Monthly Archives: July 2022

49. Milk and Kisses, Cocteau Twins, 1996

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Among the many and varied types of music we listened to in the 1990s, none was more “1990s” than a spectrum of dreamy, often unintelligible albums ranging from Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares  via the likes of Enya, and a fondly-remembered project called simply One World, One Voice to, well, to Cocteau Twins, nominally a Scottish band, but unlike pretty much any other Scottish band in their seeming determination to sound like their music came from outer space.

I had been vaguely aware of a Scottish band with some ethereal vocals for some time, but I’m not sure at this remove what finally prompted me to properly listen to them – maybe it was another library album.

The last time I remember regularly borrowing albums from a library was when we lived in Tring.  Tring library was very similar in size and scope to the one I first started borrowing albums from, and still mostly dealt in vinyl albums – at least, that’s what I think I remember, but maybe I’m conflating the two in my mind.  I got through a fair number of early-nineties fads – remember those MTV Unplugged albums – and some things I probably should already have known, and then suddenly I was listening to Cocteau Twins music in all its otherworldly glory.

One of the principal reasons that this album is on this list as opposed to any of the other mainly instrumental sounds is that when this album came out in 1996 it quickly became a firm favourite in the house, and then the following year, became part of our intended childbirth soundtrack.

Now, I’m not kidding myself; I’m barely qualified to talk about childbirth, having been a spectator for both of my children’s births, but there were some aspects I could take part in, including the ante-natal classes, and the curation of a delivery room playlist.

The classes were generally interesting and useful – save for the one which was basically a sales pitch for one particular brand of formula milk (I assume that’s how the whole thing was funded); we sat in a room once a week with a group of other first-time parents who were all as bewildered and anxious as we were, and we were reassured that the whole thing would be simple and straightforward – the point of the classes, in reality, is to ensure that the new parents-to-be are aware of the wide range of what’s normal, both during and after the birth, and in my case at least, to be given permission to think about what calming music I could provide to at least let me feel like I was contributing in some way.

Milk and Kisses had quickly become a favourite – one of the albums which accompanied our move to a slightly bigger house on the fringes of Watford, and a certainty for the labour ward playlist, combining as it did ethereal, calming sounds and a general air of peace and tranquility.

At least, that’s how I remember it – I haven’t listened to it in years.

Of course (and you may be ahead of me here), the well-intentioned plans for a calm, almost mystical birthing experience didn’t really survive contact with the real word, in which we spent the majority of a chilly November day listening, not to Liz Fraser emoting or Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde dazzling us with their layers of sound, but to the surprisingly rapid heartbeat of our imminent arrival.  That day is nudging 25 years ago now, but it’s vivid to me; I can even tell you what I was wearing.  And I can’t do that about yesterday.

We did listen to Milk and Kisses at some point around lunchtime, I think.  But that was still many hours from the actual delivery, and I don’t remember any more music being played; it all seemed a little superfluous to the real life happening in the room.

As I say, I’m not really qualified to talk about anything more than what it looked like, but I think it say something that of the no doubt lengthy playlist I had assembled, this is the only album which stands out and which, on the odd occasion I do hear something from it, reminds me acutely of the sounds and smells of that unforgettable day.

And once we were parents, there seemed to be so much less time for listening to new music that I actually found myself wondering if new music had completely dried up around the end of 1997.  It hadn’t, of course, but it’s telling that we’re at number 49 in the list with 25 years of music still to go.  All of which prompts me to wonder what this album which is the soundtrack to a very specific and highly charged part of my life sounds like now.

The immediate reaction to Violaine is a mix of “oh, I remember this”, and wondering if that’s a live drummer, since I am almost certain that there wasn’t an actual drummer in the band.  And then Liz Fraser’s unmistakable voice cuts in, singing those strange syllables and accompanying herself in a pure soprano, and I’m not listening to the music as such any more, just experiencing it.  There’s a false ending with a chance for the bassline to re-establish itself, and the whole thing drifts along exactly as I remember it – easy to hear why this would have been on the playlist.

Serpentskirt opens with delicious cascading guitar, and a vocal which trips along beside it in a language which is almost, but not quite, English.  If I was to choose an example from this album of what this band sound like, this would be it – there’s a whole soundscape here, played at a loping pace and with enough modulation and shifting of the melodic ground to make it something more than the background music you could easily write it off as.

On the other hand, Tishbite almost sounds like a regular 1990s pop song.  It’s still at that same calm, unhurried pace, but there are actual English lyrics, and the song is structured in a more easily interpreted way, although the lack of printed lyrics leaves the whole thing open to interpretataion, like snatches of an unfamiliar song heard in a dream

And Half-Gifts drifts in with a woozy fairground feel – it reminds me very strongly of Gabriel Yared’s score for Betty Blue (there’s a whole unexplored area of film scores I have known and loved, but there’s no time…).  This sounds like a break-up song, and it’s hard not to relate it to the crumbling relationships which meant that this was the final Cocteau Twins album.  I can make out the words fairly clearly on this one, and while it’s a bitter kind of song, it’s also in that special Cocteau Twins way, deeply weird – “That’s what grown-ups do / That is mature thinking” sounds more like an argument than a song.

Can I just point out my deep admiration for a band who attach seemingly random titles to their songs, prompting as much reflection as the actual music does?  What on earth does Calfskin Smack mean?  How on earth does it relate to the impenetrable lyrics which seem to be adjacent to, rather than entirely in, the English language.  It’s still a gorgeous song, though, and ends absolutely perfectly, as if they all looked around and said “Yes, that’s all we have to say about that.”

Some albums on this list have tried my patience with songs which outstay their welcome, but I have never felt that about this album; each song is precisely as long as it needs to be – some take longer to make their point than others, is all.

Rilkean Heart (which I have discovered today was written for, or inspired by, Jeff Buckley) actually features the song title in the lyrics, which may make it unique (although I’m now wondering about Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops).  It packs a lot into its four minutes, including a breakdown where it all threatens to fall apart, searching for a key to continue in, before righting itself and flowing on.

It is all calm, and similarly paced, this album, but never does it feel samey or plodding (which had been my concern – how was I going to write about 10 songs which all sound the same?  I needn’t have worried).

I’m captivated by the voice – of course I am – at the start of Ups; I have looked up some lyrics for this, and can see that someone has valiantly tried to render it as if it was written in English, but it plainly isn’t, and the linguist in me is just entranced by those trills…  The voice is at its most free and expressive here, given permission to just explore the outer edges of what’s possible in the melodic framework, and not worry too much about where it’s all going, or what it means.

The sound effects at the beginning of Eperdu take me aback; I hadn’t remembered them at all – we’re standing on a rocky shore, listening to the ocean, and there’s hardly any instrumentation at all, leaving us to focus on the voice, which is soaring above the water, gliding along like a seabird in a strong onshore wing, hovering, swooping and gliding seemingly effortlessly.  What does it mean?  I have no idea, although I think I hear words like ‘floating’ and ‘dreaming’ in there; maybe I’m projecting my feelings onto it.

I still haven’t worked out the drum thing yet – there’s very definitely a drum kit involved in some of these songs, rather than a drum machine, but more research is needed to see what was going on there.

