HOLYFUCK: Lovely Allen

I have no idea whether they mean Woody or Lily or Ginsberg, but it is one of the great instrumentals of recent times. The Toronto duo’s LP is Rough Trade’s current best seller and a startling spectacle it is too; Neu! filtered through Lightning Bolt with a touch of Martin Rev, hardcore but clean avant-dronerock. “Lovely Allen,” however, is the standout track and TV companies should be elbowing each other out of the way with electrified Bulgarian Army surplus cattle prods to get to use it as a theme tune. Starting with a electrified radio scan replica, guest Owen Pallett’s string motif is immediately taken up by the keyboards, which in turn are joined by Loel Campbell’s mighty drums and Michael Bigelow’s thudding, continent-demolishing fuzz of a bass to form a huge anthem which I fully expect to hear played at next year’s Olympics. Over the underlay, ecstatic noise guitar sweeps the sky with rollerskate tinsel. It makes you want to summon the rays of the new beneficent light from the summit of the Ark building in Hammersmith! Best of all perhaps is the closing section where Pallett’s stately strings abruptly come into elegant focus before being scorched by 1972 Eno synth/oscillator whooshes, a bass now so fuzzy you could comb Mount Rushmore’s hair with it and a guitar nearly beyond the remit of any non-general assembly. It ends with trails of ARP comets, like the promise of “Telstar” finally, if belatedly, fulfilled.

DOROTHY SQUIRES: My Way

The most popular song to be played at funerals, or at least it was in those pre-Whitney/Robbie/Celine days, “My Way” has functioned as a kneejerk safety valve, celebrating the independence and fulfilment of those who spent their whole lives kneeling, embedded in numbing and often humiliating day jobs where the average cockroach crawling midway up the staff room walls had more say about its fate and they ever did. It is the expression of a wish never granted.

Most singers who think of themselves as big (or small) have essayed the song in its lifetime (though Whitney, Robbie and Celine have yet to avail us of their readings), usually with one of two results: somewhat smug and self-satisfied, or loudly defiant. Sinatra himself remained ambivalent about the song and his own delivery of it, and indeed he adds that final coda where everything trickles into quietude, rather than culminating in a triumphantly loud flourish – “Yes…it was…my way,” and the grain of his throat holds those last two words with as much suppressed despair as he ever mustered (the shattering “can know my sadness” which ends “None But The Lonely Heart” and the No One Cares album symbolises the seeping of reluctant blood from the mourning wrist, when despair can no longer be contained). The single was not an especially big hit in the States – it peaked at #27, didn’t hang around for long and in his book Dino Nick Tosches remarks how the Rat Pack boys were effectively ostracised from the pop charts by the late sixties and relegated to the cosy ghetto of the specialist Easy Listening lists. But in Britain it gained a slowly gathering newness of life – it climbed agilely to number five on our charts soon after its April 1969 debut and then refused to exit, not taking its final bow until the beginning of 1972. Its cumulative run of 122 weeks remains the only triple digit run in the singles chart, far ahead of callow pretenders like “Amazing Grace,” “Blue Monday” and “Chasing Cars,” and if a full Top 75 had been in operation at the time the 200 mark would not have been inconceivable.

There was, of course, an underlying sense of reproachment about “My Way”’s continued presence, as the sixties congealed into the seventies and the Engelbert/Valium/cooking sherry generation began to feel vindicated; see, they seemed to say, you only knew the half of our pain; this song, this man, says our lives are justified, however we live them. Do you think you’re the only one who couldn’t find their way home? And, as the seventies solidified into the eighties, we reached the other end of the spectrum; Elvis, already too careless to live, sung it from just beyond our grasp, and Sid, who as Paul Anka astutely noted seemed to turn the song from a passive reflection on passing away into an active weapon to speed up his passing.

But nobody ever sang “My Way” without meaning it, even if the contradictions of their own semi-wrecked, semi-surrendered lives told them vividly to the contrary. Least of all Dorothy Squires, who recorded what I still believe to be the most truthful and disturbing interpretation of the song. Her “My Way” appeared as a single in the summer of 1970, shortly after she had invested five thousand pounds of her own money to stage a lavish comeback performance at the London Palladium. She was then fifty-five years old, and her life had been teetering towards wreckage for some time; a considerable star in the pre-rock era – her former partner, songwriter Billy Reid, composed “I’m Walking Behind You” especially for her (Eddie Fisher’s chart-topping 1953 reading was a cover) - she married Roger Moore, a decade her junior, who left her in the early sixties for an Italian woman. She never really recovered from the latter; and it wasn’t until the end of the sixties, after many bitter battles, that she granted Moore a divorce. By then drink had taken hold and her career was in serious decline.

However, as befitting someone born in a trailer park in Wales during WWI and who grew up during the Depression, she did not yield easily; fearful of ending up where she’d started on one hand, but casually reckless with resources and emotions on the other, she booked the Palladium, coming on with immense, garish, pastel-coloured feather bows, unbowed and unapologetic. Like Judy, the voice wasn’t quite what it had been, but the determination was violently visible, her audiences ready to suffer along with her and cheer her on as required.

Thus her “My Way”; a more garish, luminous, enraged version is scarcely imaginable still. She starts low, like Shirley Bassey, rolling her rich Welsh diphthongs and refusing to drop them. But she is like a huge mansion trembling atop a volcano, as when the lava orchestra swells up for her “And there were times – and I am sure that you knew,” her voice already tearful in that second half, enunciating every individual syllable so that the listener cannot avoid receiving her message, still grieving for her lost love, but doggedly she will stand on top of that mountain regardless of any imminent eruption – “I ATE IT UP,” she proclaims, and then, after a meaningful pause, she howls demonically, “AND! I! SPIT! IT! OUT!,” with epileptic pitch control but putting all of the emotional emphasis on that “I.” The Palladium audience was already in tears at her defiance of imminent and immense ruination.

Then she descends again – “I’ve laughed” she weeps – before attempting her second ascent, not even bothering to change the gender of the “For what is a man?” section (singing directly at her Roger? “WHAT HAS HE GOT?”), and now she is in charge, reigns supreme: “I TOOK THE BLOWS – AND! I! DID! IT! MY! WAY!” That final “WAY!” sees her toppling from her precarious perch of pitching as though tumbling down the cliff to her irrevocable doom, but she greets her presumed demise with neither fear nor surprise, gracefully toppling like a newly swallowed gull. To add to her woes, the veteran tenor saxophonist Johnnie Gray provides an obbligato throughout her performance which sometimes seems to be laughing at her predicament (indeed he gets a co-credit on the label of the single) though his fleet descending bop runs at the climactic end seem also to indicate a sheer fall.

The record did well; although it only peaked at #25, it was on the chart for 23 weeks (eventually becoming one of the very few singles to earn a silver disc for 250,000 sales without ever breaking the Top 20), and its momentum helped in part to keep interest in Sinatra’s original buoyant. But the demise turned out to be less than presumed. Squires’ house burned down; underinsured, she vowed to move somewhere closer to the river, whereupon her next house was wrecked in a flood. Litigious at the touch of a button, most of her money went on fruitless High Court libel cases, all of which she lost; towards the end of her days (remarkably she soldiered on until 1998, aged eighty-three) she was rescued from destitution by a fan who put her up (and commendably, or foolishly, put up with her rages and whims) in her cottage in Yorkshire. But there is a rawness, a ghastly truth about her “My Way” which no other singer has yet approached, as though she stared right into its hollow heart and knew the lies it was telling, but embraced them anyway, because what was the alternative?

