to – it’s kind of an album of songs rushed into being without the usual agonising and careful sculpting, and I remember loving it at the time.  Maybe that’s the one I’ll go back to…

Compilations to consider?

There are plenty, of course – the two Best Ofs cover the 1980s and then everything else; perhaps its time for a more comprehensive career summary.

Live albums?

Under a Blood Red Sky was the first time I properly heard U2, and I’m still fond of its short, sharp and to the point nature.  The aforementioned Rattle and Hum contains some live tracks, but they’ve never done another one, in spite of the globe-straddling nature of their live shows.

Anything else?

If you get the chance to see the Glastonbury performance in the pouring rain from 2011, that’s worth a look.  And, you know what?  I’m certain there are all manner of books about them, but I’ve never felt inclined to pick one up.  Maybe I should. Oh, and if you do check out Until the End of the World (the Wim Wenders movie, that is), try to find the 280-minute version; it’s more like a miniseries than a movie, but it’s mesmerising and has one of my favourite soundtracks.

41. Flood, They Might Be Giants, 1990

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All told, I spent around nine months working for Ferrero in Scotland.  In the summer of 1990, I applied for, and got a job working in the head office in Rickmansworth, which changed everything and finally put me, at nearly 28, on the path to something resembling a career, but for those nine months, I slogged around Scotland doing a strange and nebulous job which required a lot of sitting in the car listening to the radio.

As the eighties shaded into the nineties, FM radio was gradually asserting itself in parts of the world – mainly rural Scotland – where it hadn’t been available before.  My daily radio diet was still mainly BBC Radio 1, especially in the first part of the day, and I was still hearing some strange and wonderful things that way, but I was also just starting to wonder if I was growing out of the relentless diet of pop music it served up.

Chart music in the 1980s was – in the UK at least – eclectic and strange.  Among the steady stream of radio chatter, you could hear a surprising number of experiments and off-the-wall oddities, almost all presented as serious music, many of which, from Laurie Anderson’s sublime artwork O Superman to the Dadaist ravings of Trio’s Da Da Da, were also purchased in their millions and took up residence in the higher reaches of the charts.  If there was a formula for making a successful pop record (and it turned out there probably was), no-one had yet discovered or perfected it.

Noisy rock sat alongside twee novelty, electronic experimentalism, heartfelt folk, the odd country song, disco (which was becoming Dance with a capital D) and straight up comedy records for almost the entire decade, and it was often hard to tell them apart.  Entire new genres arose and were instantly parodied; out-there experimentalists became chart staples and passing fads inspired by old movies or TV shows would suddenly and bafflingly appear for a few weeks, only to disappear, never to be heard from again.

All the while, those of us who spent our days driving around would listen to it being served up by an array of DJs who were household names entirely because of their position in the Radio 1 lineup, and hum or sing along to a bewildering array of music.  I don’t remember often (if ever) turning the radio off or changing the station because of a song I didn’t like being played – there would be another one along in a minute to take its place, and it would likely sound completely different.

There were gaps in the radio coverage, though, and it was filling those gaps which first led me down the TMBG rabbit hole, and while it was Radio 1 which led me there, the Radio 1 of 1990 was different from the one I’d been listening to for the past twenty years or so, and while I didn’t articulate it – or likely even think about it much – at the time, I think the variety was dropping out; the music was becoming more formulaic, and I know I was listening to Radio 4 on the way back to Perth at the end of the day more often than not – unthinkably, I seemed to be growing out of Radio 1.

My job for those nine months was a strange one.  Not only was I not expected to sell things, I was actually expressly expected not to sell things – Ferrero still employed a broker to do the selling, and while our presence in the wholesalers and cash and carry outlets was very obviously the company putting its own salesforce in place before taking the business away from the broker, we all played along as I solemnly explained how excitring the new TV campaign was going to be, and asked politely for the buyer to talk to his rep when they next came in.  Meanwhile, I was going to tidy the shelves, rotate the stock, and get back in my Ford Escort to drive to the next cash and carry.

At least I was exploring a new part of Scotland.  Until late 1989, I had been very firmly an East Scotland boy – Aberdeen, Inverness, Edinburgh and Perth were my home territory, and I only ventured to the west to go to football matches.  All that changed when I was handed my new territory – all of western Scotland.

