LADY SOVEREIGN: Those Were The Days

The intro to this song demonstrates exactly why Lady Sovereign has what Lily Allen could never have; an opening “aah” which sounds like a weary, painful groan followed by an extremely nervous, semi-giggled spoken intro: “Uh, OK, this is, um, my cheesy intro, and this is my…(cue sudden burst of laughter)…YES! OK, um, this is a song all about how I grew up, so, um, yeah, like..” You can picture her standing before her parents or at the end-of-term school concert. But then she fearlessly VAMPS into a huge “YEAH YEAH!” as the track swings into action; an old-school groove decorated with hazy summer guitar, high swirling string synths and scratching. It sounds wonderfully natural and instinctive as she describes days which are too soon for me to think of as a different era – the mid-late nineties? – but for her clearly represent a spent childhood; halcyon times of Safeway trolley downhill racing, ten ice pops which melt in their pockets, water fights, swapping jungle tunes on cassette, and McDonald’s bumbags (“That was back then,” she warns, “so boy don’t mock it”).

But as the track progresses, although the music becomes no less cheerful, the memories become steadily darker; being chased by the local pit bull or the “odd character that every borough had,” stabbings, and it becomes clear that those days weren’t quite so rosy. Finally she looks at the present day, the Coffers community centre having been turned into an Asda, and concludes, grimly, “the Chalkhill Estate don’t exist no more – it’s just talk.” Real in a sense absent from subsequent copyists, her “Those Were The Days” makes this writer doubly detest Universal Music for sitting on her album for so long, allowing Allen to streak through with her packaged Asda variant. Funny, scary and moving, sometimes all at once; let’s hope she gets to make a second album.

PINK FLOYD: Apples And Oranges

The Floyd would probably prefer it if I didn’t talk about “Apples And Oranges.” In the first edition of the Guinness Book Of Top 40 Charts “Another Brick In The Wall Part II” is described as their first UK single release since “See Emily Play,” and most of their fans accept this to be the case. But there was one further single, towards the end of 1967, as Syd was manoeuvring himself towards the exit door. “Apples And Oranges” has become the great unmentionable item in the otherwise seamless Floyd discography; deemed by most involved parties at the time to be an irredeemable mess, neither the band nor EMI went out of their way to promote it, relatively few copies were pressed, it received virtually no radio play, did not trouble the Top 50 and was quickly deleted in a presumed attempt to save face. Although its B-side “Paintbox” resurfaced on Relics, the A-side didn’t, and since then it has only been made available on a very few occasions, as part of a bonus CD included with an extravagantly priced retrospective boxed set, as one of six tracks on a blink-and-you-missed-it stand alone CD EP, and most recently as part of the bonus third disc of the deluxe 40th anniversary edition of Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, which has now (in London at any rate) sold out its limited run.

Rather than an embarrassment to be swept speedily under the Saucerful Of Secrets carpet, it is perhaps a final tribute to Syd and to “Apples And Oranges” that the track now sounds utterly contemporary. To make a completely unoriginal comparison, it sounds like late nineties Blur; a vaudeville swagger undermined and detoured by wayward guitar and unexpected interludes. Today it doesn’t sound at all unusual – Syd’s eager chasing of the girl around town (“Feeling good at the top/Shopping in sharp shoes/Walking in the sunshine town feeling very cool”) actually summing up the dying days of King’s Road psychedelia with great acuity, while his guitar roars and snaps on the sidelines before the band land graciously on the harmonies of the song’s title as chorus, followed by an extended pregnant quaver of uncertain guitar drones before abruptly veering back into the second verse as Syd tries to get closer to her – “I catch her by the eye then I stop and have to think/What a funny thing to do ‘cos I’m feeling very pink.”