J. WALTER NEGRO AND THE LOOSE JOINTZ: Shoot The Pump

It should have been one of the great summer dance hits, possibly even a necessary balance to the following summer’s “The Message.” “Shoot The Pump” is a joyous ode to fire hydrant violation and subsequent ejaculation of spray as barely concealed sexual metaphor (“Wow, you got that chick wet all the way across the street, Seeley!” J Walter Negro congratulates lead guitarist Leonard K Seeley Jnr, following the mother of all ejaculatory guitar solos, half-Hendrix, half-Sharrock), not quite hip hop, not quite downtown No Wave, not quite post-Ze Latin postmodernism, which should have squirted all over the charts – but Island Records gingerly flung it onto the British market in mid-December 1981 and it was inevitably drowned beneath the considerably more powerful sprays of the Christmas rush, having yet to materialise on CD over a quarter of a century later.

If Carla Bley had been musical director of Kid Creole and the Coconuts they might have sounded like “Shoot The Pump”; indeed sometime Bley organist Arturo O’Farrill contributes a suitably unhinged, reverb-drenched Hammond solo to the track. And its seemingly good-natured spring is devoted to a celebration of flooding the neighbourhood and the finer arts of graffiti and culminates in an over-hasty police shooting (“Oh my God! It was only a monkey wrench!”).

These days such a scenario would be illustrated with sub-John Carpenter synth ominosities, doomy, throaty raps and perhaps an obscure-ish Blue Magic sample. But “Shoot The Pump”’s good humour proves to be indestructible, since the shooting victim has been wearing a bulletproof vest (“Oh, I’m gonna live forever or die tryin’,” he remarks casually, scarcely three minutes after the track has been nearly obscured by police sirens, outraged yells of “get away from that fire hydrant ya punk, don’t ya know there’s a WATER shortage!” and gunfire, as J Walter returns to the sprightly avant-bubblegum with which he started, full of the inevitable double entendres (“Then you turn up the pressure and then you turn up the funk/You put the spray in the can and then you shoot the pump,” followed in the second verse by a sly [or Sly] “Uh, you do know how to twist and shout, don’t you baby?” and, near the end, a purr of “That’s why they call me the plain brown rapper”).

The horns (one of whom, Eric Leeds, went on to become Prince’s regular saxman, and there’s certainly more than an element of purple portent here) are sunny, the handclaps childlike and yellow, the rhythm easy but insistent – Tomas Doncker’s supporting guitar instantly reversing me to 1981, vibrant bass from Lonnie Hillyer Jr, son of the Mingus trumpeter, to remind us that everything connects and continues - the adventure inherent and enormous. Sadly, from what I’ve been able to find out online, J Walter Negro’s story proved a partially fallacious one and ultimately a sad one – he appears to have died from drug abuse some years ago – and yet “Shoot The Pump” is a tightrope of a reminder when things weren’t quite set in stone and musicians from different fields could work with each other and create something truly new. Keep it next to your Mutant Disco, Was (Not Was), Memory Serves, “Genius Of Love” and Electric Spanking Of War Babies and marvel at how such music could make even winter sound sunny.

THE SERPENT POWER: Endless Tunnel

All I knew about the eponymous debut album by the Serpent Power - note the suggestion of Sgt Pepper in that name - before finding a copy and listening to it was that Christgau rated it the 28th best album of 1967 and I wanted to know why; they made further records, but this is the only one remotely findable in the UK, and indeed finding it was a remote and lengthy pursuit. Leader David Meltzer (whose wife Tina appears on co-lead vocals – I have no idea whether either is related to Richard but am presuming not since they do not appear anywhere in The Aesthetics Of Rock) is a noted second-stage Beat Generation poet, and some of that is evident in the poems printed on the album’s sleeve (one haikuesque offering, “27 April 67,” reads:

“No one to write to
but to myself tonight
Not even the familiar phantom
behind my chair
Who scans all words for immortality”).

Musically, however, The Serpent Power offer what on the surface is something fully to be expected from early ’67 SF; a mixture of post-Yardbirds frat blues yowling (with David doing the yowling – check out his splendidly boyish tantrum on “Nobody Blues”: “I’m gonna walk into my closet…and I’m gonna shut the door…and I’m gonna cry!...I’m gonna SOB!” which is all the more effective by coming directly after Tina’s wistful “Flying Away” in which she threatens “If you tell me one more lie/I will run away and cry”) with John Payne digging into his Mysterians organ, hopeful Monkees/Mamas and Papas-type anthems to the new spiritual sunrise (mostly sung by both David and Tina - from “Open House”: “The black cloud’s moved away!...Open up your door!”) and ethereal folky musings (mostly sung by Tina, who only really loses her immaculate, pre-Linda Perhacs cool towards the end of “Forget,” when she sighs “Oh I HATE tomorrow!”). Unlike, say, the Velvets, the music doesn’t scream RADICAL in the listener’s face, and the first few listens may lead to nought beyond a shrug of the shoulders, but there are other subtly restless factors at work; the unexpected harmonic amplifications of “Gently, Gently,” where the group doggedly descend down the semitone scale, the harmonic ambiguity which greets the “Forever!”s of “Open House” and at times even points a generation ahead to Tortoise. Its less than formal (or legal?) atmosphere leads to tracks being faded almost randomly, as though merely recording excerpts from a performance too long to fit into 40 over-convenient minutes.

But “Endless Tunnel” was the big finish to the record, the standard epic raga/mindblowing freakout. Except in its thirteen or so minutes it never really freaks out. Here David offers the usual metaphor of train journey as passage to who knows where, and gets increasingly frantic in his requests: “Oh Mister Conductor, tell we where are we going?...But Mister Conductor, he just walked on by,” until he resorts to petulant, extended squeals of frustration over the lack of an answer as he proceeds through the train, car by car, passing through cobras and pythons who “hissed out a welcome,” hawks pecking out his eyes, platoons of ladies looking for a lover, and so forth. The sort of thing which in normal circumstances would fully deserve standing in the corner and writing a hundred lines.

It came out a few months ahead of “The End” and the similarities are marked (though there is no climax as such) but in truth it’s much more fun and enterprising than dull old Jimbo and his Oedipal integrity kick; everyone digs in for the instrumental sections, none more so than one J P Pickens, who guests on “electrified 5-string banjo” and wails up a storm with his plucking, nearly walking away with the track (you’ll believe that a banjo can scream) before Meltzer’s lead guitar comes in to plot a more considered route to its orgasm, with his characteristic rapid, blunt picking of notes as though he is attempting to use his guitar to wax and pluck Ralph Gleason’s moustache. He audibly realises the absurdity of the journey halfway through – you can hear him turning over his lyric sheet – but continues to go for it anyway; with “bloodlike lake water seeping through my shoes” he tries to gain access to the engineer’s cabin, offering every conceivable variation on the “let me in” motif, and when he is finally let in and asks the engineer, again, where we are going, he turns round, grins and replies “I don’t know…I’m just following the tracks…up and down the tracks…” whereupon both train and song speed out of the picture. Try and track the whole album down, though; already its tracks are bearing that sense of near-instant familiarity that makes you want to listen to it in its entirety. OK, maybe it’s 1967’s 37th best album. For now.

MIKE REID: Freezin' Cold In 89 Twoso

Possibly the nearest that seventies British mainstream comedy-but-with-music got to its own Finnegan’s Wake, this song began life as a huge Continental avant-dance hit – “Prisencolinensinainciusol” by Italy’s own Gainsbourg, singer/writer/comedian Adriano Celentano, much played on Luxembourg and in knowledgeable clubs but not a chart hit in Britain, a deliberately mangled, semi-rapped exercise in Italianoinglese which stands somewhere between “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “He’s Gonna Step On You Again” with a lead guitar going systematically berserk in the right channel and an enthusiastically uncomprehending chorus of backing singers.