Meanwhile, Treasure Hiding is slightly slower, and even more enigmatic.  At times, the layered vocals seem to be commenting on themselves – or possibly translating, who knows?  It’s entirely possible that the title is a commentary on the whole song – there’s something in here, but you’ll have to work at it to find out what exactly the song’s about – the lips, the heart, the soul; who knows?  Then it suddenly breaks open; there’s a definitive beat and suddenly, all this way in, a purpose and energy to the song – unlike everything else we’ve heard before, it’s going somewhere.  It’s just that only the driver knows what that destination is, the rest of us are blindfolded and along for the ride.

The whole thing is rounded off by Seekers Who Are Lovers, which announces itself with a firm drumbeat, then gradually puts on all the Cocteau Twins layers – at first the vocal seems clear and even meaningful, but gradually is enveloped by the guitar sounds, and then the second level of voice – Liz Fraser just emoting in a higher register, and taking your attention away from what you thought the song was about.  In the end, like all the best Cocteau Twins music, it seems to exist to perplex, beguile and leave the listener not entirely sure what they just heard, but eager to go back and see what they might have missed while trying to work out which planet this came from.

I though that I would be dropping back in time, listening to this, but what I found was that Milk and Kisses, and probably most of the band’s output, exists outside time; I can imagine it being discovered by today’s generation and still heralded as radical and otherworldly; maybe I should ask my 25-year-old what he thinks…

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Certainly.  Both the mainly acoustic Victorialand and the full band experience of Heaven or Las Vegas are worth your exploration, especially if you were enraptured by this album.  I will say that I find the production on the earlier albums better than the slightly muddy sound on Milk and Kisses.

Compilations to consider?

Stars and Topsoil looks to be a comprehensive collection covering the 1980s; I’m not aware of anything equivalent for the 1990s material, though.

Live albums?

Nope.  Not really a live band, your Cocteaus.

Anything else? If you’ve never heard the This Mortal Coil version of Song to the Siren, it’s basically a Cocteau Twins track (it’s all a bit complicated to explain), and is breathtaking in its simplicity and the power of that unmistakable voice.  Speaking of which, one of the reasons I enjoy Massive Attack’s Mezzanine album (not on this list, but might have been) is that the best tracks – including the peerless Teardrop – feature Liz Fraser.  Basically, seek out anything which she’s ever sung on, you won’t go wrong.

48. (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, Oasis, 1995

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To look at the last few albums, you’d be forgiven for assuming that I’d more or less lost interest in what was new and popular; I was happily exploring the byways of grown-up pop music, and assumed that those heady days of breathlessly scanning the new releases in my local records shops for the latest sensation were behind me.

And you’d be right up to a point.  I think that the mid-nineties marked the point where I was most likely to have moved on like generations before me, and to have devoted my time to exploring back catalogues and different genres rather than keeping my finger on the pulse of what was new and exciting.

I’ll admit there was a part of me which wondered if we hadn’t squeezed the last drops out of pop and rock music; if we weren’t already overdue another revolution and something different for the next generation to feast on while us old-timers tutted and shook our heads before going back to our treasured Deep Purple albums.

I still bought new albums, but not – as a rule – ones which were going to reach the top of the album charts, or get reviews in the mainstream media or make the national news.  Not until I went to watch England play Bulgaria at Wembley on a bitterly cold March evening in 1996, anyway.

For a few years, Tic Tac was the official mint of the England Football Team (apparently, only one gender played football in those days), and while it wasn’t the most successful sponsorship deal ever, what with England failing to qualify for the 1994 World Cup, it did mean that our sales department (of which I was, nominally at least, still a member) regularly took clients to see games.  The glamour games (England played Brazil during this period, for example) were over-subscribed, whereas the ones against the likes of Bulgaria tended to be passed along to the likes of me, to give me a break from compiling month-end statistics, or whatever else it was I was supposed to be doing in those days.

I’d like to tell you it was a tremendous game with end-to-end action, but it wasn’t.  In front of a barely quarter-full Wembley, England plodded to a 1-0 win which none of the players looked like they could be bothered with.

Those of us looking on didn’t even have the chance to run about and keep warm, although those of us in the sponsor seats did at least get some reasonable food and drink beforehand.

I remember very little to nothing of the game, but I remember half time.

I was, of course, aware of Oasis.  And Blur, and the whole ‘Britpop wars’ thing which had surrounded their in-no-way-contrived simultaneous album and single releases.  By March of 1996, I doubt there were many people in that Wembley crowd who weren’t fully aware of the new Oasis album and the five singles which had been released from it already, but the whole thing had almost passed me by; I thought (probably correctly) that it was squarely aimed at younger people than me, and while I could hum along to ‘Wonderwall’ if pushed, I hadn’t really given Oasis much thought beyond a vague awareness that the Blur songs seemed more my kind of thing.

But at half time that evening, whoever was in charge of the music at Wembley played the new(ish) single Don’t Look Back in Anger.  And everyone sang along.

It was an astonishing thing, because half-time music at football matches generally doesn’t do much more than raise an occasional eyebrow.  The DJ will rotate through seven or eight recent chart hits, breaking them up with announcements and birthday wishes to people whose parents have written in, and there’s usually no acknowledgement from anyone of the music which is being played.

But here was this song – not announced, just put on and greeted with the loudest roar of the evening, then a full-throated, word-perfect singalong.  It was a moment etched in my memory, firstly for how unusual it was, but secondly because I suddenly heard an Oasis song in context – these were not songs to be pored over and listened to thoughtfully; these were raucous singalong anthems of a kind which seemed to have gone out of fashion the last time Slade got a single into the charts.

In context, it seemed, Oasis songs were magnificent, irresistible things which could get a crowd of cold, bored football fans on their feet and singing along.  Even ones like me who hadn’t paid much attention to them before, but suddenly understood what was going on.

The song got an encore as we trooped out of Wembley at the end of the evening, and got an equally lusty choral accompaniment from a crowd who had barely mustered polite applause to mark the end of the game.

At lunchtime the next day, I walked along to Strawberry Fields Records in Rickmansworth and bought myself a copy of the album.  I still don’t know if that made me an Oasis fan or not, and I have never quite shaken the feeling that this album wasn’t really intended for the enjoyment of someone as old as me, but I do know that for the first time since I was having my head turned and my brain scrambled by every new album which came out in 1978, I could see and hear the same thing happening to a new generation, and the really interesting thing was that I didn’t feel excluded from it, because –

Well, let’s listen and find out why, shall we?

If you come to the album having heard Wonderwall, then the opening is naggingly familiar, and you reach over and turn it up just in time for the actual start of Hello to leap out at you with a defiant statement of intent – this is going to be the kind of album where you don’t really get to take a breath, and will find yourself singing along long before you’ve worked out what the words are.  It thunders along, reminding you of several 1970s things before explicitly referencing Gary Glitter and causing you to remember where you heard this before.

Not to belabour the point, but Roll With It also drinks deeply from the well of mid-1970s pop music.  I remember remarking at the time of the battle with Blur’s Country House (it really happened, and really was reported on the evening news) that this was basically a Status Quo song, albeit with the kind of attitude which Quo never mustered – Liam Gallagher wasn’t, and still isn’t, the most technically accomplished of singers but he could deliver a song in a way which brooked no argument.