This then gives way to a gorgeous, semi-tortured sequence of proto-blissout with Syd’s “I love she, she loves me,” the group’s escalating triple “see you”s; bridged by the most ecstatic of collective swoons, Richard Wright’s electric piano introduces a wedding bells motif which Syd’s guitar picks up immediately, followed by Waters’ sliding bass, some more ruminative guitar chimes, and finally a hallucinatory antiphonal choir and church organ turning the Chelsea girl into a hymn. For the final stretch, Syd utters an emphatic, ecstatic “Thought you might like to KNOW!” before informing us that “I’m her lorry driver man,” still watching her, now perhaps a little more sinisterly (“She’s on the run/down by the riverside/Feeding ducks in the afternoon tide” – immediately answered by a group “quack, quack”) before the final chorus, which itself dissolves into a curious Cockney scat singing segment, some Goon-type nonsense syllables and a final high-pitched feedback signoff. On the Piper bonus disc, the tune appears in both mono and (for the first time) stereo mixes; at the end of the latter Syd assures the rest of the group, somewhat poignancy given his eventual fate, “I’ll explain it all to you sometime…one day.” He never did, but as with that other Hurricane Smith-produced masterpiece of late 1967 psych-pop, “Defecting Grey” by the Pretty Things, he seemed to approach “Apples And Oranges” with a brief strictly to have as much experimental fun as possible, and it deserves permanent rescue from the sub-carpet debris.

GARY NUMAN: Berserker

In a 1984 Christmas full of goodwill and self-congratulation, a prosperous season of feeding worlds like virgins, Gary Numan seemed to be about the most contrarian presence in that season’s Top 40. “Berserker” was arguably even more of an anti-rest of 1984 chart hit than the Council Collective’s “Soul Deep” (“Nothing here for me now,” muses Numan halfway through, “I can’t believe the noise”) and thus did not progress beyond #32. There is something very splendid and logical about the single appearing on what used to be the Pye label (by 1984 it had become PRT, with Numan appearing on his own “Numa” imprint) since it indicates a crash landing to the journey initiated by Space’s “Magic Fly” seven years previously. Where Howard Jones wanted to shake everyone’s hand, Numan passively indicated that anyone attempting to shake his hand risked electrocution.

“Berserker” as Viking or robot warrior? Once again, Numan dies every day and wakes up with a transplanted memory dependent on the presumed symbiosis of his fanbase (“My face, the picture’s changed/Do you remember me?”). But the single is especially hard in its impact; pitilessly squealing guitars, plutonium landfills of synths, atomic thunder of drums (“Now I’m fighting to breathe,” complains Numan, understandably). He has been waiting for someone, or something, for far too long, and is now prepared to “trade new dreams for old,” but there seems no question of love or salvation here; the stark brilliance of “Berserker” rests in Numan’s fantastic use of his backing singers (principally Tessa Niles, she who two years previously had warned Martin Fry that love had no guarantee) from the demonically angelic acappella intro of “I’ve been waiting for you” to the triple perspective Numan lends them on each of his three choruses (the anti-Glitter beat of “Do you wanna come, do you wanna come, do you wanna come with me NOW?”); on each occasion nascent hope crashes to the sodden earth of despair – the full arrangement in the first chorus, the “c-c-c-come-come-come” cut-ups in the second (a nod to Frankie) and a sudden, dry acappella “with me” in the third, while Numan mumbles his own doom, lapsing over beats and finally fading into incoherent oblivion, the girls’ ghostly “I’ve been waiting too long” chorale meanwhile predicting another era of girls to come. The least fashionable record of its month, and typically one of the most enduring.