For reasons long since submerged, somebody at Pye Records decided that it would be a good idea to do a “British” cover version, and assigned the task to Mike Reid, who at the time of his untimely passing this summer was best known as Frank Butcher in EastEnders but then was still an up and coming cheeky Cockney comic who looked inpatient to escape the frilly shirt/bowtie identity parade; he was perhaps best known in the seventies for his intermittent stewardship of the children’s TV game show Runaround in which he made no secret of his contempt for both contestants and audience (“Migraine, MIGRAINE!” he would howl when the cheering got too fervent). In 1975 he even scored a top ten hit with his Cock-er-nee update of “The Ugly Duckling” (another result for Junior Choice).

But the re-Anglicisation which emerged as “Freezin’ Cold In 89 Twoso” is if anything even stranger than Celentano’s original. The lead guitar here is noticeably more polite, mainly sticking to reasonably funky chordalities, but the “Magic Fly” synths seem ready to suck all of the participants out into a parallel asteroid belt. Meanwhile Reid’s hoarse Stepney hugeness belting out frankly indecipherable lyrics (“When I sing the toon I call Mrs Mangle and I hurry maybe for a cuppa sometime” is a completely uneducated attempt at the first line, and the second - "Brrrrr chickens in my head a-keep the cold hold baby Suzy yeah Little Joe!") suggests what might have happened if Jimmy Pursey had been kidnapped at an impressionable age, taken to Manchester and pressganged into joining the Happy Mondays, a feeling enhanced by his occasional asides of “Little Joe - right on!,” his dip into cabaret/pub singing in the final chorus and the inevitable insertion of his then catchphrase “TRIFFIC!” (there was even a Triffic chocolate bar in brief existence). It gives the impression of some very peculiar purple fluid having been poured into the barrels round the back of the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club and is the seldom acknowledged accidental surreal masterpiece of its age, flapping awkwardly between Pete and Dud’s “The L.S. Bumble Bee” and Alexei Sayle’s “’Ullo John, Gotta New Motor?” He ends by attempting to join in with the closing harmony chorus but they are out of his range so he instead offers impersonations of incipient constipation before breaking into fits of sinister giggles to fade. The man is much missed.

ROISIN MURPHY: Overpowered

Overpowered, the album, looks to its cutlery bones like a ZTT record; royal blue borderlines, a vicious pink centre (phenomenal!) and at the front, Roisin beaming knowingly at the camera, seated in a working man’s café with appreciably greasy full English on her table; the other visible customers do their best to ignore the fact that she is dressed in the bright red costume of a medieval court jester. Judging by its decidedly undersold profile in the capital’s record shops this weekend, it may well follow antecedents like Anne Pigalle and ACT into the rapid bargain bins; a gesture of primary colour wasted on a world happy with, and in, grey – most of the major record shop front spaces were occupied by the new record from exciting, forward-looking Welsh Conservative pub rockers the Stereophonics.

I am not entirely sure whether Overpowered, the album, is a classic or a dud, but since I’ve played it half a dozen times in full, and the title track approximately two dozen times, thus far I think I may veer towards the former. As with Moloko, the overwhelming impression is one of punctum Eurythmics – where Dave and Annie could have gone after Into The Garden if they’d kept a little more Holger Czukay and a lot more Grace Jones instead of trading them in for a lot more Elkie Brooks and a little more Ronnie Wood – or a properly golden Goldfrapp; the CD design is beautifully pretentious, encompassing highly relevant texts from Beckett (“For Murphy had such an irrational heart that no physician could get to the root of it”), Douglas Adams (“He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife”) and Laurie Anderson, who gets the credit for dancing about architecture, as well as parallel views of Sheffield and Lady’s Bridge – the missing link between Richard Hawley and Relaxed Muscle – fish, One From The Heart, sausages and CORRECTED*.

Other than that, “Scarlet Ribbons” is wonderfully vermillion skank-folk for those nights now fairly drawing in, “Tell Everybody” is so perfectly weighted as a pop song that one almost regrets its premature retreat, and there is more to be discovered…but the title track currently owns everything. “When I think that I’m over you,” she coos, “I’m overpowered” as the rhythm line comes in, drawing the expected line from Kraftwerk through to Bangalter, with Air poignant sparks of melody and trying to avoid ecstasy by detailing chemical reactions and biological quarks as the stuff of life (“Your data, my data,” pronounced in the manner of “tomatoes” and “tomatoes” of old); there are “amarant feelings” and “a cognitive state,” but it’s no use; those lustrous Chic synth bells chime their way in as Murphy surrenders to her better instincts (“It’s long overdue,” she shivers). “As science struggles on to try to explain,” she perorates like a Lennox reborn in Billy MacKenzie’s trunk, “Oxytocins flowing ever into my brain” (“Kissing the love object”, she notes on the sleeve, “causes the hormone oxytocin to explode like a firework display in the brain”) and she ends up gladly unwilling to explain anything: “Alien feelings – me have to accept.” Grandiose yet tactile, quivering but vulnerable, “Overpowered” ends in a ghostly resolution of divergent harmonies like the sun daring to shine through the half-submerged porthole (why do I think of the end of American Music Club’s “Last Harbour”? Why not?). Beautiful, sublime and bifurcating endlessly onto the scrolls of new, Roisin again proves that there’s no limit to where the bop will stop – and “who would’ve expected this?” Book your pool of light while the offer stands.

ROBERT WYATT: Out Of The Blue

Like The Drift, Wyatt’s new album Comicopera seems to have been consciously undersold by its reviewers. The now familiar landmines of three stars (for devotees only) and the re-employment of the word “experimental” as a pejorative glisten like newly rained upon roadkill, even though Wyatt’s methodology is the same “experiment” which he has been carrying on for nearly four decades. While Wyatt continues to be “respected,” it is in the same, nervy way as Walker; just as secretly they only want Scott wearing his 41-year-old cloak of loneliness, they desire only the Robert Wyatt of “Shipbuilding” – the tragic story, the plaintive voice singing songs everyone can understand, a cuddly rock Alan Bennett. Such is the continued curse of market economics and the associated pseudo-socialism which insist upon only that brand of art which is “easy to understand,” and condemn any art which suggests more complex and painful patterns as anti-people, and in certain heavily vested corners a global evil comparable with the state capitalism which masqueraded as Communism in the East (although “Marxist” is as a predictable rule always substituted for “state capitalist”).

There is very little of comfort about Comicopera; indeed it may be Wyatt’s most unsparing record since The End Of An Ear (but again, how contemptuously ironic is the term “Wyatting,” an act – if act it be – of contempt towards the minds and hearts of ordinary people, and if its purpose is to clear pubs, then doesn’t the perpetrator, in the end, despise the music as much as he would like everyone else to?). Divided into three parts, the first (Lost In Noise) is for this listener the hardest going, not because of its frequently lovely music – “Just As You Are,” a carefully barbed but fear-filled duet between Wyatt and Monica Vasconcelos, is one of the most spellbindingly beautiful songs he has ever written – but because of its unwinding account of a collapsing love and the final ghosts which herald loneliness; “A.W.O.L.” is scarcely bearable in its pitiless account of “the tick and the tock of the damnable clock” (cf. “The little clock’s stopped ticking now/We’re swallowed in the stomach room”) ticking its hapless protagonist a few further seconds towards solitary death. I do not intend it as an insult to Wyatt if I say that I don’t have any room for this kind of thing in my life at the moment, since this is toweringly great music – it’s just that I existed through five years of knowing, smelling, breathing and re-breathing every fibre of that dust-filled room and now I’m breathing fresh air; this I hope separates me from the red-nosed circus acts of the “my life is OK now and therefore this record’s no good” variety which certain, infamous scribes have been allowed to make their stock in trade. I applaud Wyatt for reminding me so gracefully but I will leave the making of it to others more emotionally qualified.

