Junior laughed at the song title, then added, “It’s not funny, really.” And she’s right. We’re all going to hell in a handcart; Wallinger knows it, but he’s fo’ sho’ not going down with the rest of us plumbs. Rather winningly, he tells us this with the trusty implements of a dead catchy tune and some killer “ooo-ooo-OOO”s that Junior sings along with.
While Mike Scott was gazing at the whole of the moon, Karl was concerned with more earthly matters. Mainly matters like getting grumpy about not receiving full credit for his swirling synths, but also the fact our planet was on the brink of disaster. It continued to teeter on the edge on 1990’s superb Goodbye Jumbo album (which I’ve lost – so if anyone fancies sending me a copy, be my guest) and 1993’s ‘Is It Like Today?’ where even God was wondering, “How did it come to this?”
Well, it’s in more trouble today, Karl (and God), so can you lend a hand, please?
Aside from a few “lovely and brilliant” throwaways, Junior’s leading response to this was some zesty air guitar. There is some muscular soloing, but ‘Life’s What You Make It’ is about the big-fingered piano riff and Talk Talk’s new, ambitious, spacious, jazz-flirting sound. The Colour Of Spring album is the tantalising halfway house between the band’s synth-pop roots and the nearly ambient, breathtaking vision of Spirit Of Eden, the 1988 piece that wrapped commercial suicide in a startling prog-jazz overcoat. Give them their due – not everyone can carry off a prog-jazz overcoat.
Here, Talk Talk still make concessions to pop with almost-choruses and that catchy piano thump, but the shift has already happened. Critics’ fave Spirit Of Eden was not the bolt from the blue we’re led to believe; more than a couple of The Colour Of Spring’s meditative moments could flit between the two albums. The question is, did the band even lose something in their stubborn retreat from the pop fray? For me, it’s hard to pick between the two. It’s like asking if I prefer one daughter to the other. Well, it depends which day it is.
On the other hand, this is “good and lovely and great”, so at least I got the order right. Maybe starting school has turned Junior all militant, because – on learning the Bangles were an all-girl group – she announced, “I only want to listen to music by girls now.”
So of course I told her this was written by a boy. Well, Prince anyway. Along with his ‘Take Me With U’, this was meant for the debut album by Apollonia 6, but the sly old dog kept the former for his own Purple Rain and used this as leverage for a go at Susanna Hoffs. Who can blame him? She was cute; even more so when perched all petite in front of her somewhat butch bandmates. Come on, one of them was called Michael.
‘Manic Monday’ is a pretty ditty, buoyed by rolling piano fills and the other girls’ Byrdsian harmonies. It broke the Bangles over here, but they could never consistently capitalise, only ‘Walk Like An Egyptian’ and ‘Eternal Flame’ providing sporadic highs while the rest of their output took the middle ground. Still, ‘Manic Monday’ was a No.2 hit in the UK, and runner-up in the US too, losing out Stateside to a certain purple pompatus and a certain record which we may or may not return to in a bit.
1985 was Madonna’s annus mirabilis, barely a week passing without a saucy New York dance-pop nugget brightening up the UK charts. She bagged eight Top 5 hits, including bona fide breakthrough ‘Like A Virgin’, ‘Holiday’ recharting 18 months after its initial Top 10 appearance, first No.1 ‘Into The Groove’ and the utterly forgotten ‘Angel’. Try and sing it, go on. So the slutty Material Girl angle was all sewn up; now it was time for the serious artiste.
We’d already had the ever-so-earnest ‘Live To Tell’, but ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ was the big one. A rather less trashy tackling of her Catholic guilt than ‘Like A Virgin’, it was real, honest and oddly – paradoxically – innocent. Dramatic too. ‘Like A Prayer’ would scare the horses, but ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ is the raw truth. Madonna was still fresh and unpredictable and winningly rounded too, not the skin-smeared Terminator we blanch at today.