THE HERD: Paradise Lost

Another hopeful assemblage of post-Mod beat boys whom Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley used as an experimental crucible for ideas too outré even for Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, featuring puppy-eyed teenage guitarist and lead singer Peter Frampton, the Herd’s time was relatively brief; “From The Underworld,” their debut hit with funereal bells, undertaker’s plunking bass, Gregorian chanting and an Oedipal lyrical complex (though Scott Walker’s “Oedipus” offers a subtler and yet somehow far more hysterical variation on the same theme), still gets the occasional radio play, but the follow-up has seemingly become lost to follow-up and never gets revived. A shame, because as gaudily great as “From The Underworld” is, “Paradise Lost” is arguably much, much stranger. The kind of single which could only have appeared in 1967 – it was released at the very end of the year, reaching the Top 20 in early 1968 – its beginning is enough to make the listener wonder whether they have purchased a Frankie Vaughan single by mistake; sliding “Stripper” brass, high-kicking “Don’t Bring Lulu” drums, awaiting the arrival of top hat and cane; but then it meticulously dissolves into a sombre variant on the “Underworld” model with mournful motets of plainsong as Frampton muses: “In the deepest dungeons of my mind/I dredge the shadows” ...as I said, only in 1967 could something like this occur. As he cries over the “scene of my innocence departed,” the song opens up to allow pirate radio beat boom harmonies and cavernous chambers of choir and brass.

Essentially dwelling on the loss of a certain kind of sexual innocence…remember, Frampton was sixteen going on seventeen at this stage…he wanders confused, thinking of the now surrendered self-pleasures of youth (“Once I could love without desire/Her glance could warm me without fire”) but sounding hurt and almost enraged about his inability to…get the real thing (“Experience has dulled my eyes/With repetition, wonder dies”) or his agony over the fact that he can never experience it again for the first time (“She was my promise and my dream”).

As the cascades of “Teenage Opera” trumpet fanfares make metaphorically clear, “Paradise Lost” is less to do with Milton than with “Pictures of Lily” (do you see the alliteration there?), but since he hasn’t actually lost his virginity yet (the tantalisingly unreachable sweetness of the Vaughan Williams solo violin balanced with the irretrievable loss of childhood of the lullaby glockenspiel) all he can do is wearily turn the pages again and go through the mechanics as the dream fades and the crass “Stripper” stomp returns, this time not to be moved, until someone finally comes to show him the way.

KEVIN DREW WITH J. MASCIS: Backed Out On The...

The yellow-dominant package which houses Spirit If…, an album billed as “Broken Social Scene Presents Kevin Drew,” is a smashing contrast to the raspberry red-dominant package which housed the last BSS album. Its brightness, especially when set against the sunny yellow spine of its new neighbour, Pacific Street by the Pale Fountains (there is an ineffable, if inexplicable, logic to my filing system), would be enough to cure approaching Seasonal Affective Disorder on its own.

As you would expect, Spirit If… could just as well have been credited as “Broken Social Scene Plays Kevin Drew” since more or less all of BSS turn up in the course of the record’s fourteen tracks (they were recorded over a span of two years); this reminds me heavily and pleasantly of the venerable seventies days of Ogun Records when sundry permutations of the same basic circle of twenty or so musicians worked in interchangeable bands playing the tunes of whoever was leading them at any stage. Indeed, Keith Tippett once confessed to my dad (Calton Studios, Edinburgh, solo recital, 1980) that he had a tendency to get so carried away with the music that he’d forget whose band he was playing in and had to look to see who was in the horn section to work it out; not an easy task when, at one stage, the personnel of Harry Miller’s Isipingo and Tippett’s own Sextet were identical except for the saxophonist – and yet the each group’s music was radically different from the other.

There is far too much invention, miraculous inspiration and creativity at work in Spirit If… to sum up properly at this early stage; suffice it to say that it is a major work, possibly more superficially “structured” than BSS’ “own” music but with so many unexpected facets and detours in its architecture that it continues to put most of the pabulum which currently passes for “alternative” or “indie” in this country to deserved humility. But in “Backed Out On The…” Drew achieves the remarkable feat of making his guest collaborator J Mascis interesting again. Beginning with modest pearls of individual, twinkling guitar notes, gradually resolving into stellar, delicate interplay like a sky shedding unnecessary grey, Drew and Mascis (together with Metric’s drummer Joules Scott-Key) suddenly move into fuzztone overdrive. Their excited thrash, combined with Scott-Key’s monstrous drum figures, make me think how good Be Here Now could have been if only Oasis had been that little bit braver.

