Discover Weekly #4

It’s taken almost a week to get round to writing this. Not because I can’t think of anything to say (that’s a rare occurrence) or because there’s any great difficulty in saying something about the next tune in this series. I had the Cassette piece in my head and wanted to get that done first. And then, for the second time in three months, my mother has been admitted to hospital.

I won’t go into it too much but my mother’s residence, and indeed the hospital, are around 40 minutes away from me. My sister lives a lot closer and has taken on a lot of the visiting duties, but I’ve been heading up when I can. My sister and I have had some lengthy phone calls around various aspects surrounding this hospital admission as it’s looking more serious than the previous one. So spare time and motivation to write have been limited this week.

Anyway.

9th January saw a new list and sitting in 9th place on the playlist was…no…surely not…I MUST have got that on a playlist somewhere! But I hadn’t (please note the use of the past tense there – the situation has now been rectified).

Despite the fairly traumatic nature of this week, this song has been going through my head pretty much all the time when I haven’t been listening to anything else.

How on earth this has evaded any previous listing, or indeed that its absence had failed to come to my attention, is beyond me. I’d even gone to the trouble of putting Juxtapozed With U from the same album onto a couple of playlists.

Super Furry Animals are a bit of a strange one for me. I like pretty much everything I’ve ever heard from them and have five of their first six albums, including the one from which this is the title track. But if you asked me to list my Top However Many Favourite Bands, they’d be some way down the list. I’ve been thinking about this and have a couple of thoughts as to why this might be the case.

1 – I used to work with a guy, a few years younger than me, who had heard the band before I did and was genuinely an enormous fan. I mean, he even used to name his Fantasy Football teams after their songs – what greater accolade can there be? Any liking of the band on my part paled into insignificance in comparison, and they didn’t feel like “my” band.

2 – They were at their peak in the late 90’s / early 00’s, just as small people that demanded constant attention were appearing chez TGG. I know full well that I didn’t spend the time with albums purchased during this period in the same way that I did in the previous fifteen to twenty years. As as result, bands from this era spring less readily to mind when coming up with those lists.

Whatever – it’s a top quality tune and if you’ve clicked on the link at any point whilst reading this, I’ll wager it’s well and truly lodged in your head now. And I don’t feel sorry about that at all.

TGG

January 15, 2023

1. 

   george

   January 16, 2023

   Tune not lodged in my head but has inspired me to play LoveKraft

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2. 

   Charity Chic

   January 20, 2023

   Sorry to hear your mum is poorly
   Old age is a bugger.

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3. 

   JC

   February 5, 2023

   As CC said.

   I’m also with you on SFA in that I have and really enjoy all of the early albums; I’ve seen and loved them in the live setting. But if I was to compile a list of may all-time favourite acts, they wouldn’t make the Top 50…..maybe not even the Top 100.

   I’ve too much affection for the late 70s/early-mid 80s music to not have it dominate, while lots of singers/bands of the 21st Century have made a huge impact on me as the blogging days got underway and have continued. SFA, like many others, fall in between two stools.

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The Cassette Albums #1: World Party – “Private Revolution”

It was early March 1987. Probably (*1).

My then-girlfriend (Mt-g) and I are just starting the two mile walk from the one large supermarket in the city centre back to her student house. A VW Transporter van pulls in just ahead of us and I recognise instantly the face that appears out of the front passenger window. “Hey!”, I say, “It’s Karl Wallinger!”. I rush over to said van, barely noticing that Mt-g hasn’t actually moved at all. “Hiya, we’re looking for the King’s Head”, says Mr W. I politely inform him that there isn’t a King’s Head – does he perchance mean the King’s Arms, known for having rooms to let? He confers with the driver. They decide that it might be the King’s Arms. “In which case the bad news is that you missed the turning for it a couple of blocks ago. And the even worse news is that you’ll have to go right round the one way system to get to it now. Sorry – mad I know” (Thinking to myself all the time that I curse whoever came up with this bloody road system because I’ve just had to give some bad news to a guy who appears on some records that I own). Mr W seems quite chipper given the earth-shattering inconvenience that I’ve just made him aware of, thanks me very much and bids me good day. And off they drive.