Taken purely at face value, ‘Papa…’ is an easy singalong, but Junior might just have seen it as an oblique way of telling me to shut up. We can salute creativity like that. We also found the song good for call and response – “Papa preach?” “Papa DON’T preach!”
Pressed on the actual quality of the record, Junior declared it “good.” A future in music journalism awaits.
We’ve been living with 21 Singles and Psychocandy for a few weeks now – the road to actually posting our No.18 is paved with good distractions – and strange things have been happening. It’s not that I keep playing ‘Some Candy Talking’ with the daily intention of writing about it; it’s that Junior keeps asking for it. Asking for The Jesus And Mary Chain in general. She can sing this and ‘Just Like Honey’ and ‘April Skies’. More tellingly, she claims never to have heard of Jesus, which suggests she’s going to be expecting huge chunks of surfcore feedback when her reception class goes all Nativity in a few weeks.
Like me, she’s into ‘Some Candy Talking’’s calm release, its gently thrashed guitars and easy to follow chorus – she doesn’t care that it’s not really about the natter of a packet of sweets, nor that it sticks to a formula. Listen to their 21 Singles and you marvel at the if-it-ain’t-broke bloodymindedness of JAMC’s career. Yes, it all gets a bit shinier but, despite the odd loping baggy beat in the shaky early 90s, the whole set thumbs its snub nose at fashion. They were capable of dishing out scuzzily bejewelled classics like this from the off, so there was no need to shilly-shally with the template.
Infected was the second CD I ever bought (yeah, yeah, after The Joshua Tree – I wasn’t exclusively furrow-browed agit-pop) and a jolly listen it is too. Matt Johnson was always pretty straight-faced, but by The The’s second album proper, he wasn’t merely serious – he was grave. ‘Sweet Bird Of Truth’ tackles the dying panic of an American pilot plunging into the Gulf of Arabia, swearing that he’s only done his duty, that he’s never believed in God, but might God be so kind as to lend a hand anyway? It’s bitter, nihilistic and one of many kicks in the teeth Infected dishes out to the good ol’ US of A. I think Leona Lewis covers it on her new album.
But it’s also a sterling tune, dramatic and punchy, almost demanding an uncomfortable sing-song. Junior dances like a drunk to it, rolling her eyes, flailing her limbs – rather like Johnson himself in that bankrupting feature-length video accompanying the album. Insane pop-political statements, eh? Weren’t the 80s great?
TIME TO TACKLE 1986 AT LAST and we start with Moz, j’en ai mar and litigious chums. But first, a final word on The Beatles. Enjoyed this little exchange in the Past Masters sleevenotes, Brian Matthew interviewing the chaps in 1964 on the release of Beatles For Sale:
BM: I’ve heard it said that a lot of these would make good singles. Do you think there’s any likelihood at all of them being released?
John: You can’t release singles off an LP after the LP’s been out.
BM: A Lot of people do.
Paul: Well, in America they do…
John: Well, they’re different over there, aren’t they?
Paul: In America they do that, but it’s a bit of a drag.
The Beatles were, of course, er, past masters at dishing out the quality singles without recourse (on the whole) to plundering their albums, but it’s become a rare practice. In this sense, The Smiths were one of their last natural heirs, hurling out singles and albums at breakneck speed without repetition – until the record company squeezed the everything they could out of Strangeways, Here We Come. ‘Paint A Vulgar Picture’, indeed.
’Panic’ was one of those bonuses. Christ, it was released one month after The Queen Is Dead and doesn’t even appear on it. Throwaway downloads aside, I can’t imagine that happening now. Remind me if I’m forgetting something. Anyway, ‘Panic’ has a taste of will-this-do? about it, but it clangs and saunters amiably and is suitably apocalyptic, if on a provincial scale. Its signature line, “hang the DJ” smells a bit of sniffiness towards burgeoning club culture, but you can prefer to hear it as an early blood-on-the-carpet attack on Simes and DLT. Junior prefers to hear it as “gingerbread man, gingerbread man, gingerbread man”.