In reality, of course, that mostly entailed driving to Glasgow, with the odd foray into Ayrshire or South Lanarkshire, and I came to know and appreciate Glasgow (not the way I loved Edinburgh, of course) much more, although the traffic often left something to be desired.

Each week, however, I had one of those wild excursions only someone sitting in an office in the south of England could dream up.  Once every two weeks, I was tasked with a drive up to Fort William and Oban, and on the opposite fortnight, down to Stranraer and Dumfries.  If you’re not familiar with the geography of that, have a look at the map.  Both trips involved early starts, later than normal finishes, virtually no business transacted (Dumfries being the only town of any real population in the whole itinerary), and an awful lot of driving through some of Scotland’s most spectacular scenery.

It was the driving through the scenery bit which led to this album; there was no FM radio coverage for most of those two drives, and I loaded my car up with tapes of favourites old and new for the Tuesday excursions.

Occasionally the music ran out.  I don’t mean that I forgot the tapes, more that I had heard them all many times and craved something new.  You may well imagine that stopping en route to buy a new tape might have been tricky, and you’d be right.  There wasn’t time to stop on the way out; early starts and time pressures generally meant I didn’t even stop for coffee at the start of the day.  By the time I was in Oban or Fort William or Stranraer (Dumfries always came last for reasons lost to the mists of time), there wasn’t a wide variety of music shops to scour while I picked up some lunch.

So it was that one Tuesday lunchtime in early 1990 I found myself poking at the thin selection of cassette tapes available in Woolworths in Stranraer.  I had already completed my duly appointed visit to the town’s only wholesaler, and before heading off down the A75 to Dumfries, I usually picked up a sandwich in one of the bakeries.

I had never before considered the Woolworths’ tape section, but I must have been desperate that day.  There, among the cut price compilations and Daniel O’Donnell tapes, I spotted an album I had already earmarked to borrow when it appeared in the Perth library collection.  I knew and loved Birdhouse in your Soul from its repeated Radio 1 plays in the previous autumn, and my attitude to the album was probably “well, why not?”

Listening to new music for the first time in the car while hammering along a major trunk road in between convoys of heavy goods vehicles off the ferry is, perhaps, not the perfect listening environment, but enough of it must have stuck with me, because I remain an ardent TMBG fan to this day.  They were, and are, quite different to anything else I listened to, but their mastery of dozens of musical styles and the evident fun they have with the language are right up my street.

Flood is a startlingly different album to pretty much anything I’ve talked about so far.  It’s hard to solemnly opine about something which is scampering around like a puppy chasing its tail, and in any case, there are nineteen tracks to write about here; even I might struggle to come up with something weighty and considered to say about all of them.  So I’m going to dive back in to Flood and note down my reactions as I go, but I’m not going to constrain myself to a track-by-track analysis.

Unless I do, of course – who knows?

It starts, naturally, with an overture – its own theme, which causes a grin before breaking into Birdhouse, which – I’m only noticing this now – fades up from the volume level of the theme before fully asserting itself as the strangely compelling pop song it is, albeit one sung from the perspective of a nightlight with assorted brass instruments parping their way through the middle eight.

If you wanted to know how this was all going to sound, this is as good an intro as you’re going to get, from the unconventional instrumentation to the way the words only just fit the melody, to the interplay of the two similar but distinct slightly nasal voices.

The interplay continues into the upbeat bluegrass of Lucky Ball and Chain – all banjos and – I don’t know, pool balls?  It’s a mournful lyric delivered as a jolly romp, but you can’t imagine it played straight – how would you fit in the accordion and tuba?

Istanbul (Not Constantinople) was a pre-existing nonsense song which the two Johns made their own, and is probably the best known song on here, thanks to its life as a single, and occasional use in advertising and television.  As with so much of their work, the song is played with an absolutely straight face, if you can do such a thing with tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Dead is about reincarnation as a bag of expired groceries.  I’m not sure there’s anything more you can say about that.

Whereas Your Racist Friend is worthy of an entire essay.  How such a politically sharp point came to be made on an album like this is anyone’s guess, but it truly stands out in the sea of silliness – even the instrumental break feels serious and pointed.  It’s a simple way to make an important point – “Can’t shake the Devil’s hand / and say you’re only kidding”.