Wonderwall is timeless and glorious; there’s a brief sense that things might be calming down a touch before the voice, all barely controlled plosives and urgency, howls its defiant joy at the sheer fact that this song exists.  It’s not possible to just hear a song like Wonderwall; you experience it, and if you’re not singing along by the end, there’s something seriously wrong.  No amount of ham-fisted cover versions can dilute its power, and when it is covered sensitively – I remember an episode of a TV show where a young cast member plays it at the funeral of a classmate – it has a quiet, devastating power.  They may never have written a better song, but very few people have.

As if that wasn’t enough, it collapses straight into Don’t Look Back in Anger, which makes the late-period Beatles influences explicit, and out-anthems its predecessor. I’ve just explained that no Oasis song tops Wonderwall, but this comes as close as it’s possible to do, and while it doesn’t carry the emotional heft, it makes up for that in the way it just keeps building the chorus to the point where it sounds wrong not to have tens of thousands of people singing along. I don’t know if Noel deliberately set out to write an anthem, but I heard it sung like one, and that moment has stayed with me for 26 years now and counting.

Inevitably, Hey Now! doesn’t reach the heights of what has gone before it.  It’s not the song’s fault; it’s full of singalong moments, and the band sound as if they’re having a fantastic time, but while the previous two songs leave you wanting more, this one outstays its welcome and even drags a little by the end.  They can’t all be indelible classics, you know.

The first of the untitled instrumentals (I think they only acquired the Swamp Song title later) fades in, intrigues you with it’s apparent disconnect from what else is going on (I can’t be the only one to hear Canned Heat in there, can I?) and fades out again in favour of the eye-opening riff at the beginning of Some Might Say, which is a straightforward rock song, but delivered with the whole Oasis arsenal, leaving you with the sense that you’ve heard something much more than the sum of its parts.

It’s perhaps the apposite point to observe that this is one of the first albums to obviously employ the ‘everything louder than everything else’ method of mixing and mastering, which came to be known as the ‘loudness wars’.  Many albums suffer from this compression which was designed to cut through background noise, but this one – I think – probably benefits from it.  Strip songs like Some Might Say back, and they would definitely lose something, although listening to it now on noise-cancelling headphones makes the deficiencies obvious.

Cast No Shadow does have some space to breathe, and reminds you that in spite of Noel Gallagher’s reputation for writing lyrics which are all surface, there are plenty of songs like this which actually have more to say than first appears.  The arrangement stands out and lends it an almost laid-back air which allows you to poke around in the various strands – I’m noticing for the first time in a while just how expressive Noel’s bass playing is.  It’s somewhat underrated, is Cast No Shadow.

I’ve mentioned before how I was trying to teach myself any number of songs on guitar around this time, and when I came to try She’s Electric, I remember thinking it wasn’t one I’d particularly noticed.  Then I tried to play along, and became unreasonably obsessed with it.  It’s not particularly tricky or clever, and it’s not one of the great lyrics, but there’s something about the way it takes a simple melody and pulls at it until it reveals something bigger than itself inside – the middle eight is simple, understated but irresistible, full of the joys of being young in the way so few songs manage without sounding deliberate and arch.  It’s the sound of a band who heard all the early Beatles albums, and thought they wanted to sound like that – the same energy and enthusiasm for what they do.

Morning Glory, on the other hand, is full of all the other stuff; everything which came after the first flush of enthusiasm wore off.  Doom-laden and swampy in its mix, and pretty nihilistic in its lyric, it takes the energy of the whole album and shows you it through the filter of all the substances needed to make it sound as fresh and optimistic as it does.  It’s yet another anthem, but a cynical and harsh one.  I’m still singing along, though.

There’s another quick burst of the swamp, although this one with more sound effects, and much less melody, before Champagne Supernova cuts through it and brings us back to earth with the only possible way this album could end.  It’s a ballad, although a fairly fast-paced one; it’s calmer than what’s come before it, but not much calmer, and if we’re going out, we’re going out singing and playing air gutar while pretending that the words mean something.

It’s not a particularly complex or clever song, but the way it’s played and arranged, with just the faintest hint of Hey Jude in the background make it timeless and one of those closing tracks which just make you want to go back to the beginning and start again.

(What’s The Story) Morning Glory? is one of those albums which brook no argument; it’s rightly considered a classic, and genuinely has no weak moments.  It turned my head in a way it hadn’t been turned for many years, and it did so by taking all the things I knew and loved about rock music and mixing them up in a way I genuinely hadn’t heard before.  It’s not groundbreaking; it’s not a new kind of music; it’s not even especially challenging or outrageous.  But it is truly spectacular, and listening to it now with nearly 60 years behind me, it still does the same thing to me as it did the first time I heard it; the thing which great albums do – it made me stop, pay attention, and join in – whether by singing along or air-drumming those fills, or wishing I could remember the chord sequence so I could play along.

There’s been a lot of hype and noise around Oasis; there always was.  But it’s the music which matters.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Definitely Maybe is a spectacular debut; I still prefer this one, but it’s close.  The full Oasis sound isn’t quite there on the earlier album, but maybe the real Oasis sound is.  The others don’t match up to this, but Be Here Now isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be, and the later albums all have something to recommend them.  They never managed another full album of unskippable tracks, though.

Compilations to consider?

First up, get hold of a copy of The Masterplan. It’s a compilation of B-sides, but it dwarfs some of the later albums; it’s the only place to hear songs like Acquiesce, Half the World Away, Whatever, and The Masterplan.  Then there’s Stop the Clocks, which is as comprehensive a retrospective as you could want.

Live albums?

If you want a live show from around this time, the recently released Knebworth 1996 will be right up your street.  Otherwise, Familiar to Millions should do the trick.

Anything else?

Both Liam and Noel continue to have successful solo careers, although it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that they need each other to really reach the heights their early career scaled – not that a reunion seems on the cards any time soon.  The lengthy documentary film Supersonic looks at this early period in some depth, and is worth a look. And I’m going to say it – Oasis music never sounded as good as Half the World Away as the theme song to the brilliant sitcom The Royle Family – if you really want to understand why this music works the way it does, you should pop in and spend time with Jim, Barbara and their family…

47. To The Moon, Capercaillie, 1995

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The final track was only on the ‘Special Edition’ re-release

By 1995, we had been living in a foreign country for five years.

I’m aware that’s a contentious statement, and I’m not sure even I fully believe it, but I’ve been thinking about it as I try to contextualise this album (and a couple of others I bought around this time), and it’s what I feel now.

We moved to England in 1990.  At first, there were some differences which we noticed, but the majority of things we encountered in daily life didn’t change.  Sure, the water out of the taps tasted funny, and trying to buy a ‘fish supper’ in the local ‘chippy’ would get you funny looks, but we’d been living in the UK our entire lives, and it wasn’t especially clear to me that someone moving from Yorkshire or Cornwall to the Home Counties wouldn’t feel the same sense of dislocation.

But over time, the differences accumulated.  Not in obvious ways, but definitely subconsciously.  I would regularly meet people who not only had never been to Scotland, but had only a vague idea of where it was and whether life there was in any way comparable to life in the south.  The regular jokes about whether we had electricity up there were – of course – jokes, but there’s a reason these jokes appear in the first place.  I missed certain things – sport was probably the most obvious – and as I became more and more immersed in a world where Scottish accents were rare, and references to Scotland on news and current affairs programmes were pretty much non-existent, I began, I think, to feel increasingly Scottish.