Gingerbread or not, she loves it, identifying with the title – “I do that sometimes, don’t I?” – and puzzling over the band members not actually being related. Like half the world, I’m in a Beatles moment right now, but she later makes me switch off Abbey Road to “play The Smiths again”. God, Dad, you’re so square.
As Beatlemania strikes for the fourth time – yes, fourth: there was that first one, then the chronological single releases in the 80s, then Anthology, now these rather comely remasters – it seems only fitting to gad about playing Stones records.
But what would The Beatles be like if they were still around today? Notwithstanding some high profile deaths, would we be dismissing them for not having had a Top 10 hit since ‘Got My Mind Set On You’? Would we be saying, “Oh, but you have to see them live to understand. Not that they’ve performed since that rooftop gig in ‘69”? Would we be suggesting their last great peak was when Linda supported an addled Lennon on guitar duties in the early 70s?
Mick Taylor was the Stones’ unsung hero as 60s turned to 70s, initially stepping in when Brian Jones was seemingly not fit for the job, and then way too dead for the job. But the man on Exile On Main Street’s ‘Tumbling Dice’ is still Keef, a trademark riff boogie-ing the song along. It’s an easy, devastated rocker, bang-on cool in its barely glued swagger, and the touchstone for all those would-be Stones. Just pick up Primal Scream’s Give Out But Don’t Be Give Up and jump to ‘Call On Me’. “Carbon-copy” implies a laborious step between the two.
Charlie Watts would be pleased in his dotage to hear Junior praising the drums. She goes on to join the gospel backing for the “baaayyy-beh”s, and she and her sister give it the full lungs for the fading “got to roll me”s, swept up in the ecstatic cyclone of soul-soaked seedy rawk.
A month-long gap is inexcusable of course. Anyway, my excuses are holiday, seasonal lack of exciting releases and a nagging sense I should be searching for a new job. I have your sympathy now, don’t I?
This is a single from a couple of months back, from an album about 10 months back. Topical. It’s the only obviously Princey song from TV On The Radio’s reputedly very Princey Dear Science, funking along with a guitar riff that could cut your hair. Still, while the album might not be massively Minneapolitan, it’s completely bloody amazing and the global critical consensus says, “Here, here.” Everyone’s jumped on board now, possibly because it’s the most accessible thing TVOTR have done; there’s a sense of relief they’ve shipped out challenging for tuneful, but even though the sound was murkier on Return To Cookie Mountain, it was really no less melodic. You just had to try a little harder. Maybe no one wants to try a little harder.
We didn’t try all that hard here, mind. No chance Junior could keep still in the car seat as TVOTR hit their groove, but we reserved our critical faculties for Kyp Malone’s name. Surely no one’s called Kyp? “Harvey at nursery’s middle name is Kyp.” I’ll take her at her word.
In some cold sense, Lady GaGa is a fantastic pop star – all glitz and Vegas glamour, ever-changing, seemingly personality-free – yet it’s those very things that make her one big nothing. In my shady day job as editor of a horrifyingly mainstream music site, GaGa is a godsend. She’s full of juicy quotes, decked out in a new flesh-flashing doily every day, selling phenomenal amounts of records and it’s all so… so… boring.
On the other hand, she put on a sterling if robotic show at Glastonbury and ‘Just Dance’, ‘Poker Face’ and ‘Paparazzi’ are the sort of ear-worms that The Saturdays, say, would kill for. I’ve gone with the third single here because – hey! – it’s recent and we’re nothing if not bleeding-edge. ‘Paparazzi’ is a huge great clunking metaphor for slavish empty adoration; just the kind GaGa needs for these 15 minutes.
Is Junior her biggest fan? She shuffles in her seat as she takes the standard eon to eat her cornflakes, but in the end the song merits a shrug. I try to fire some debate: “Do you know what ‘Paparazzi’ means?” “Morris has got one.” Her friend Morris calls his dad “Papa”, you see. Maybe he’s seen him sneak off into the night with his Canon, in hot pursuit of a mini-Madonna in a bubble dress. It’s a living.