Drew (lead) and Mascis (unmissable back-up) rage joyfully against what might be ambulance chasers, fairweather collaborators, sellouts or non-committal bystanders – “You thought you were leaving temporary grieving,” “You think it’s the season, temporary treason,” “If the lies they don’t fit ya, better trade some spit” – with the central motif of “Backed out on the cocks!” throttled out in splendid damn-you spleen, and at one point (3.59) barked out. In banishing betrayal and false prophecy they are clearly having one hell of a time – witness all the whoops, cheers and studio chatter which litter/decorate the song like tickertape punctum. Perhaps the most directly rock (but never rockist) performance yet to come from the BSS camp, and maybe even their first hit single if radio can tolerate “make sure they fuck you,” it also symbolises one of the collective’s central tenets: “Everyone can write this song, but they can’t write you and me.” Freak scene, we were born to run.

THE MIKE WESTBROOK CONCERT BAND FEATURING NORMA WINSTONE AND MIKE OSBORNE: Love Song No. 4

Mike Osborne died this morning, aged 65, following a lengthy battle with cancer and too much else besides. He had not been well for over a quarter of a century; the last time he played publicly was in early 1982, but while he was still here there was always the hope, however hopelessly remote, that he might one day pick up his horn and play again, even though he had little or no recollection of his musical past, his mental collapse having wiped the memory. At his most intense – which was most of the time, but best documented on side two of his 1974 trio album Border Crossing (with Harry Miller and Louis Moholo on bass and drums respectively) – he sounded as though he were playing against the death clock, knowing that he was running out of time, fully aware that every supersonic run he played shortened his lifespan just that little further. Indispensable to every group which he formed or with which he played – Mike Westbrook and John Surman’s various bands, Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, Harry Miller’s Isipingo, Barry Guy’s London Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, Kenny Wheeler’s big band, his own Trio, Quartets and Quintet, his duo with Stan Tracey, Tracey’s shortlived and unrecorded free jazz big band Tentacles, and let’s not forget renegade free-folk singer/songwriter Mike Cooper (three decades before “free folk” became another lifestyle option) – his was maybe the most distinctive voice on alto saxophone ever to come out of Britain, and easily on a par with the international flux of altoists who came to the UK from Jamaica (Joe Harriott, Bertie King), South Africa (Dudu Pukwana) or Australia (Ray Warleigh). Along with peers like Elton Dean and Trevor Watts, Osborne had a sour intensity in his tone and approach, an exceptional emotional canvas.

His song was so long and, in the end, so cruelly curtailed (mostly by himself) that it seems vulgar to extract a “song” from his works, too many of which still languish out of print; but “Love Song No 4” is one of the most distinguished individual recordings to emerge from British jazz in the seventies from Love Songs, an album which, although returned to circulation by unlikely but welcome popular demand, still remains underrated, not least by Westbrook himself. Over Chris Spedding’s careful guitar, Norma Winstone sings, pained but composed, about a collapsed love affair. Soon she is joined by Osborne’s alto; as Winstone moves into abstract scatting, they circle ecstatically and mournfully around and into each other, an early orgasm of a late spring. Eventually the song speeds up and the rest of the horns enter for its second section before dropping back to ballad tempo – Malcolm Griffiths’ trombone meditation over hushed horns predates Dexy’s’ “I’m Just Looking” by a decade – and then George Khan’s harsh, scratchy tenor returns to rush up the tempo again. Finally Winstone is alone – “Saw you yesterday,” she sings at a funereal, out-of-tempo pace, choosing her pronunciations with extreme care – “It wasn’t me you held so tenderly…it wasn’t me who walked away”…as the final “away” shivers out through chambers of compression into the void.