When I was an awkward idealist as a teenager, I would cheerfully declare myself a ‘citizen of the world’.  I don’t know where I first heard that, but I latched on to it as a way of distancing myself from narrow jingoism and nationalist sentiment.  The devolution referendum in 1979 was my first opportunity to inspect my own feelings about Scotland, and I remember being quite firmly in the ‘no’ camp, although I didn’t have a vote, being only 16.

But ask me in 1995, and I’m not sure my answer would have been the same.  Living in England was great – I love England, my children were born there, and I have many English friends and memories of the place.  But I gradually realised that it actually was a different country to the one I was brought up in, and that it was OK to miss things about Scotland which I hadn’t really thought about before.

We would, of course, regularly go back to visit family, and I would have the occasional work trip (I’m coming to another one of those), and each time we went, I’d notice something else I’m not entirely sure was there before.

There seemed to be more Scottish flags flying, more national team shirts around, even more tartan in places.  I don’t think we were going to tourist areas; it just seemed that things had changed.  Things I used to take for granted, like the Scottish country dance music on the radio on Saturday teatime, stood out to me now – I wouldn’t say I’d missed Robbie Shepherd on the radio, but on hearing him again, I found myself reflecting that there was a whole part of my childhood missing from my English life.

I don’t know if being away from Scotland encouraged me to think more about Scottish music and culture, but I started to actively investigate music from my homeland, and to identify some distinct differences – Deacon Blue might just have been another 1990s pop band, but they sang about things I recognised; things which didn’t feature in my new life.  I was, somewhat belatedly, introduced to Runrig and heard things I didn’t know I’d been missing – people singing with a distinct Scottish accent, for example.

And this album came in to my life because of an old friendship and a trip to Scotland at a time when I was thinking more and more about my Scottishness, and what it meant to me now.

Spoiler alert – I am  a citizen of an entirely different country now, and I still haven’t figured any of that out yet, so there’s not going to be an answer.

At some point in late 1995, I was on a work trip to Scotland, which I extended into a weekend, so I could go up to Aberdeen and see my family.  There was  – I think – a sales meeting on the Thursday in Edinburgh, and I needed something to do on the Friday before driving north.  I had one of my colleagues with me (or I met her at Edinburgh airport on the Friday morning, which seems more likely) and we spent the day surveying the distribution of Nutella tubs in the corner shops of Edinburgh and beyond.

I now have to explain the Nutella tub.  At the time, Nutella was sold in glass jars – the smaller one could be reused as a drinking glass once empty – and in multipacks of what we generally referred to as ‘tubs’; little portion-pack sized plastic containers with a peelable lid which you could buy for pennies at the counter of your local corner shop.  I genuinely hadn’t thought about them for years before sitting down to write this, and have no idea if they still exist in their original form.  I do know that the tub was reshaped to mimic the shape of the jar a few years after this.  I also know that if you refrigerated them, you could have a bite-sized Nutella flavoured chocolate snack, which I recommend.

Scotland was, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, a hotbed of Nutella tub sales, and our Nutella brand manager, Anna, who was English, but of Italian descent, wanted to see for herself.  I jumped at the chance to show off my favourite city, and we spent a fantastic day driving around Edinburgh interrogating owners of small neighbourhood shops about why the little tubs sold so well.

I knew why, of course, and it’s to do with ice cream.

Ice cream in Scotland was, and is, heavily influenced by the Italian diaspora.  There are many variations on the stories of Italians settling in Scotland from the late 19th century on, and no space here to tell all those tales, but the important point is that not only did every Scottish town have its Luigis, Macari’s, Vicca’s, or Nardini’s, but it also had fleets of ice cream vans, selling all manner of confections alongside the gelati.

This is also not the place to get into the so-called ice cream wars; suffice it to say that ice cream is an important subject in Scotland, and if you’re of Italian descent and you sell ice cream, you also sell that staple of the Italian breakfast table, Nutella.

The little tubs were sold in highest volume from the ice cream vans – the wholesalers who supplied the vans bought the tubs by the pallet load – but by a process of the way markets function, there was a demand for tubs which expanded into every newsagent and corner grocer in the land.

So there was no shortage of surveying to be done, and any number of shopkeepers happy to tell us that they just kept a box of them on the counter, and sold them mainly to those who were spending pocket money on them after school, but that a surprising number of people would opt for one of the little tubs instead of a more traditional chocolate bar.

I’m not sure what we learned, but we had fun.

As I was driving to Aberdeen at the end of the day, we had arranged for Anna’s flight south to depart from Aberdeen, and I’m sure we intended to spend more time in my home city than we did, but there’s so much of Edinburgh to show off, and I’m not sure we had time for more than one or two fleeting visits in Aberdeen.

On the drive north, we entertained ourselves by firstly, me making Anna try to pronounce all the Scottish names we saw on roadsigns (the one just outside Forfar which points to Bogindollo, Oathlaw and Jusinhaugh was a particular favourite), and listening to my new Capercaillie CD.

The first thing we did that morning was to go to the Gyle Centre (again; that’s twice it’s shown up in here, and they are quite possibly the only two times I ever went in there) so we could pick up coffee and a CD for the car.

The previous night, rather than staying in the hotel we’d been meeting in, I drove across the Forth Road Bridge and spent the evening with the same friend who had started me off on the Ferrero journey back in the Tears For Fears post.  During dinner, we listened to his new copy of To The Moon and all those strange feelings of Scottishness flowed through me.  Living in England, I doubt I’d even have heard it, but hearing it there, in good company, and thinking about how different my English life was turning out to be, compelled me to take home a slice of Scotland.

And before taking it home, to subject my Italian / English colleague to it.

To The Moon is sung in a mix of Scottish-accented English (not Scots; let’s not go down that road just yet) and Scottish Gaelic.  The English part is, of course, comprehensible to an Aberdonian (I’m not sure there are many, or indeed any, pop songs sung in Doric); the Gaelic much less so.  Had I stayed in Scotland, might I have followed my friend Andrew’s example, and learned Gaelic?  I’d like to think so, but my experience of trying to learn Italian, which was of daily use to me for 16 years, suggests I might not have got very far.

All of which is to say that for a number of the songs on here, I’ve literally no idea what’s being sung, but I can react to the sounds.

The opening title track, for example, sets the mood perfectly – it’s all smooth bass and sparse instrumentation, supporting a breathy voice singing about who knows what before it eventually explodes into live about halfway through, opening the door to the rest of the album.

Capercaillie are not a traditional drum-bass-guitar kind of band.  Instrumentation tends to revolve around violins (strictly, fiddles), flutes and other traditional woodwind instruments, with piano or accordion supplementing the more rock-oriented rhythm section.  It gives the music a highly distinctive, and to these ears, particularly Scottish, sound.  Of course, people have asked me about the ‘Irish music’ I’m listening to, but the distinction is clear to me.

For instance, the fiddle line in the strangely upbeat ‘Claire in Heaven’ is unmistakeably descended from the same ancestry as the ones I used to hear on Robbie Shepherd’s Take The Floor programme on a Saturday night.  The song itself is one of those contradictory ones; ostensibly sung from the perspective of an infant who died at only three days old, it’s curiously joyful and easy to sing along with.  I always like that in a band; the ability to mask the message of a song and make you work for it.