I return to Mt-g. “Was he one of those people from your course? I thought you didn’t bother with them. (*2) What were you talking about?” Perhaps a little too smugly, I advise her as to who I’ve just been speaking. “Why didn’t you ask for some tickets for the gig tomorrow?” My next words are way too smug. “Er, because it’s pay on the door”. “Well you should at least have got his autograph”. At some stage in my life, I have taken to carrying a pen round with me all the time. This episode predates that. My response of “Haven’t got a pen on me” ensures an unusually quiet walk back to her house.

We did go to the gig – sadly, there was no dedication to “that guy in the audience with the glasses and the overcoat who gave us directions yesterday”. Half the audience were probably sporting overcoats. A reasonable percentage were probably bespectacled.

Private Revolution, purchased on cassette at some point in 1987, is an interesting album. Wallinger’s influences from the Beatles and Dylan among others, are very obvious, and it’s a very un-1986 album (apparently its year of release), given that students seemed to be the target audience. World Party were neither C86 nor goth, which covered petty much everyone else who performed there that term. I’d bought the title track as a 12″ single after seeing a clip on the TV and really enjoyed all the tracks thereon. Having played the album in its entirety twice over the last few days, there was a real familiarity which suggests I’d played it a lot more than I realised back in the days of cassette. I wouldn’t have said it’s my favourite World Party album (and all the ones I have were cassette purchases, so my view may change as I revisit those) but I’ve certainly reconnected with the song World Party, which I’d forgotten how much I liked. Sadly, Spotify users disagree and at the time of writing it has around 1% of the plays that Ship Of Fools has.

I’ll probably come to Ship Of Fools in a series I’m planning for the future about songs that never made the UK Top 40, but seem to have done a lot better elsewhere – or something along those lines. It’s an idea and no more right now. I’ll leave you with the title track that started my liking for this band.

And yes, that is Sinead O’Connor on backing vocals.

*1 – the gig I refer to is not on Setlist.fm, but there were other Uni gigs that month, so March 1987 it was. Probably.

*2 – Mt-g and I had been an item for long enough that she knew pretty much all of my acquaintances. She thought it odd that I didn’t socialise with anyone who was on my course, but just with other music geeks, the radio station crowd and some board gamers. “But they only ever want to talk about the course”, I said, “and frankly I don’t. It’s bad enough going to the bloody lectures….” I got a third.

TGG

January 12, 2023

1. 

   barrystubbs

   January 12, 2023

   “I got a third”.

   Biggest lol of the day so far. A great tale.

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2. 

   baggingarea

   January 15, 2023

   I have a bunch of cassettes from this period, often bought like you for either financial reasons or because of extra songs. Although I have nothing to play them on, finding them brought a bit of a rush of nostalgia.

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   1. 

      thegreatgog

      January 15, 2023

      Mine are buried in a corner of the study mentioned in the blog title. I had to move all manner of things out of the way to take some quick photos of the ones I felt I might want to write about. I find their presence reassuring. Mrs TGG does not.

      On a separate note, remiss of me not to have your blog on my list. I’ll add it on once I can remember how to do it.

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      1. 

         baggingarea

         January 16, 2023

         ‘I find their presence reassuring. Mrs TGG does not.’ Very relatable.

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Coming Soon: The Cassette Albums

From around 1982 until 1993 or thereabouts, I purchased several albums on cassette. The majority of my purchases, certainly until 1988 were on vinyl, but I do have a significant number of pre-recorded cassette albums.

The albums from the early years, up to July 1988, were bought mainly because my record emporium of choice at the moment of purchase didn’t have said album available on vinyl, or the cassette version was in a sale (I was a student between 1984 and 1987 and again for a brief spell in early 1988, so I was easily swayed by discount offerings).