The Osborne/Winstone duet – so controlled, so carefree – defines what was so special about the altoist; roughly equal parts Dolphy, Coleman and Jackie McLean (listen to his solo on Part VII of Westbrook’s Metropolis for an example of how the McLean influence persisted), his passion was uncut, his strength unmodified, his tone commanding but never tyrannical and frequently vulnerable; if his playing on Isipingo’s Family Affair (recorded live at the Battersea Arts Centre at the beginning of 1977) involves a new, more frightening form of intensity, it was because that was the way he felt he was heading – the Brotherhood gradually dissolving into Europe or becoming early casualties, Surman moving into the ECM camp, the old alliances coming to an end – and his solos on “Jumpin’” and “Eli’s Song” nearly defy repeated listening; phenomenal and brilliant, both technically and emotionally, but the fuse rapidly streaking towards the final detonation. That didn’t waste much time in coming. But listen to “Love Song No 4” and find as many of his records as you can to appreciate this most damaged of geniuses. I am currently too numb to approach anything resembling objectivity.

Sally SHAPIRO: Hold Me So Tight

This year’s “Young Folks” but with added “Pacific State” input? Think spiralling oceans of synths, limpid modulations through heartbreaking chord changes, stout Cortez looking over the roof of the disco and finding Avalon. The noble, lucidly dreamt poignancy of Global Communications, Lawrence (the German techno one, not the Felt/Denim/Go-Kart Mozart chap), Casinos Versus Japan, Jeff Mills with his XL3 bathing cap on…there is a certain kind of maximalistic, generously melodic techno to which I could listen and in which I could swim forever. Combine with the admirably hurt song structures of the Pet Shop Boys at their most distant (and yet, paradoxically, their closest) and a lyrical bent derived from the average C86 seven-inch, filtered via Saint Etienne when they let go and allow themselves to drift (side two of Tiger Bay, “How We Used To Live”), and you would have something like the six divinely felt minutes of “Hold Me So Tight.”

Sceptics have questioned whether Sweden’s Sally Shapiro actually exists, but there she is, photographed twice, beaming but cautious of eyes, on the cover of her Disco Romance CD; one Johan Agebjörn appears to be the principal musician, songwriter and producer behind her wary smile. It is New Pop, but not quite Annie or Abba, even though it is as happy to pause for extended thought as either. “I Will Be With You” may be the standout track (though for the time being I do not intend to discuss it publicly), but “Hold Me So Tight” is blessed with near equivalent magic.

Shivering its way into illuminated splendour out of an unspecified cold, Shapiro counterpoints the music’s epic majesty with observations on how ordinary days and circumstances can lead to transcendence; she sings plaintively (and hesitatingly but affectingly in the upper range) about meeting her Other in a store (“you were in my way”); they get to talking “about the rain falling on the streets” and end up as “friends meeting twice a week.” In the bridge the chord changes double in speed to mimic her belatedly excited increased pulse rate (“I may be wrong but I may be true/But I think you like me too”) before diving off the springboard into an Esther Williams eternity of a chorus, countering night (“I see a lantern shining bright/I know you’ll be mine in no time in the moonshine” – note the ingenious triple internal rhyme used to bring the chorus to the first of its two rhetorical climaxes) with day (“So be mine in the sunshine”).

The music waxes and wanes as they dance in the club and internal fireworks explode - “I looked into your eyes, you gave me a smile…/And nothing else existed for a while,” Shapiro sings as though she wants nothing else to exist, ever – before the song comes back into focus, not afraid to absent the beats for half a verse at a time, constantly altering its perspective, finally letting the glorious melody take over, dissolve and rekindle in volcanoes of benign borealis. So the small (“we were never meant to go walking along”) is turned into the immortal; the death of New Pop is deferred yet again, and another great song attracts me to its attention at the time when I needed to find it.