Nil Si nGra, on the other hand, is clearly mournful.  I put the lyrics through Google Translate, which tells me that it is a song of regret and sorrow.  It also tells me that the text was detected as “Irish”, which is annoying.  I am also reminded by looking at the original lyrics that Gaelic is perhaps only rivalled by Danish as languages which seem to have little or no relationship between the written and spoken form.

Meanwhile, Why Won’t You Touch Me? starts off in Spanish to completely throw the translate program.  It features some splendid Spanish-style nylon-stringed guitar alongside the fiddle.  It’s not clear to me why it keeps breaking into Spanish, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t; just because Capercaillie are rooted in the Scottish islands, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t also reach out to the rest of the world.  There’s also a very 1990s bass break in the middle, which I’d forgotten about, and which caused me to grin widely.

I don’t think I’m bringing those prejudices to this album; I’m not expecting a dozen songs about the Highland Clearances or anything, which is just as well – the lyrics of You, bar the Gaelic backing vocals, cover the same subject matter as a million other love songs.  It’s just that this one sounds Scottish in its execution and delivery.

La Paella Grande has me researching just what, exactly, is the Spanish connection.  It’s largely instrumental, and full of life and joy, but I’m not sure I understand the name.  Not that names have to carry deep meaning; as Robert Plant said about Big Log, “you have to call it something”, and there’s a definite Spanish feel to the beginning of this – the handclaps mixed with the fiddle actually give it a sound all its own.

I think The Crooked Mountain exemplifies the sound of this album.  It contains all the warm production and smooth sounds of its time; the bass and drums are solid and funky; the mood is that of a 1990s pop anthem, but the unusual instrumentation breathes a different kind of life into it.  It’s one of the least played songs on the album according to Spotify, but I can hear all the elements of a proper chart song – I suspect that says something about how things had moved on from the 1980s; the offbeat and quirky found it much harder to reach a wide audience than they had ten years before.

However, Ailein Duinn took the path of being a key song in an Oscar-nominated film, and very nearly propelled Scottish Gaelic into the UK charts, so what do I know.  Some of the music on To The Moon came out of the costume drama Rob Roy, starring that well-known Scotsman Liam Neeson, and this interpretation of a traditional lament was used as the theme tune, although it perhaps reflected the mournful tone of the story too well to reach a wider audience.

God’s Alibi is a political anti-war song which isn’t all that sure about religion, now you come to mention it.  The overall tone of the album might suggest that the subject matter is unexpected, but there was a war going on in Europe at the time, and bands which play traditional instruments and sing in Gaelic aren’t immune from the effects of that.  It’s a terrifically powerful statement which deserved a wider audience.

Fear-Allabain positively rocks along, although it’s only with the help of the translator that I understand that rocking along is the whole point – it being a ‘get up and get going’ kind of song, albeit one with a flute solo where others might have had a wailing guitar.

The Rob Roy Reels are instrumentals from the movie soundtrack, and are comfortably the most Scottish thing on here, hewing not only to the traditional sounds, but to the structure of Scottish music, with the shift from the gentle reel at the beginning to the wild abandon of the second part accompanied by much whooping from the dancers.  Well, I can hear it.

The Price of Fire feels like it could be from another film soundtrack, but I think I’m imagining that.  It’s a cool piano ballad, and allows me to rhapsodise about Karen Matheson’s extraordinary pure, clear voice.  I’m used to it singing these songs in this way, so it’s easy for me to overlook the fact that one of the most important things about the sound of this album is that the voice is peerless and is doing so much of the work so apparently effortlessly.

Amusingly, Spotify thinks that it’s called The Prince of Fire, which would be a completely different song, I think.

Another reel, billed as Eastern Reel, to ease us out of this most enjoyable album, wraps things up calmly and to send me on my way wanting more.  I don’t listen to it often, but when I do, I always find myself immersed in its soundscapes.  If you’ve never heard it, give your ears a treat.

The further I have moved away form Scotland, the more Scottish I have felt, I think.  The music of Capercaillie is a direct link to my roots in two ways; the sound and feel of it echoes music I often heard growing up, but perhaps more importantly, it reminds me of a specific time and place, and of starting to think more seriously about who I am and where I come from.  My children (who we’ll be meeting soon) are a mix of English, Irish, Scottish and Canadian, and I’m sure that while they have a link to Scotland, it’s nothing like as strong as mine.  Albums like this, however, might give them a clue.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

I’d like to give you a full rundown, but the truth is that the longer I was away from Scotland, the less likely I was to buy another Capercaillie album.  I know lots of bits and pieces of their music, but no other whole album.  I should rectify that.

Compilations to consider?

There’s a Best Of from 2012.  I’d start there; it’s what I’ll be doing.

Live albums?

Yes.  The other Capercaillie CD I owned was the Live In Concert one from 2002, and it’s terrific.  Highly recommended.

Anything else?

Well, this is – I think – now the fourth album in this list to feature Davy Spillane, so we should go and check him out, don’t you think?  Atlantic Bridge seems to be the place to go….

46. Stanley Road, Paul Weller, 1995

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Like everyone else, Spotify thinks that’s the cover of Stanley Road. It isn’t.

This project is partly – perhaps even mainly – about getting older and tracing that journey through music, but it occurs to me that I haven’t really thought about that process from the perspective of the musicians.

Even by 1995, it was still possible to think of rock music as a new phenomenon, something which young people created, and young people listened to.  I think that most other forms of music had matured to a degree, but the 1990s were the first period where it became clear that the first and second generation of rock musicians weren’t slipping quietly out of the limelight to make way for the next iteration; everyone was competing for the same space.

But were competing for an increasing number of ears.  It seems obvious to say now, but no-one was growing out of this music; if the musicians were growing older, so were the audience.  In 1995, I turned 33.  There are four albums on this list released in 1995, and I bought them all on or near their release date.  My father was 33 in 1964 – he wasn’t buying Beatles and Rolling Stones albums; he probably barely knew who they were.  From his generation to mine, something changed – partly the effect of the ‘album era’ I talked about back at the beginning; that easy availability of all the music of the last 40 years – and partly, I think, that music seemed to have hit on a formula which worked.

I’m not pretending that music stopped developing after the early seventies; of course not, there are an ever-evolving set of genres and styles, with more appearing every day, and I certainly wouldn’t argue with the contention that hip-hop and its fractally expanding offshoots was an entirely new kind of popular music, not beholden to much of what came before it (but gleefully ready to appropriate any parts of it which served the rhyme).  My point is that, instead of one style overtaking a previous one, and leaving the teenagers of the 1970s behind, everyone came along for the ride.

There’s an essay or two to be written on why that is, of course – just offhand, I can think of the change in formats; of the explosion of DIY creativity ignited by punk and carried forward by the New Wave and all that followed; of the expansion of rock journalism from weekly disposable inkies to proper glossy magazines; you can even throw in changes in the political and economic landscape and the sudden availability of easy consumer credit.

While I make notes for a forthcoming writing project which won’t get off the ground, let’s consider the case of Paul Weller.

Having used the sensibilities of the punk movement to give his band, The Jam, a way into the public eye, Weller’s songwriting and musical abilities kept them there for several years.  The Jam were staggeringly popular, but came to an end (at Weller’s insistence) when he was only 24.  In 1982, to have had a rock music career which lasted as long as it did was a significant achievement, and had all three of them faded into semi-obscurity afterward, no-one would have been overly surprised.