The second “act” (The Here And The Now) starts out as a bemused but amused sixtysomething look at the increasingly absurd world in which he is compelled to live; “A Beautiful Peace” and the self-mocking pro-atheist ode “Be Serious” remind us of Wyatt’s vocal and songwriting debts to Ray Davies, but soon passes towards graver matters; the government’s foreign policy is suitably belittled in “Mob Rule,” cut down to the level of a Town Hall meeting, before “A Beautiful War” – utilising the same tune as “A Beautiful Peace” – begins to chill the blood as the pilot in Iraq prepares to unload his cache of bombs (“Re-live my beautiful day…/How they got no time to flee/Total success/We’ll all be free”).

And then, in “Out Of The Blue” – this album’s “Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road” – it all blows apart; an uncompromising, arduous drone of synthesised choirs (Eno’s sampled voice combined with Wyatt’s sampled voice) hum down the eaves of destruction as Wyatt, with plaintive ire, delivers his lyric to a descending tune which could have come straight out of 1967 (“Secret” by Virgin Sleep?). Behind and around him, Annie Whitehead’s multiple trombones, as free as I’ve ever heard her play, fulfil the Mongezi Feza role, cascading, sliding and screaming in torrents (Gilad Atzmon’s solemn tenor honks acting as an anchor), while Wyatt surveys the beautiful day from the perspective of the victim – “Something unbelievable has happened to the floor,” “The upper storey’s out of reach/The stair’s no longer there.” Finally he settles into an intense chant of “You’ve planted your everlasting hatred in my heart.” It is virtually the last thing he sings on the record in discernible English.

In the final section (Away From The Fairies) he escapes, finds both rebellion and refuge in other languages; singing songs of unceasing battle for justice and a better world in Italian (“Del Mondo”) or Spanish; the Lorca interpretation (“Cancion de Julieta”) is a melancholic tour-de-force, Chucho Merchan’s multiple bowed basses acting as a viciously slicing string section while Wyatt demonstrates that his trumpet playing continues to improve in leaps and bounds, though he wisely avoids Feza’s virtuoso triple tonguing in favour of carefully sustained tones of Miles/Chet moodiness (in addition he handles most of the percussion duties on Comicopera; his cymbal work is as slashing and angry as I’ve heard him since the Softs days). Finally, as if to prove that it is we, not he, who have changed, he concludes the recital with a lustrous reading of “Hasta Siempre Comandante,” the folk song sampled by Charlie Haden on his Liberation Music Orchestra recording of “Song For Che” – and, of course, Wyatt covered the latter on Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard a lifetime (32 years) ago. This seems to furnish some hope with which to end the record, but note how the tune finally dissolves into the agonised screams of Maurizio Camardi’s saxophones – remembering not just Gato Barbieri’s contributions to Liberation Music Orchestra, but also that long-term hurt cannot easily be wiped away in the space of an hour. The record’s bosom is broad enough to begin with an Anja Garbarek tune (“Stay Tuned”) and take in an extended piece of avant-ambience (vibraharpist Orphy Robinson’s “Pastafari” which Wyatt compares in his notes to taking a swim), and, like all the best and most lasting of art, doesn’t go for the easy answer.

SIMON WARNER: Waiting Rooms

Active in music for nearly a quarter of a century but only venturing into the public gaze with acute rarity, 1997's Waiting Rooms is as yet the only Simon Warner album; a pained, and at times very funny, account of overaged bedsit life set to Richard Benbow's prosperous orchestrations which had the misfortune of coming out just as the Divine Comedy were at their critical and commercial peak; there wasn't room for two lush avant-balladeers, although there seemed to be room aplenty for scores of mirthless post-Oasis Britrockers.

But the album seems to be both prelude and epilogue to "Waiting Rooms," the song; it opens with Warner busking it, at one end or the other of the Victoria-Brighton line, humming into his wary acoustic guitar, and ends with a distant string chorale and an even more distant howl as he returns home, brews up a cup, lights up and switches the answerphone on for the evening. One Daphne Warner, who I presume is his mother, contributes mezzo-soprano backing, while Benbow's strings climb ominously and descend reluctantly behind Warner's recounting of the "scuffed snaps" of his mother he has just found; cinders of Chanel girl flashbacks, admission of a full and purposeful life having been lived...but now, a curious emptiness as she, or he, wanders alone through these increasingly dusty and empty passageways, life having spent most of its own bounty - "She's not at home! This home is haunted!" Warner growls with ineffable sadness (but not pity) as the orchestra repeatedly opens up and folds upon his smoky musings. "Waiting for...nothing but...time," he hisses like a prematurely aged David Essex, ushering in a music box: "Vulgar and dusted, an antique zone," which in turn leads to the strings and horns sweeping in again like not yet purulent vultures. But wherever he, or she, wanders, the loss, the absence, is inescapable; "but each new home feels like a train station waiting room." The swallowing feeling that he, and perhaps we, should be elsewhere instead of trespassing on our own wilfully suppressed ghosts. We need to know what happened in the intervening decade. Did he get out, and annul that faint Newley aroma of declining dissonance?

THE BLUE NILE: Family Life

Shadows of differing degrees of silver – the moon, the icicles – filter through most of Alan Spence’s Its Colours They Are Fine. A novel, a meditation disguised as a collection of short stories about growing up, growing old and growing out in and of Glasgow, it was published in 1977 and I recognised its chimes of limitation; starting with a childhood Christmas, impoverished and to a degree frustrated but still obtaining magic by means of innate goodness, and moving onward to the multiple disappointments and revelations which the rest of life will furnish; Shuggie, already doomed at eighteen, lashing out jealously at love rivals in the 1968 dancehall but still spellbound and transmutated by the power of the music he hears – Motown, “This Old Heart Of Mine” – the confusions and misplaced pride in Glasgow’s ongoing religious apartheid system (the book’s title comes from an old Orange Lodge marching song), the internal and external rebellions of a cross-religious wedding, the drift towards other, less easily definable worlds until the book ends about one street away from where it began but in a separate universe; the spirit finding its own nexus and axis.

And, above all, the story “The Palace,” about the middle-aged man, recently widowed, living in furnished rooms, waiting for life to reshow itself, finding small but immense magic in the second-hand markets, or just sitting in the Kibble Palace at the Botanic Gardens…waiting and perhaps praying quite a lot more than he is prepared to let on…

Much of this permeates “Family Life.” On every Blue Nile album there is a moment where time is literally stopped and emotions laid open and bare. On A Walk Across The Rooftops it was “Easter Parade”; on Hats it was “From A Late Night Train” (with its unconscious reminders of Hardy’s “On A Heath”). Peace At Last, the third Blue Nile album, came out in 1996 and received a muted reaction – the consensus was that they had become too glossy – but “Family Life,” buried deep at its core, is the cynosure of all of the group’s work, and I would argue that unless you grew up in Glasgow at a certain time you will be able to understand and inhabit the song only up to a point.