July 1988 saw me purchase my first car (a dilapidated 9 year-old VW Derby, nicknamed the “Debris” by my mates as bits used to regularly fall off it – door handles, wing mirrors, random bits of metal from underneath….). But it did have a radio / cassette player, which probably accounted for about half the value of the vehicle. It was at this point where a total proliferation of cassette albums began. Why bother buying the vinyl when I’d have to transfer it onto a cassette to play in the car? I could just get a pre-recorded cassette instead – one or two even had bonus extra tracks!

It all ended abruptly in July 1993, when the future Mrs TGG and I started living together. To celebrate this momentous occasion, we splashed out on a CD player to add to our collective hi-fi equipment. Blur’s Modern Life Is Rubbish heralded the new dawn of what is a scarily huge collection of CDs. Within a couple of years, we had cars with CD players and the cassette albums have been pretty much gathering dust ever since, grand survivors of Mrs TGG’s many culls of “your crap”.

Some of those albums have been replaced with CD versions over the years – pretty much everything by R.E.M. and The Smiths among others. But many of those albums have not been played by me in their entirety for over a quarter of a century. I’m not sure what state the cassette tapes are actually in these days, and the sound quality of the one remaining device we have which is capable of playing them is somewhat grim. Thank goodness for streaming services.

This new series will see me revisiting these albums and seeing which, if any, I really wish I’d listened to a lot more over the last twenty-five years.

I’ve just listened to the album about which I intend to write the first article, and it will include a mention of a brief chat I had with the lead vocalist of said album (don’t get too excited, it’s unlikely to feature in his memoirs).

For some reason, this tune has been going through my head whilst typing the above.

TGG

January 7, 2023

Discover Weekly #3

My freshly curated playlist on Monday 2nd January had a song by Australian band, Flash And The Pan as its second tune.

For the UK reader with a long enough memory, Flash And The Pan are only really remembered for their 1983 #7 hit, Waiting For A Train. This was an annoyingly catchy tune that I bought early on in its rise up the Charts and was heartily fed up with it by the time it departed. I think thereafter it sat on the shelf, unplayed, for the best part of a decade. Absence made the heart grow fonder and I do now allow myself occasional listens, smiling all the while at the erratic music-buying patterns I had as a 17 year-old. At the ripe old age of 56, they haven’t really moved on all that much if I’m honest.

Anyway. That’s not the tune on my playlist. Nor is the featured tune their other UK Chart entry (yes it’s true, they’re not quite a one hit wonder). That tune is Down Among The Dead Men, from their 1978 debut album, which got to the giddy heights of #54 that year, although for some reason it was called And The Band Played On with the other title in brackets when released as a single in the UK.

The featured track is also from the debut album and was the b-side to their first single a couple of years earlier. At first glance when I looked at the list I thought it said Waiting For A Train. Then I cleaned my glasses and realised it was actually Walking In The Rain. Playing it, it seemed very deadpan and downbeat and also vaguely familiar. Was it a Waiting For A Train prototype? Well, possibly, but, no, there was something else. That’s it – Grace Jones! She did a cover of it on her 1981 Nightclubbing album (it’s the lead track).

Familiarity leads me to preferring Ms Jones’ version, but in all fairness I’d find some entertainment value in Grace Jones menacingly reciting a telephone directory to music.

So this Flash And The Pan track is unlikely to make it onto any of my existing playlists, largely because one of my “rules” is not to have two versions of the same song on any of them. But it’s here with an unofficial video as it was just a tad too early for MTV to be a consideration.

TGG

January 6, 2023

Alan Rankine R.I.P.

And so we lose another talented musician at far too early an age.

There will be others who are far more au fait with the early Associates output than I am. Party Fears Two was my conscious introduction to the band, although I may have heard tracks before then without them registering. I certainly made efforts to explore the earlier recordings once they did cross over into the Top 40, and have enjoyed those songs for may years since.

I can’t see any videos for the pre-Sulk songs, which doesn’t exactly come as a surprise, so I’ll let the music do the talking on this link.

Hopefully a more cheerful post next time.

TGG

January 4, 2023