Weller, however, started an entirely different band, and made them successful, playing music which sounded  quite unlike The Jam, but exactly like the 1980s.  Even then, at the conclusion of a second career, Weller faced the question which few had encountered until then – what does a middle-aged rock musician do now?  Once past the supposed musical peak of 27, is there a career to be had continuing to make music?  Who’s going to be buying albums by people heading for their forties when there are a hundred new bands a month appearing, and appealing to an audience who want something which represents their lives and their concerns?

It turned out that the audience who loved The Jam in their teens and twenties were – unlike their parents’ generation – still buying music, and while (as we’ll see) they would be perfectly capable of finding much to enjoy in the younger bands, having someone of our own generation still making music which stands up alongside it was even more appealing.

In 1995, I was still waiting for the moment when I’d grow out of all this ‘pop music noise’, but the noise kept evolving along with me, and while I did think for a time that perhaps there wasn’t much more blood to be wrung from this particular stone, I’m still eagerly anticipating new albums by bands I only discovered recently, and looking forward to hearing something new.

I have some strong opinions on what passes for ‘pop music’ these days, but I did back in 1995 too, and that particular gripe clearly doesn’t hold any water with the millions of people who go out and buy it.  I prefer my music not to be shaped by algorithms, or moulded by focus groups, or written to a formula, but there’s plenty of other kinds of music still out there, so I’m not going to run out of things to listen to any time soon.

Back in 1995, I acquired a copy of Stanley Road on CD (and I think it might have been a birthday present), and loving it helped me lean back into those Jam albums I’d never quite fully absorbed back in those fast-paced days of change, and helped me find a way into the ‘Britpop’ (I was never a fan of that label, but you know what I mean by it) which was all around at the time.

I sometimes struggle to clearly identify with the 1990s; it doesn’t have a ‘feel’ for me the way the 1970s and 1980s did, and that may be a function of age, but the music is what anchors it for me, and right at the centre of it is this album, a considered, mature work by an artist still finding new things to say, despite having reached what his generation would once have considered pensionable age.

On the cover, designed by Peter Blake of Sgt. Pepper fame, Weller looks – no doubt intentionally – like John Lennon, and The Changingman starts with that Beatle-like guitar sound, straight out of Dear Prudence, although the vocal couldn’t be anyone else, and while the song never quite shakes off its influences, it manages to sound contemporary, perhaps partly due to the way it influenced (or shared influences with) the likes of Oasis, who mined the same seam musically.

I had forgotten how effective the sparse opening to Porcelain Gods is – perhaps I should say that despite it being one of my favourite albums at the time, I haven’t listened to it for maybe a decade or more – it’s actually a much better song than the opener in its willingness to explore the sound rather than just chug along in the same vein.  I’m not sure if I knew that the bass is played by Dr. Robert of the Blow Monkeys, but it’s fantastically fluid and gives the track a relaxed underpinning for its otherwise menacing air.

Another musical doctor next – Dr. John’s swampy New Orleans blues retitled for some reason to I Walk on Gilded Splinters (the original is Guilded).  I’m not sure I’m convinced that Paul from Woking carries off the voodoo menace, but I’m singing along anyway; it’s an irresistible melody however presented.  Apparently – did I know this at the time? – Noel Gallagher is in the mix somewhere, and I do still love the fake ‘scratched vinyl’ outro.

You do Something to Me is a straightforward love song, perhaps the best known song from this album, and one which perhaps best illustrates the way that the passage of time produces music which wouldn’t have worked as a Jam or Style Council song – it’s a mature song with a slightly world-weary feel to it which would sound strange coming from a younger Paul Weller.

Woodcutter’s Son demonstrates that the passage of time hasn’t dulled the righteous anger of the man who was a big part of Red Wedge.  It‘s perhaps not as clearly focused on a specific target, but behind its cheerful clapping and the unmistakeable keyboard work of Steve Winwood, there’s a real air of menace and anger at the state of the world.

As soon as I hear the piano at the start of Time Passes…, I realise that my thesis for this post was perhaps subliminally inspired by this, my favourite track on it.  There’s nothing complicated about it, a quiet blues-based lament, but I suspect it came into my life at the first time I really thought about the inexorable progress of time.  Turning thirty and being in possession of something approximating a career, together with the fact that I was now listening to music like this and thinking about the people who were making it getting older like I was – well, something struck a chord with me, and something made me approach this album from this perspective.

I still don’t know if the instrumental coda is meant to be attached to it, or is an introduction to the title track, or somewhere in between.

While it’s musically different – much more up-tempo and purposeful, Stanley Road addresses the same question – how to look back and look forward at the same time.  It is, of course, the theme of the whole set of songs, perfectly captured in a simple image of the street where Weller grew up.

Broken Stones shifts moods quite deliberately.  There has, so far, been little sign of the soul influences which reach all the way back to the days of The Jam, but they’re all here – surrounded by understated piano, drifting accordion and that glorious bass, Weller’s voice makes much more sense in this context – he’s a soul singer; perhaps even a gospel singer, trying to explain his philosophy while adrift in the sounds of the seventies.

Talking of which, Out of the Sinking feels like a lost song from the early seventies – it’s got that same swagger that the Small Faces did.  If this album is, as I seem to be suggesting, a recap of everything which has gone before and is trying to put all of that into a 1990s context, it is drawing from impeccable sources.

Back to the Beatles for the piano intro to Pink on White Walls; a simple, straightforward slice of a pop song which swings joyfully by in little more than a couple of minutes, which is not something you can say about  Whirlpool’s End, which takes the premise of an angry Jam song and stretches it over seven minutes of slow boiling anger.  I’ll be honest; I think the song is done at the halfway point, and I’m unconvinced that stretching it out past that adds much at all, despite some smart guitar and drum work – the drumming on this whole album is impressive – I’m known for being an apologist for overly long songs, but I’m prepared to call out the odd one which seems to burble away to no great effect.

Wings of Speed is much more like it, concluding the album with a burst of gospel-tinged (OK, gospel-soaked) piano balladry.  It’s a very effective way to end an album, timeless in its appeal, and perhaps symbolising the way this whole album manages to be at once free from any particular time period, and firmly fixed in the 1990s.

I’m not sure my words convey how much I have enjoyed renewing my acquaintance with Stanley Road. While I wouldn’t claim to be word-perfect on the lyrics the way I was with some of my earlier favourites, I was singing along happily to much of it, and while it’s not a perfect album by any means, it does illustrate neatly the way I was feeling about music, and life in general in the middle of the 1990s.  I’ll not leave it so long next time.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

The only other one I know well is Wild Wood, which I also heartily recommend.  As with a few others, I played this one to death, but didn’t move on to any later ones – I should probably try to figure out why that is.

Compilations to consider?

There’s a greatest hits album called Modern Classics from around this time, and a much later one called More Modern Classics (naturally); maybe I should investigate those…

Live albums?

Live at the Royal Albert Hall contains some of these songs, but Catch-Flame! from 2005 also includes some songs from earlier in his career, which may appeal.

Anything else?