It’s Christmas Eve, and Paul Buchanan’s narrator is too ashamed even to let God look at him (“Starlight do you know me? Please don’t look at me now…I’m falling apart…”) but still he prays, his murmur frequently faltering into tears. “Jesus, love…let me down…and I know where you are…it might lead somewhere...” The song has to form around his emotion; it sounds as though he is watering a spring flower, out of season but perfect, in a cracked vase on a rotting sill. “Jesus, please…(he can scarcely resume going on at this point) make us happy sometimes…no more shout…no more fight…family life.” Note the singularity of that “shout” as though it is a person, a bogeyman, a demon which shatters all hope of goodness under that trembling roof. I do not recount how many times such thoughts flooded through my childhood mind.

But this isn’t quite the portrait of a boy wanting his mum and dad to get on and actually love each other, even if the narrator may be recalling his own childhood. “Tomorrow will be Christmas,” Buchanan sings with the heaviest sigh of dread any singer has ever applied to the season…the façade of the old songs, the pseudo-merry, and still the simmering hatred…

At the third “Jesus” – “Jesus, you…” – his voice swallows itself and he literally cannot go on; the piano continues to pick out the patient melody, with discreet strings weeping in the background…but somehow he manages to finish this entreaty: “Wipe the tears from her face/And the sound of his voice”…think about that latter; is he asking Jesus to wipe the sound of his voice. Does he – or she? - fear hearing it so much?

It is possible that each verse may be prayed from the perspective of a different narrator – husband, then child, then wife – or that it is all coming from the mind of this one tormented (and tormenting?) man who may himself be the cause of all the pain. At the end the whole song crouches down to allow his slow but vital breath: “Jesus, I go to sleep and I pray…for my kids…for my wife…family life.” I’m sure such thoughts flooded through his adult mind, too. Would that have excused what happened? Are we being asked to empathise or at least sympathise with a man who is substantially less than straightforward – or does he honestly feel that it’s all happening to him and this is why he…? But then – the whitening joy of Christmas lights, the soft candour of her touch in what was not a proper bed as such but it would do and they find peace within each other and let the bombs fall elsewhere, the elapsed evolution, the journey upwards and out of the mundane towards the nearly definable other – so leave a prayer for my dad too while you’re at it, because he didn’t get many in his life. I am only seven years behind him now but in all other senses a million miles away.

EELS: Susan's House

Was this really a top ten hit a decade ago? What were we dreaming? I can remember exactly where we were when we first heard "Susan's House" (and Eels); it was on Saturday mid-evening Radio 1 in one of those calmly golden lazy weekends we used to love. Stuart Maconie played it on his show as a sample off this interesting new album which at that moment was only available on import; we scooted off to HMV in Cornmarket Street Sunday lunchtime and there was one import copy (a bargain at £9!) in the racks. Like all the best music and musicians, it didn't quite fit anywhere in particular - a Boy's Own Cibo Matto with angst instead of recipes? A blackly comedic Beck? - and Beautiful Freak, the album, managed to be simultaneously unsettling and comforting; the Generation X lullaby of the title track ("And I'll be here to see that you don't fade away") is still profoundly moving.

But "Susan's House" got the nerve conduction studies going; a waking dream of a less than golden kind...he walks through this muffled landscape, the music scraping its way through a fog of dread; he sees the crazy old woman smashing bottles, the paramedics stripping down the shot kid, Echo Park, Baywatch seeping into black, crack spammers, the popsicle and the pram...but there's no Travis Bickle vengeance programme at work here; if he starts a little smug ("Nothing hiding behind this picket fence") he ends up furtively watching his own breath ("And I keep walking"). A Strawberry Fields where he wishes none of this was real.

And all of this contrasts with the rest, the pause, the meditation, the pledge to continue until he reaches Susan's house ("She's gonna make it right," "I can't be alone tonight") with the notion that it is far realer than Paolo's Chinese house; the fog clears, the sunshine and blue blink, an old Gladys Knight electric piano beeps a welcome (sampled the wholly appositely titled "Love Finds Its Own Way" - and I didn't have to look that one up) and Mr E becomes plaintive, almost noble; what struck us at the time was how the chorus suddenly turned "Susan's House" into a Blue Nile song...the purity determined not to be contaminated by what stumbles or avoids its path. Let's go in tonight.

MARI WILSON AND THE WILSATIONS: Baby It's True

Almost a decade and a half ahead of Mike Flowers, there were Neasden, and beehives, and Mari Wilson; a #42 hit in the shining month of New Pop that was May 1982, “Baby It’s True” was probably prohibited from climbing any further by having its tongue stuck slightly too firmly in its cheek – the deadpan Home Counties spoken intro, including the immortal tag line: “It’s been a long time since I saw my baby – in fact…I can hardly remember what he looks like” – but is still Mari’s masterpiece, and also that of writer Teddy Johns, as a (relatively) mainstream follow-up to the still extraordinarily adventurous “Beat The Beat,” a #59 hit from earlier in the year composed by Tot Taylor and initiating a Sondheim New Pop perspective which nobody appears to have followed up.

As a simulacrum of 1968 CBS Brit bubblegum aspiring to Motown, “Baby It’s True” is hard to beat; from its opening cyclical bassline, soon joined and doubled up by lead guitar – a line so good it crops up largely unaltered in the Belle Stars’ top three hit “Sign Of The Times” eight months later – the layers of keyboards, drums, alto sax and strings are steadily applied, and once Wilson gets past her “out there in Radioland” spiel, the song opens up with its Sisyphean staircase of unrequited absence (“I CAN’T/Stop MY/Self FROM/LO-VING-you and/I CAN’T…”); she sings the first verse’s quintuplet of “baby, baby, baby, baby, baby” as though falling down that staircase backwards in slow motion, or even reluctantly tap dancing her way back down the stairs. After the second chorus, she absents herself briefly to make way for an extremely May 1982 arrangement of salsa(ish) beats, Gary Kemp guitar and Harry Beckett trumpet (which sounds as though Beckett may have played the solo himself; compare and contrast with Weekend’s “View From Her Room” from the same month) before gliding back in with a deftly agonised “I NEED you too!” and renewing her pleas for the absent Other to answer her prayer and make her so very happy (all those references and subtexts gradually accumulating) before the final, glorious, key-changing ascent of the chorus into the shiny yellow stratosphere with Wilson’s joyful high-note exclamations of “I can’t stop myself!” and then one more unexpected chord change, a flurry of Motown piccolos before the end with the bass droning and then sliding upwards and out like Marianne’s motorcycle. “Baby It’s True” transcends its own inbuilt irony, much as its smarter, richer Northern cousin “The Look Of Love” does; a Eurovision winner if anybody wants it, and a future number one single for any performer astute enough to seek it out.

BLUR: Popscene

The beginning of Britpop time, marooned in an era which did not yet have the time for it, “Popscene” was barely acknowledged – another shoegazer hourglass licking the final atoms of sand was the general shoulder-shrug reaction – and as with that other 1992 denied pop future “Avenue” glanced half-heartedly into the Top 40 (one week at number 32 over Easter) before driving off in a huff. Although Blur have continued to perform the song live, they treated “Popscene” as the record Britain didn’t deserve; it is conspicuously absent from Modern Life Is Rubbish – though does appear on the American and Japanese editions – and from the Best Of Blur compilation.

Revving up like a lawnmower fighting the wasp back, or a motor not yet headed anywhere, Graham Coxon’s self-swamping guitars provoke a determinedly stern Mod-punk rhythm before the mighty central riff is declaimed by masses of brass, glide guitar and near unnoticeable harmonium (the latter two stay for the verses). Then Damon appears to spit at whatever dream has been lost (“A fervoured image of another world is nothing in particular now”), accusing British rock of settling for limp MBV/Nirvana xeroxes (“And everyone is a clever clone/A chrome coloured clone am I”), hammering against the Camden Underworld toilet door of indifference (“Just repeat this again and again…and aGAAAAIN!”) before sneering his ball of demolition in the chorus (“Hey, hey, come out tonight…PopSCENE! All RIGHT!!”).