KEVIN ROWLAND: This Guy's In Love With You

This isn’t one of the big setpieces on that psychotherapeutic tool of a covers album My Beauty but it is one of the most emotionally naked of its tracks, even on a record which set new standards for emotional nakedness. “This Guy’s In Love” is another song which interpreters have to approach with extreme caution; it is easy to convert vulnerable into bland, or collapse through the trapdoor of overkill on the key line of “if not I’ll just die.” Originally composed with Chet Baker in mind – although the Chet Baker of 1968 was in no condition to tackle it – Alpert’s voice preserves Baker’s pretend nonchalance to conceal his extreme fear and uncertainty; humming to himself in the park, hands insecurely hunched in pockets, while swerving his head around every two seconds to ensure that she’s heard him.

Rowland’s reading, as with much else on My Beauty, puts me in mind of Robin Williams’ character in The Fisher King; his life having been razed to ground zero, clumsily and fitfully but faithfully attempting to build a new one, needing to relearn just about everything in terms of what a human being is and how that human being relates to other ones (“After being so lost and seeing only ugliness in the world, these songs started to penetrate my frightened world” remarks Rowland in his brief sleevenote…well, that’s why some of us build Churches…). He keeps the song very quiet indeed, as a sort of midnight blue jazz ballad, though this is as much to do with insecurity as restraint. Guitarist Neil Hubbard and bassist John McKenzie are the epitome of discretion; indeed, for the first two lines of the song Rowland is accompanied only by Blair Cunningham’s near-inaudible brushes.

The singer’s delivery is bluffly humble, like a broken man painfully and slowly learning to walk again; he’s trying to talk to her, to us, as best he can manage – the delivery is not refined, but it is a question of familiarising oneself again with this sort of language so that the ability to love can be rediscovered (“my-heart-a-keeps-a-break-in’-ah”). Lush strings filter in from the left channel but are for now kept at a distance. Note the subtle changes to the lyrics – “you see, this guy” as opposed to “you say this guy,” and “what I’d give to make you mine” rather than “what I’d do” – with a radical break at the first climax where, instead of offering death as an alternative option to himself, after “say you’re in love, in love with this guy,” he extends the “guyyyyyyyyyy” as though hanging onto an umbilical cord; then the music simply slides to a halt and he offers a simple, spoken “please.”

The trumpet instrumental break is replaced by Mark Feltham’s harmonica (we only hear a harmonica in the third and fourth lines of the first verse of Alpert’s version) while Rowland repeats to himself “come on, come on” as he does throughout the album, willing himself to believe in his own restoration, begging himself to keep breathing. When he returns for the second and final chorus it is clear that he has gradually lost his reserve; his post-Russell Mael vibrato sites his voice at the edge of tears and total breakdown (the vulnerable tightrope is a major theme on the record), and for the last, and indeed, only time, he sings, very lowly, slowly and deliberately, that crucial line, stretching it out like a noose threatening to overlap the clothes line – “if not I’ll just………die,” the “die” coming out as an exhausted bitonal baritone sob. Hubbard’s guitar ripples his consent and concern, and the song “dies” into the bluer ether. Mercifully, he has not died.

MARCEL KING: Reach For Love

Ten years previously he had been at number one as the 16-year-old lead singer of Manchester soul octet Sweet Sensation, made famous by New Faces, with “Sad Sweet Dreamer.” The last Tony Hatch production to date to top the charts, the record indeed blends sadness and sweetness in a way that is uniquely British; King sings the song with a passion almost uncomfortable for a would-be child star, even a Moss Side Michael Jackson, against the swirling strings and palais band saxophones which unmistakeably nail the single as Pye Records in 1974, with that very characteristic Marble Arch studio echo.

But the fame did not last; after one more hit, the band struggled despite many fine singles (especially “Hide Away From The Sun”) and after a failed attempt to gain the British nomination for 1977 Eurovision split up. What became of Marcel King in the intervening years is unclear, but in the spring of 1984 he abruptly and unexpectedly re-emerged on Factory Records with the one-off single “Reach For Love” (FAC 92). Produced by Bernard Sumner, it received enthusiastic, if slightly baffled, notices in the music press but sold minimally, even though it filled the floor of the Haçienda regularly; to this day Shaun Ryder regards it as the best record Factory ever released. King more or less vanished again until his death in 1995 from a brain haemorrhage, aged just 38. Two years later his son Zeus was shot dead in a drug feud; he was nineteen.