Well, there’s The Jam and The Style Council.  That should keep you busy for a while…

45. Concert Program, Penguin Café Orchestra, 1996

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To trace my history with this curious and engaging band, we’ll have to indulge in a little time travel, and head all the way back to Inverness.  If you’ve been following the story closely, you’ll remember that I moved to Inverness in early 1986, and – inevitably – one of the first things I did on finding myself a more or less permanent place to live was to join the library.

I have a clear memory of picking up the first Penguin Café Orchestra album in the library there, but I am drawing a complete blank on where the library actually was.  Unimaginably to the 1986 version of myself, I can just go and look it up now.  I’d remembered it being near the railway station, which it is, but what I was actually remembering was that it was, and still is, tucked in behind the bus station in the centre of Inverness.

It’s like scratching an itch, figuring that out, I can tell you.

Anyway, in spite of being the main public library in one of Scotland’s cities, at that time the record collection available for loan wasn’t quite as broad as I had been used to in Aberdeen, so after borrowing a couple of things I’d been meaning to get round to, I found myself perusing the cover of a frankly mysterious-looking album which I think had also been in the rack in Aberdeen, but which I’d never felt the need to investigate.

What did I know about Simon Jeffes and his oddly-named Orchestra?  Precisely nothing at this point, I think.  I may have come across the name somewhere in the murkier recesses of the review section of Sounds at some point, but the great thing about having a library card was that I could take a risk on something I knew nothing about and hand it back a week later whether I got on with it or not.

I took home my borrowed copy of the ten-year-old Music from the Penguin Café and probably listened to it straight away.  I was living on my own in Inverness those first few months; I didn’t know anyone in town, and my weekends were fairly quiet and uneventful – I didn’t even, to my considerable surprise looking back, go to see a Highland League game, of which there was pretty much always one going on in town on a Saturday.  I spent my time listening to music, reading books, wandering around on Culloden Moor – right along the road from where I was living – and presumably watching television, although I don’t remember that being a particularly large part of my life.

I do know I had a TV, though, as I watched a large chunk of the 1986 World Cup on it that summer.

So, if I can presume to reconstruct my Saturday afternoon, it likely was spent listening to, trying to figure out, and then deciding to tape, Penguin Café music.  That first album has some obvious highlights – the opening track, Penguin Café Single, and the irresistibly catchy Giles Farnaby’s Dream, for example, and some other things which seemed inscrutable and minimalist, but worthy of further study.  The thing was – and this was an important consideration – what could I put on the other side of the C90 tape?  Flipping from this weird, string-driven, classical inflected folk music to pretty much anything else would have jarred.  What I needed was a second PCO album to pair it with.

Fortunately, Inverness Public Library also had a copy of Broadcasting From Home, and the following weekend, I swapped one for the other, filled up the tape and then let this quietly seductive, slightly subversive music infiltrate my life.

The band remained unknowable, beyond the sparse details on the album sleeves, and as I had had access to those for a week each, any details I might have gleaned from them faded quickly.  What I was left with was a tape of music, mostly unlike anything else I had in my collection, but which I kept coming back to, particularly on long, late-night trips (sales meetings which ended at 10pm in Perth when I lived in Inverness; I don’t know how we put up with it, to be honest).  I can’t say I carefully studied this music which always seemed to uplift and cheer me, but it got under my skin.

Once we were living in Perth and embarking on a CD collection, I added to our minimalist collection one day with the live album When in Rome… which quickly became a firm favourite.  This music, which had seemed to me perhaps a little cold and sterile in its studio renditions, came alive in a concert setting.  For the first time I was aware that PCO music was not only mentally stimulating, but fun.  I resolved to see them live.

One of the benefits of living in Perth and working in Glasgow for that year was that it allowed me to feel reconnected to the cultural world.  During that short time, we (sometimes just me, sometimes both of us) found time and the money to start going to things again – Glenda Jackson in Mother Courage at the Citizen’s Theatre is a particularly fond memory – and while Glasgow’s arts festival, Mayfest, perhaps didn’t rival the more famous summer one next door, it did cram a lot of intriguing things into a few weeks in spring. 

So in May 1990, I saw Simon Jeffes and his Orchestra at the City Halls in Glasgow.  It was a venue I had previously been unaware of, and was perfectly suited to the PCO.  The audience was as eclectic as the music – a whole class of music students here, a bunch of ageing hippies there, me still in my suit I wore to work – and the evening passed in a blur of joyful music-making.  The live album hadn’t revealed the full effect of a performance – it cut out all the dry wit of Jeffes’ between-numbers chat, for instance, and seeing these remarkable musicians effortlessly switch between instruments as needed – often mid-song – gave the whole thing an extra dimension missing from the recorded version.

I was apparently now the kind of person who went to concerts in a suit and tie, who sat down during the whole thing, and nodded thoughtfully along to pieces I hadn’t heard before, and didn’t even register that there was no-one up front, singing.

The music of the Penguin Café Orchestra came with us to Tring; expanded our collection on the release of new albums (I bought Union Café pretty much on the day of release), and I did finally figure out how to know something more about them.

In the early 1990s, the internet (strictly speaking the World Wide Web part of the internet, but let’s not go there) started to permeate first my work life (I vividly remember my colleague Gianluca and I being the first people at Ferrero to get online, thanks to a cheap modem and one of those “free internet” disks which quickly became drinks coasters in IT departments around the world), and then my home life.  The move from it being a curiosity to something we could use for work, to a way of finding things out at home – things like guitar tablature, and so on – to part of daily life seemed to happen at bewildering pace.  One minute there was this slightly scary thing called Usenet with a bewildering array of bulletin boards, the next I was cheerfully saying “hang on; I’ll just look that up” – probably on proto-search engine Dogpile, my personal favourite.

One of the things I suddenly realised I could look up was the Penguin Café Orchestra.  There was a domain – zopf.com, and upon it a suitably inscrutable early website, which began “I am the proprietor of the Penguin Café.  I am asked to say something to explain”.

Naturally, not much of what followed was an explanation, but it was from the zopf.com website that I first heard the story of how the Orchestra had come into being thanks to a bout of food poisoning, and sparse details of the personnel on the albums.  The air of mystery only cemented my love for the music – it did seem to exist slightly outside the usual constraints of publicity machines and press releases.  It seemed to say: here’s our music; see what you think.

Simon Jeffes died in the autumn of 1997, which I discovered from the obituary pages of my newspaper of choice at the time, The Independent.  The deaths of people in the public eye rarely affect me, but the idea that there would be no new PCO music was profoundly shocking to me; I imagined that I’d always have something new and strangely compelling to look forward to – this was a band unlikely to suffer from the usual travails of ageing rock stars, and would surely continue sporadically releasing slightly off-kilter chamber music well into their old age.

Alas, the PCO discography is complete, and short, although it’s not all bad news, as I’ll explain below.

Concert Program is, therefore, the final statement from a group of musicians who played in the space between classical minimalism and joyful folk music; recorded ‘as live’ but without an audience (or with a staggeringly well-behaved one who didn’t so much as cough throughout), it serves as an introduction, primer, and record of the live performance of a unique musical entity.

It is also over two hours long, and were I to attempt a track-by-track review, I think I’d suck all the joy out of it by trying to describe how the piano enters here, underscoring the cello part, while playing an odd metre which seems to give the track a limp.  So, for once, I won’t be doing that.  Instead, I’m going to try to convince you to go out and buy a copy of this album, unheard, by explaining some of the ways it just sooths and uplifts, probably without trying to.