Coxon’s guitar “solo” does its best to erase the song while Damon speaks of running away from cliché only to find another cliché (“No queues and no panic there/Just dangling your feet in the grass”); he doesn’t quite know what he’s aiming for yet (“My lack of natural lustre now/Seems to be losing me friends”) but wants, needs it to be better than the scene which celebrates French fisherman’s stripy jumpers (“So in the absence of a way of life…”).

“Popscene” is a monstrous call to arms, and the irony of its aptness in relation to the 1996/7 post-Britpop ruination need not be underlined. Yet its commercial and critical failure may be more ascribable to the fact that, judging by what else was in that April Top 40 which wasn’t the product of dinosaurs or bland American Idol antecedents, there was a pop scene in full flourish, namely rave and everything which stemmed and arose from it. It’s possible that Albarn was calling for “rock” to take this on, in spirit if not in form, but few were in the mood to heed Albarn’s calls; in that year’s Rollercoaster tour, which also involved Dinosaur Jr, MBV and the Mary Chain, Blur seemed to be disinterestedly making up the numbers. But still, that motor had started up, and the journey across the Westway and back into the heart of something couldn’t be delayed for much longer.

LESLEY DUNCAN: Love Song

The early seventies weren’t just about the glam. They were about the successive hangovers from the sixties (artistically) and the thirties (socially – walk in and around the Glasgow of 1973 and it might as well have been 1933; everyone firmly in some other time’s place), about the whispered dread of imminent apocalypse, huddled up in a blanketed corner, about kids from the Catholic school trying to run you over with their bikes, about the loss of power, about black and white, oranges squashed with a hammer and other public safety horror films, about trying not to die…

…about picking up the pieces, about finding the resources and the will to make new ones, about things and people left over from ’67, about Lesley Duncan, whose songs I heard on Radio 2 all the time as a child when not drowned out by the brand new roar of the Zanussi washing machine, who may have appeared on The Two Ronnies or similar Shows Of The Week, about grasping something before it becomes lost forever…

“The words I have to say may well be simple but they’re true…”

…about her “Love Song,” which has subsequently been covered by everyone in the world, from Elton John to Olivia Newton-John, from Julio Iglesias to Pitman, but none of these, but none, touches the stranded strand of the original, as sung and performed by the writer herself…

…about her record trying not to be a record, about it sounding as remote a ghost in 2007 as Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was The Night” even though she is still here, but it sounds like a refugee from an elapsed time capsule, as if she just picked up the guitar in the corner of her kitchen and sang the song while the world spun around her, about the ironically jaunty whistling at the beginning of the record, welcoming a new day not everyone wished to see, and Lesley Duncan, her voice resonant and firm but not harsh, gently asking for the whole scenario to be pummelled to bits (“Until you give your love, there’s nothing more that we can do”), asking her ’67 people not to forget ’67 (“Love is what we came here for/No one could offer you more…do you know what I mean? Have your eyes really seen?”), knowing that nettles have to be grasped and that fear of scratches outweighs living death (“You say it’s very hard to leave behind the life we knew/But there’s no other way, and now it’s really up to you”). Electric piano flurries kiss the stale air like doves wearing down a blockade of smog…

“Love is the key we must turn. Truth is the flame we must burn. Freedom the lesson we must learn. Do you know what I mean?”

…about the singer vanishing into her own song, the cars and buses passing by outside her third floor window, the barely audible exchanges downstairs, past the close and out into the street (“Please miss,” “Next time round”), about the jangling of keys or is it spare change, about taking the money, about preferring to take the chance and run, about not glueing ourselves to a world now spent…”Well, play something on the piano” as an old lady, probably older than the century, croaks out the sincerest “Lili Marlene” she’s ever heard and it’s time to go, about the cupboard exploding, about time running out, about not always leaving all options open, about Jessica Niblick, about what if Lesley Duncan’s name had been Vashti Bunyan, about all of us moving or wanting to move in the same direction, about striding out from beneath the blankets of blue, about dusting down the portholes, about opening them up and breathing in roses…a shilling in the meter and a deposit for the palace of the future…do you know what I mean? Have your eyes really been seen?

SINEAD O'CONNOR: Success Has Made A Failure Of Our Home

The story that Sinead has offered Britney her home as a refuge is heartwarming, even if the offer is unlikely to be taken up; the right of women to go mad, to break down, and not be ridiculed or vilified for doing so, and even, or especially, to be helped gently back to recovery, cannot be underemphasised, particularly in a world which otherwise shows all the signs of regressing to the Dark Ages. Doherty is cheered; Winehouse is jeered.

Recent interviews find Sinead to have achieved at least some semblance of peace and contentment, and she deserves both more than most. In 1992 the sales of her own psychotherapeutic covers album, Am I Not Your Girl?, were demonstrably hit by the controversy spun around her exercising the democratic right to speak her own mind, and so its unresolved journey from childhood pain to abuse and exploitation was largely missed. “Success” was originally a C&W weepie made famous by Loretta Lynn early in her career; O’Connor and (re)arranger Doug Katsaros leave only the tune intact but change the harmonies and mood entirely. She has suggested that the performance can be viewed as an allegorical statement on prosperous Britain using its monied lever to suppress the Irish; whether it can be applied to her own situation at the time is debatable, though I note the prominent credit to then-husband John Reynolds on drums.

Thus “Success” gets the swooning Broadway treatment with an ominously confident tread of a rhythm which seems to approach from another direction entirely; during verses trumpets and trombones snarl out from unexpected angles, strings shimmer uncertainly in the middleground, and at the point where it looks about to grind to an elegiac halt, with her whispered sob “of our home,” Reynolds kicks the orchestra back towards its systematically more unsettling coda; the song and sentiments now entirely Sinead’s: “I never changed,” “You’re killing me,” and finally a repeated and increasingly frantic rosary of the semi-rhetorical question “Am I not your girl?” as the luxurious surroundings deconstruct behind and to both sides of her, melting into a barrage of free noise as the players steadily break into collective improvisation like a thousand resentful butterflies – not a thousand miles away from the climax of Septober Energy, although these are studio players rather than jazz improvisers per se; still, Lew Soloff is prominent on cackling trumpet, and several of the players were veterans of Mingus’ Let My Children Hear Music sessions (not to mention Bob Carlisle, from Escalator, among the French horns). The catharsis dies down, still unresolved (“Am I not…?”) before an untidy final chord abruptly terminated by the conductor’s whistle. Bulging with emotion and scope never likely to fit into a Top 20 – and yet it did go Top 20 as a single – “Success” marks a success for “our” side, though we should be careful not to wash our hands in unaccountable pools of ecstasy over her grief when the point is to help us to decodify and understand it.

EAST RIVER PIPE: Party Drive

FM Cornog has put out many albums under the East River Pipe name, and will doubtless continue to do so; but 1999’s The Gasoline Age is the one which has stuck with me. It is the record I have turned to for those especially lonesome, auburn-lit journeys; at the time, Thursday mornings on the 400 bus to Headington, walking the last ten minutes to the John Radcliffe Hospital for my weekly physiotherapy, cars slow, no one really about, or lunchtime Oxford Tubes back home, not in a rush, but the mind in a mess; ominous sunny mornings in Abingdon, Saturday lunchtime bus rides to unfathomable places like Tolworth. Or the number 11 bus, cruising through the nearly empty City before coming to rest at the temporarily abandoned Liverpool Street terminal. Times when you’ve no real places to go and you’re looking to grasp something but as yet haven’t quite worked out what.