Superficially, then, here we have another story of a child prodigy who didn’t, or wasn’t allowed to, fulfil his promise. I am sure the full tale is a lot more complex and less able to fit into preordained storylines. But listening to “Reach For Love” now, it seems like a pop single just slightly out of its time – it should have been a huge hit, but Factory’s legendarily crap distribution and marketing facilities militated against that, as did lack of radio play. There is also the question of whether “Reach For Love” was slightly too intense a song and performance to become that huge a hit. The rhythm and bass lines set up at the beginning thrust themselves forward in a somewhat menacing manner, although their propulsion cannot be denied; Happy Mondays would go on to use it as their 1988-9 rhythmic template. The beats are intense enough to qualify as rock rather than dance; there is an unusual thickness to their solidity.

When King’s voice first enters – “Girl when I first met you” – we could almost be listening to a better Bros, but he then develops a seamless union between grace (the floating stream of “so strong” in the line “Our love was so strong”) and franticity (the teeth-extracting agony of “feel” in “Now I feel everything’s going wrong,” echoed by the emergence of a high-pitched string synth). Then the track lightens for ripples of sunlit electronics to decorate the chorus of “Everybody needs love baby/Ain’t no lying/Everybody wants love babe/We’ve got to keep on…striving!” and suddenly we are in 1990 Madchester half a decade early.

King continues to extemporise on his increasing pain – “I’ve been trying to show you better things,” he exclaims while an icy backing chorus chants “You keep on giving me shots!” (make whatever analogy you will of that) – climaxing in the bloodcurdling “freeeeeeeeeeeze” of “I freeze, baby, at the thought of leaving you behind.” This is vocal control of an exceptionally high level, both technically and emotionally. As the string synths melt into formalism behind him he is preaching to the grey skies: “Girl when you reach for love you’ve got to hold onto it!/Music is the love that helps me through EVERYTHING…makes you hold on, move on…” and his perspective shifts from the girl to music as salvation (“Yes it does,” he whimpers, “Sweet music,” the backing chorus responds). As a dance record it is exceptionally forceful, perhaps too forceful for the general treble-friendly politesse of 1984 daytime radio; and it only ever appeared as a twelve-inch single, clocking in at just under five and a half minutes. Overall, however, there was something just too real about “Reach For Love” for it to thrive in a culture of masks, irony and timidity. Yet it now stands as one of the great pop hits that never was (or hasn’t yet been) and should be sought out and cherished to demonstrate the untapped greatness of this saddest and sweetest of dreamers.

MARTY WILDE: Abergavenny

The sui generis Sir Cliff being automatically discounted, Marty Wilde has to qualify as the most durable and consistently adventurous survivor of the first Britpop boom of the late fifties – and as an active songwriter and producer as well as a singer, may well outdo Cliff; in the early seventies, while the latter was occupied making God-pestering anthems for the Festival of Light, Wilde was heroically attempting to hitch a ride in the glam carriage as Zappo before turning his attention to writing for and producing son Ricky and his extraordinary, if brief, run of squalling teen anthems on the UK label (most notably 1974’s gloriously cacophonic “Teen Wave”) – and then of course his elder daughter Kim grew up, and both father and son collaborated in creating that exceptional run of metahits, so spellbinding that you could almost believe that a place called “East California” existed.

Getting there, however, was a struggle; Cliff apart, all of the fifties idols suffered to a greater and lesser extent in the wake of the Beatles, and Wilde, more than most, faced the inevitable prejudices; even though he grew both hair and beard to form the Wilde Three, giving Justin Hayward his first break, he was still seen as the winsome contralto of a spent era. Undeterred, he developed his songwriting skills and enjoyed his first annus mirabilis in 1968 when, writing under the pseudonym of “Frere Manston” in collaboration with one “Jack Gellar,” which latter turned out to be Ronnie Scott, a man not generally noted for his love of pop music (his minimalist one note tenor solo on Tommy Steele’s “Rock With The Caveman,” not to mention his gruffly resentful solo on “Lady Madonna,” suggest the precise opposite), he scored three top ten hits – the Mersey-flowing-into-sunshine pop balladry of the Casuals’ “Jesamine,” Lulu’s “I’m A Tiger” (about which Ms Lawrie felt much the same as she did about “Boom-Bang-A-Bang”) and Status Quo’s “Ice In The Sun.”