Let’s start with Air a Danser, the opening track.  Is it actually an air?  Can you dance to it?  Well, as far back as Bach it seems to have been agreed that an air doesn’t actually need words, or someone to sing them, and as for dancing; I defy you not to.  It starts on a nylon string guitar, and seems about to break into flamenco, but when it does decide to let its hair down, it’s a piano and some unison strings which propel it along.  Jaunty, I think, is the word I’m looking for.

The second track is a version of Cage Dead, which the sleeve notes of Union Café tell us was both a reaction to the passing of John Cage (who must bear some responsibility for the way this music sounds) and a technical exercise in trying to write music based on the letters of the title.  The result is the very definition of ‘off-kilter’ and takes a while to process before its delights are revealed.  Once you hear it, though; once you get what’s going on, it sounds like the most glorious melody, even though whistling it remains a challenge, and draws funny looks form passers-by.

Let’s skip ahead to Perpetuum Mobile.  I don’t often delve too deeply into musical theory, being strictly an amateur enthusiast when it comes to time signatures, rhythm, metre and so on, but rarely can a piece of music have been so aptly named as this, as it continually seems to overshoot the end of the bar, giving it an irresistible forward momentum as no phrase ever quite seems to finish, kicking into the next one.  13/8, I think I read somewhere, but trying to count the beats seems futile as I’m always distracted by the parping trombone.

I skipped over Numbers 1-4, which pops up in strange places – I seem to keep hearing it as incidental music in podcasts, for example.

I once tried to write a short story based on how Nothing Really Blue made me feel.  I gave up when it reached 100,000 words and hadn’t gone anywhere.  It’s – the music, I mean, not the unfinished story – simultaneously melancholic and uplifting, with the minimalist backing underpinning a simple, elegiac piano melody which has enough tiny flourishes to make you think of someone breaking out of a long-term depression.  I have likely maligned this beautiful piece of music, but that’s what it said to me.

One of the great things about being a fan of the PCO is that every now and then a piece of their music appears when you were busy doing something else and makes you yelp for joy.  Telephone and Rubber Band did this to me the first (and perhaps only) time I saw Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio.  Famously created from the kind of technological glitch which could only happen with analogue systems, it’s based around a recording of a mix of a ring tone and an engaged signal which happened to Simon Jeffes one day when he happened to have a tape recorder close at hand. Oh, and a rubber band, which he used to emphasise the accidental rhythm of the electronic bleeps. That original, second-generation analogue recording from a telephone handset now has a life of its own, featuring in hit records, advertising campaigns, and – yes – podcast soundtracks.  It’s a handy metaphor for crossed wires and technological issues, but it also just sounds like a telephone having a cheery singalong.

Live, the sounds were played on a looped reel-to-reel tape, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that it was the original recording.

Beanfields is what happens when the Penguins let themselves off the leash and see what happens – there was always something about beans in the titles of their songs which provokes everyone to get up and start leaping around.  This far in to the concert, it serves as a joyful release of all the pent-up fun we’ve been having, and a palate-cleanser for the second half, which gets underway with the solemn, thoughtful and clam Vega, a piano piece given life by the string arrangement, and which wouldn’t sound out of place as the second movement of a piano concerto.

Music for a Found Harmonium is another of those PCO pieces which has a life of its own, having been co-opted by generations of Irish musicians as a modern reel, and remixed by The Orb in the 90s as Pandaharmonium.  Both those treatments are as joyful as the original, but perhaps miss the point of the original which was written and played on – well, obviously – a found harmonium.  The full story was on the old website.

Lifeboat really is played at a (Lover’s Rock) rhythm and tempo – well, most of it is; the cello seems to be serenely floating above it all, perhaps on the lifeboat…. It’s still one of my favourites of all of these for its gleeful loping beat and its effortless melody, and marks the point at which the concert begins to wind up to what was presumably an encore following the transition into the calm piano and strings of Steady State, which – I like to think ­ ended the main program, leaving us stamping and shouting for more.

Yes, I know.  It does sometimes sound like background music, but it really isn’t.  Immersed in it, carried along by its spirit, and seeing it performed by a host of musicians having a lot of fun, you, too, would be on your feet at the end.

Like all good rock concerts, the encore is mainly reserved for the fan favourites we haven’t heard yet.  Scherzo and Trio bounces in, allowing the brass to take centre stage, and those of the audience who listen to BBC Radio 4 (and let’s face it, that’s most of them) to suddenly exclaim “Oh, that’s the Round Britain Quiz music!

Which they all knew, anyway, but it still makes me smile every time, and I don’t really hear RBQ any more.

Then I’m catapulted back to that draughty single-bedroom cottage on Culloden Moor.  The first time I heard Glies Farnaby’s Dream, I knew that, whatever else was on this album, this was my kind of music.  It’s a kind of wheezy interpretation of an original piece from the early 17th century by a fairly obscure English composer of music for the virginal, that delicate precursor to the modern piano.

It starts almost in period costume, but almost immediately throws that off with a gleeful burst of cuatro and a yelp of joy. There are trombones and whistles going on all over the place – at times, it seems to be somewhere in the jungles of South America; at others its firmly in the English countryside which Farnaby would have recognised, but at no time does it let up in its relentless pursuit of a good time.  By this point, the audience are up and dancing, and with good reason.

This version of Giles Farnaby wanders off into new, possibly improvised areas midway, and then brings us back to earth by putting its costume back on and ending back where we began in the early 1600s, a little dishevelled and out of breath, but grinning from ear to ear.

There’s a short pause for breath at the beginning of Salty Bean Fumble, but we’re very quickly back to full ‘dancing around like crazy people’ status.  This version of the piece is superior to the studio version, and captures the energy and life I remember from the live versions I saw.  It ends too soon, of course, but that’s mainly because I could happily bounce around listening to it for another 30 or 40 minutes..

Then, like all responsible orchestras do, we’re sent out into the chill night air with a short piece of calming music – Red Shorts performs its function admirably, but I’d have happily just have had more leaping around.

I hadn’t listened to Concert Program for some time before doing this post, but if it’s possible to be word-perfect on an album with no words, that’s what I was.  Listening to it has brought the same feelings of joy and comfort I always had listening to any Penguin Café music.  Almost as much as anything on this list, and more than most, this music has been the soundtrack to my life.

It’s nothing like anything else on here, but it’s like all of it – part of me in ways I can’t really explain.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

The obligatory ‘all of them’ really does apply here; they’re all terrific, but if I have to pick one Broadcasting From Home may be the best way in.  But Union Café is probably the best of them.  Ah, listen to it all; thank me later.

Compilations to consider?

Putting this one aside, I’d recommend Preludes, Airs and Yodels, as comprehensive a summary as you could wish for.  It also features a couple of those Found Harmonium versions I referred to earlier.

Live albums?

Aside from this one, there’s the aforementioned When In Rome…, which is almost as good as this, and lived in my car for years.

Anything else?

A couple of things.  The spirit of the Café lives on in Simon’s son Arthur, whose Penguin Café no longer has an Orchestra, but very much reflects his father’s way of doing things. There’s also the ballet – Still Life at the Penguin Café is a delight, and may still be available somewhere; I had my old VHS copy digitised some years ago, and while the picture quality isn’t great, the music still shines through.