The Gasoline Age is like that; 45 minutes of sedate, secluded cruising through electroindie dreams of motion, coming to a wasted but gracious halt in some unspecified bypass within walking distance of time. The nearly ten-minute delicate climax of “Atlantic City (Gonna Make A Million Tonight)” is the record’s probable masterpiece, an ineffable arch of sadness; but “Party Drive” has remained my personal favourite (though really the album needs to be experienced as a whole, continuous entity). With lugubrious synthesisers and drum machines which recall nothing so much as the Springsteen of Tunnel Of Love – simultaneously his sleekest and most desolate record – Cornog sings, in an unsteady bass croon rising to a slightly more confident contralto, about driving away, driving anywhere, as the music proceeds in a stately manner behind him with intensely moving chord changes while the lyric systematically debunks Motley Crue-type concepts of “partying”; he sings words like “Cigarettes, cans of beer/Piled up in the rear,” “Route 26? Or 22?/A joint for me, pills for you” and “Summer nights, no cops in sight” but he sings of a wounded retreat rather than triumphalist Porkyisms. They’re off somewhere, or perhaps to nowhere, the destination less feared than the starting point – “You can break my bones, but don’t take me home!” he pleads repeatedly, “Just drive – the party drive.” He sounds as though he is being driven to the edge of the world, afraid of what he might see if he dares to peer over. A beautiful study of solitude which reminds me why I never want to be alone again.

LESTER BOWIE: The Great Pretender

Thinking about Richard Cook, and by extension about Lester Bowie doing “Thriller” as opposed to Jacko – assuming that there even needs to be an “opposition” – reminds me that this Bowie did understand the mechanics and emotions of pop to a sublime degree. Indeed, through his involvement as arranger and lead trumpeter on Fontella Bass’ “Rescue Me,” one could argue that he helped lay the ground on which the werewolf Jackson could prowl. “The Great Pretender,” though, is his key to the pop kingdom. Recorded in June 1981 as the title track of an album he made for ECM – it was released in May 1982, at the height of New Pop, received rave reviews and incredibly (especially from this distance) very nearly charted – Bowie is perceptible on the front cover only as a white-suited wraith, intangible at the far end of a murkily blue pond in the “Atmosphere” dead of night; it is no accident that the album’s final track is entitled “Oh, How The Ghost Sings.”

On the nearly seventeen-minute title track he is accompanied by a group of mainly non-stars; only long-time collaborators Phillip Wilson (drums) and Hamiet Bluiett (baritone sax) would have been well known at the time (as well as the occasional backing vocals of David Peaston and the aforementioned Fontella), and pianist Donald Smith and bassist Fred Williams never seem to have become “big,” which in Smith’s case at least seems an injustice. The Platters original would have been familiar to the teenage Bowie’s turntable – as perhaps was Stan Freberg’s brilliant parody with the recalcitrant jazz session pianist itching to play anything other than “cling-cling-cling” – but Bowie uses the song as a basis for exploring everything he feels about music and his chosen instrument, rather than just pop alone. Certainly the track gives rein to his full range of techniques; opening with Smith’s grave, rumbling piano, Bowie’s trumpet kisses with tremulous intimacy, a tender tribute to Miles, perhaps even an unspecified requiem, leaning close to the listener’s ear, so close you can hear him breathing. Then abruptly he jumps back, increases his volume – and the band evolve, or groan, into being behind him – and interspersing darting, Mongezi Feza-style runs with raspberries, slurs and half-valve burps. This in turn leads to Bowie’s hilarious Freddy Kruger-style slurring/cackling recitation of “Yes, I’m the great pre-TEN-DER!” before he swings the tune into familiar action, complete with authentic 1956 doo-wop piano and sax honks. Even then he refuses to play it straight, with acute octave leaps as though having just sat on a pin cushion, howls, entreaties, slowing the “oh-ah-oh-ah” backing vocal bridge to a funereal crawl before “YEAH!”ing the tune back into focus.

Then he gives way to Bluiett’s solo, as the rhythm section swings into a Brubeckian 3/4 tempo, but even this doesn’t remain stable for too long since Bluiett soon slides into his habitual “tonight Matthew I’m going to be John Surman” upper register squeaks and incontinent freakouts. Smith initially comps deadpan but soon moves into Keith Tippett abstraction, followed by both sax and piano winding in and out of freedom and tune. Bowie re-enters to calm things down, authoritatively authorising Smith’s still rampant piano antics, before taking the temperature yet further down to engage in pointillistic free group interplay; Bluiett briefly roars back into focus for a tumultuous free-for-all but Smith’s piano insistently polices the proceedings, allowing Bowie’s valve manipulation slowly to gather the pieces of the song back together. Bowie teases, hints, doesn’t quite reveal, but finally – and absolutely on cue with a triumphant “YAYYYYY!!!!” goes right back into the tune, on beat and on key. He comes down one final time – Bluiett’s baritone now taking the deadpan comping role – with some sensual trumpet talk, including a brief agitated moment where he seems to be disentangling a pair of underpants from the bell of his horn, before coming back for the final chorus, played with Satchmo pride, and then brings the performance to its natural end, returning gradually to his opening, muted tenderness of remembrance – before signing off with “I’m here, baby! I’m HEEEERRRRE! I’ve arrIIIIIIved!” and ghostly chuckles which exactly parallel those of Vincent Price on the original “Thriller.” He knew how to prowl around pop, all right.

GEORGE KRANZ: Din Daa Daa (Trommeltanz)

Released right at the end of 1983, and one of the first dance records to pick up on what Art Of Noise were playing at, “Din Daa Daa” is an unprecedented, even on a Sandy Nelson/Cozy Cole/Cozy Powell basis, and unrepeated piece of iced avant-bubblegum. Built around a DAF-type vocal sample of the title, drummer Kranz proceeds to have a mental breakdown, barking, hissing and screeching his drum patterns as he plays them – “boomboomboom BAP DAP do-do BASH!” “Ratatatatatatatataaa rrratatatatatatattt” – sometimes going into prolonged screams, but all the while skilfully building up the tension until the record breaks free of the water to become an oceanic jewel of deep sea synthesisers and a second, longer post-Duck Rock vocal sample for the bassline of the chorus, not that that stops Herr Kranz from shrieking or paradiddling.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, the record remains a guaranteed boggler of any mind, and I have always been quietly been delighted by the fact that it was arranged and produced by Christoph Franke, then still a key member of Tangerine Dream, since if it was Phaedra which first fired up the young Morley’s imagination sufficiently enough to get into music, write about it and eventually produce it, then there’s a lovely completion of the circle as Tangerine Dream derive renewed inspiration from something Morley dreamed up on a wet Wednesday afternoon. Given that an early and seldom heralded member of the Tangs was Peter Brötzmann (what I’d pay to hear tapes of those recordings, if any exist!) I think I can conclude with at least semi-authority that if Han Bennink had ever set out to make a dance record, “Din Daa Daa” would have been it. The breakthrough mid-song is like opening the windows wide on a Arctically cold December morning and letting the whitened sunshine flood your world with implications of warmth.

P J HARVEY: The Mountain

My first instinctive thought when I heard about White Chalk was: she’s trying to do a Cat Power with her prepared pianos and ruminatively mournful lyrics. But P J Harvey is one of the few artists whose records I still instinctively buy on the basis of trust. Usually she works best at extremes – the labiodental expectorations of Rid Of Me or the unsettled silences of Is This Desire? – and I must say I’m glad that she’s decided to pursue the path opened up by the latter, for me still her most undervalued record. Such gladness, however, is not necessarily balanced out by the will to listen repeatedly, because as stark records go White Chalk is blacker than Dylan Thomas’ Bible; ancient sounding tack pianos, a “broken harp,” caressed or singed zithers, space and crusted pauses, barely coaxing itself over half an hour. And there are scores to settle, with families who didn’t want her, with grandmothers she misses, hammers into heads, conveyor belts and Dorset, a future as hopeless as Tess’ or Jude’s.