Both the Casuals and Quo records suggest a light dripping of post-psychedelia with rich, unexpected chord changes (Scott putting his harmonic knowledge, arising from studying Rollins’ playing for twenty years, to good use), and much of this also flows into “Abergavenny.” Released under Wilde’s own name as a single in 1968 it received considerable radio play in the UK but failed to chart; undeterred, Wilde issued the single in America the following year under the alias of “Shannon” (and no, he was nothing to do with the Shannon responsible for “Let The Music Play,” “Give Me Tonight,” etc., though wouldn’t it have been nice if he had been?); it was a fairly big hit in the States and a major hit in Canada, a welcome but surprising achievement considering its inherent Britishness.

From its opening fife and drums fanfare to its brooding intro of wobbly fuzztone guitar with acoustic backing, “Abergavenny” is benign bubblegum with indistinct shadows. Wilde sounds cheerful and eager about “Taking a trip (now there’s a clue) up to Abergavenny/Hoping the weather is fine” before drums and bass enter and the pace accelerates: “If you should see a red dog running free/Then you know it’s mine,” followed by an ecstatically descending piano mimicking said dog gleefully trotting downhill before landing squarely on the 4/4 beat. “I’ve got to get there and fast,” sings Wilde as though the real world is too grey to delay his “trip,” before offering a wink to the listener, or perhaps the square: “If you can’t go” – with an exaggerated Terry-Thomas emphasis on the sustained “o” of that “go” – “then I promise to show you a photograph.” In other words, you have to experience the “trip” in person; as an indirect witness it can only make sense to a certain extent.

As strings caress the lower ground of the middle eight, Wilde offers his extremely 1968 musings about “paradise people” (who are “fine by me”) before his own voice drifts in and out of fuzzy warp as he licks the ice cream concept of “Sunshine forever/Lovely weather” before raising an eyebrow – “Don’t you wish you could beeeeeee…./TAKING a TRIP up to Abergavenny?” In order to release the escalating tension he gives his best Butlins redcoat prompt of “Everybody now!” as a brass band (plus marching band glockenspiel) parps its way into the song; not quite a summer village fete but also not quite the bierkeller pop which its pedigree might initially suggest, and by “bierkeller pop” I’m thinking of things like Chris Andrews’ “To Whom It Concerns” (the instrumental backing track of which became much better known as the theme to RTE’s The Late, Late Show) and the Dave Clark Five’s “Red Balloon” – a genre which subsequently flourished only in Eurovision and the later hits of Peters and Lee.

A much more relevant source of inspiration may well have been Jack Nitzsche’s stoned charts for the Turtles’ “She’d Rather Be With Me” – a number four hit at the height of the British Summer of Love – and as a British (or English, even though the subject matter is Welsh) equivalent “Abergavenny” sparkles with marvelling effervescence. The record climaxes with celebratory unisons and subtle dislocation, Wilde still mocking the Old Guard with his “A leetle photo-GRAPH!” as the parade passes out of earshot towards their own nirvana, Wilde’s closing “la la” cries sounding not that far removed from Francis Rossi. Reissued on CD only recently, after being absent from British circulation for nearly forty years, listening to it conjured up my 1968 with unimaginable rapidity…and it is easy to discern how such a mischievous spirit in music could go on to be responsible for “Chequered Love” - certainly the journey from “Abergavenny” to “Cambodia” is one of the most remarkable of any pop star of his generation. Including Cliff’s.