I’m not sure I ever expected to be singing along to an oompah song about an assortment of cartoonishly implausible superheroes, but here we are, bouncing along happily to Particle Man.

What I’m noticing now is how these short, sharp songs elbow each other out of the way as they vie for your attention.  No sooner have your ears attuned themselves to the weird soundscape of Particle Man than you’re rocking out to Twisting, and as you settle in to the melody, you’re immediately tipped out of the cart into the surrealist landscape of We Want A Rock which makes perfect sense until you actually go back and read the words.

It doesn’t matter why a carpenter is hammering on his piglet, or why he wants a prosthetic forehead; it’s so much fun that you don’t care.

Until you go back and think about that word surrealist, and look at it through that lens.

The tape flips over before I’ve had a moment to process that, however.  Now Someone Keeps Moving My Chair, and while I’m thinking about the clean production  and how there now appear to be three syllables in the word ‘my’ or the extraordinary sentence structure of the bit where we appear to be writing something on the back of someone’s head with green magic marker, the album’s already moved on to the next agenda item.

Hearing Aid starts all muted trumpet and weirdly distorted tape recordings.  It’s the longest track on the album, but I don’t know if that lends it added significance; it’s probably more that it’s a slower tempo, and therefore takes longer to get through the lyric.  Having said that, I’d forgotten how intriguing the seemingly random sampled noises at the end are.

Minimum Wage is the exact opposite.  The title is the entire lyric, and seems to exist simply to show off the sampled whip sound.

I had entirely forgotten how Letterbox works as a perfect jewel of a song; intricately constructed and executed – there is no way that many words should fit into the melody, but it never feels forced or hurried.  One of the less well-known songs, it is worth exploring further, if only to figure out what all those words are actually saying.

Whistling in the Dark is one of many songs on this album which still pop into my head whenever the title appears in my life – I can’t hear someone say it, or read it without immediately intoning “I’m having a wonderful time, but I’d rather be…”  It’s a curiously joyful tune given the pitch of the vocals and the subject matter, but it collapses into the sound of an uncoordinated brass band marching drunkenly into the sunset, and how can you not love that?

I feel I could say this about almost all of these songs, but I have absolutely no idea what Hot Cha! Is about, and I don’t care.  I love the unexpected solo piano break in the middle, and the way it keeps threatening to break into jazz.

Women and Men is basically a sea shanty about  – I don’t know, overpopulation, maybe?

One of my favourite facts about They Might Be Giants is that for a time, they would act as their own support band under the name ‘Sapphire Bullets’.  Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love is one of many songs on here I’d like to hear expanded out beyond the minute and a half it gets, but that would spoil the rhythm of the whole thing, wouldn’t it?

The second theme song of the album is dedicated to the band rather than the album.  I’ve never known why anyone would ‘fry up a stalk of wheat’, but it really doesn’t matter; I’m just hanging on tighter to avoid being thrown to the wolves.

How do you finish an album like this?  With a Road Movie to Berlin of course.  No sign of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Dorothy Lamour sarong’ here; this Road Movie is back in the folk / country idiom, until it isn’t as the scary synthesised sounds puncture the melancholy.  Berlin was much on everyone’s mind at the time, of course, but it seems incidental to the song – with the obvious exception of Your Racist Friend, this isn’t a political album.

Nor is it a silly one, despite what its popular reputation might suggest.  Sure, it doesn’t sing about the things everyone else sings about, and it’s full of the off-kilter and eclectic; full of wordplay and strange allusions, but it’s not playing at being a serious album, it really is one.  It’s stood the test of time, as has the band, and while more than 30 years on, I still have no idea what it’s on about half the time, I still find it endlessly engaging and entertaining.

And how many albums can you still say that about?

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

My second favourite is still Apollo 18, but there are many others, including some you should introduce your children to, if you have any.

Compilations to consider?

I am horrified to realise that my favourite TMBG compilation Dial-A-Song is 20 years old.  Having got over that, I still recommend it thoroughly, and will now go and seek out some newer ones.

Live albums?

There are a few, but for some reason, I don’t know them beyond the tracks which appear on Dial-A-Song.  Another gap I need to fill.

Anything else?

Something very specific.  Flood is the subject of one of the books in the 33 1/3 series – I’m not entirely convinced that this music is enhanced by close analysis, as may be seen above, but it presents a thought-provoking thesis, and is well worth a read.