“The Mountain” is the final track and offers climax but no redemption. Pianos ripple a riff which would have given Kate E Mellower or Kate E Turnstile a hit in a different, whiter arrangement, but Harvey simply lets the riff ripple into its own stagnant pool. She stretches the words – the eagle calling the faltering soldier on the mountain, prey or saviour? – in a manner familiar to anyone who knows the Julie Tippetts of Sunset Glow. As the keyboard refractions intensify and an inhuman bass undertow appears, however, she proclaims “By the mountain I feel nothing, for in my own heart, every tree is broken.” The zither appears to be slashed with a Stanley knife, and finally firm but minimalist drums enter as she screams to sky and ocean alike, “Since you betrayed me so” in a voice high and desperate enough to puncture the stars, the music pulsating with etiolated memories of “Beatrix” by the Cocteau Twins – that other otherness – finishing with a sopranino death rattle squeal of “Since you”…and then cutoff. Even then, though, you know she’ll be back moaning about her hairdresser on the next album. Like Wyatt or Walker or Coleman, I stick by her, if not to her.

PAOLO CONTE: La Casa Cinese

Paolo Conte also reminds me of my dad. He looks nothing like him, and likes his cigarettes whereas my dad was a stalwart pipe man, but there is that same golden, verging on auburn, Sunday autumn morning melancholy about his bearing. But 2004’s Elegia album feels like the expression of an encroaching melancholy from which there is no return; although he turns seventy this year, it still seems premature to view Elegia as his last word, since his partial Montreal doppelganger Leonard Cohen remains firmly productive fifteen years after recording “Waiting For The Miracle.” But there is a sense of deep hurt and loss throughout the recital, words about wanting to be hugged and held if he can’t get his music back, wondering what he would do if he lost it. In a lot of ways he is what Serge Gainsbourg might have turned into had he survived to seventy and developed a mournful perspective on his life and the world, physical and aesthetic, which ensured his birth. I am sure that Conte, as with Gainsbourg (and Van Morrison), had his youthful ear firmly cupped to the steam radio, waiting for AFN’s Stars Of Jazz to filter through the static; Bird and Diz, Miles and Sonny, an escape from his banal surroundings, even though he remains a citizen of his original birthplace of Asti.

Some of Elegia is typically very funny, including the marvellous “Frisco” where he lopes along, semi-drunk, valuing the Bay as an ancient wonder more precious than Memphis or Luxor while his band warm up on some old Don Redman charts behind him. But most of it seems to find him retaining only the scarcest hold on life, his world and sanity. “La Casa Cinese” – “The Chinese House” – is a comparatively miniaturist piece but in its stark abnegation of wonder is as bleak as anything on the current PJ Harvey album. Over doggedly anchored piano and double bass he looks at the man – or is it a mirror image of himself? – “searching for a street…here’s a naked soul...” while the chorus is an agonised, gravelly hum soundtracked by a poignant, Carla Bley-ish clarinet top line. “Just what are you searching for over there? There’s the Chinese house…painted blue…”; the lyrics are helpfully printed in French and English in the CD booklet as well as the original Italian, so I must point out the subtle reference to “Volare” which his performance gives in that “painted blue.” At the “blue” a sudden avalanche of agitated strings makes itself known before dying back down, receding into the darkening gloom (“This darkness doesn’t help/If anything, it forgives us…”). He wonders how much the changes in his life have negated, or strengthened, his original desire (“Memory is enchanted/Yes, that’s what you want…/Thoughts that no longer apply/Have you changed them? I don’t know”), but finally knows that the Grail he seeks has long since vanished, or possibly never even existed: “You’re asking me about a street/Anything you like/But the Chinese house/That you won’t find.” Or, translated into a chant I used to hear in my Glasgow youth all the time: “If you’d’ve been where I’d’ve been you would’ve seen the Fairy Queen!” And then Gauguin’s Nevermore. The piano steadily winds the song down like a music box coming to the end of its programmed pirouette; has he the energy to wind it up again? At my dad’s age, I think I understand the feeling now.

FUNKY MONKEY: Peaceman

The musical factor which tends to make me most homesick for 1967 is that of the gargantuan, opulently compressed orchestra. There’s been a lot of reminiscing on radio of late with the 40th anniversaries of Radios 1 and 2 and the concurrent demise of pirate radio, but it’s the hugeness, the cavernous echoes, which speak to me most dearly – think of George Martin’s original “Theme One” (described by a veteran BBC producer at the time, and not altogether disapprovingly, as “William Walton gone mad”) or David Sinclair Whitaker’s 16 rpm reworking of “The Last Time” (later the foundation of “Bitter Sweet Symphony”) or Mark Wirtz’s piccolo trumpets, harpsichords and Home Service strings on “Excerpt From A Teenage Opera.” And that’s without mentioning Wally Stott and Peter Knight’s work on the first Scott Walker album, let alone “A Day In The Life.” Of their time, yet simultaneously behind and ahead of it, this music still speaks to me of promises – some fulfilled, others trampled over in the progress of time.

“Peaceman” inspires similar feelings in me; if Radio Caroline had still been a going concern in 1998/9, I could well imagine their using this as a station ID, or an anthem. Funky Monkey – which seems essentially to have been producer and sometime Saint Etienne collaborator Gerard Johnson - were one of a thousand Big Beat hopefuls of the period; their records were diverting (extra chutzpah points for including the original, undiluted Oliver Nelson Six Million Dollar Man theme on their debut, Come Together People Of Funk) if not especially radical, and apart from the unsatisfactory compilation Join Us In Tomorrow, with a considerably inferior six-minute mix of “Peaceman,” their work has vanished from the racks.

No, “Peaceman” must be heard in its original, slowly unfolding, ten-minute, ten-second version. It begins with a Bach prelude played on a string synth which is steadily engulfed by the sound of riots and police sirens; a police radio voiceover (“Big shanks, good shanks”?) is turned into the foundation of the track as the beats systematically make their entrance; first one rhythm, then a grittier overlay, followed by electric piano and bass. Comparisons with Primal Scream’s “Come Together” would not be farfetched, except “Peaceman” is faster and slightly brighter.

An intriguing harmonic sequence is developed by the electric piano (using the initially cited Bach melodic sequence as a springboard) and the bass over the now danceable rhythm, until, at 4:45, the sunrise of synthesised strings, playing a gorgeously painful major/minor melody, casts its yellow shadow over the proceedings. A rhythm breakdown follows until the melody re-enters, reinforced, at 6:47, followed at 7:22 by Denise Johnson’s voice (hence the Primal Scream connection) singing, or intoning, “Come together, people of funk.” I think of Number 6, freed and back in London, on the verge of tears as he surveys the Houses of Parliament and the South Bank, with “Peaceman”’s swelling melody in my ears and mind. Listening to it is like standing on top of Parliament Hill Fields as the clouds steadily begin to clear, the Highgate church spire behind me, the city ahead of me…it is lump in the throat time. Finally the music fades away to leave the electric pianist (billed on the credits as “Vegas Love”) improvising on the chord sequence (cf. Anne Dudley’s piano at the end of the album version of Art of Noise’s “Beat Box”) before drifting into another song altogether and then swiftly ending with a final flourish. A masterpiece which deserves salvation from wherever you can find it.