I am open to almost any and all answers of the question “Where did it all go wrong for Supergrass?” as long as they don’t include this perfect opener from their second track, which has it all – Harmonies, repetitive chimey guitar, tension-and-release, a horn section that makes you feel triumphant and a sudden cut at the end that makes you think that something went wrong with your CD player if you were me back in the day. For no immediately obvious reason, this song always makes me remember a particular day in Aberdeen as I was approaching the end of my bachelors’ degree and running out of both money and time, slowly wandering around town and wondering how everything could end up well (Spoiler: It did).
366 Songs 076: Look On Up At The Bottom
You all know that Beyond The Valley of The Dolls is a great cheesy movie, right? If you haven’t seen it, you should check it out, and not least because the soundtrack is genuinely great stuff, and home to this lost classic piece of 1960s rock by the Carrie Nations (Is it just me who thinks the vocalist sounds like Cher after a particularly bad night?). I’m not sure if the first time I saw it was after a friend’s birthday party when looking for excuses not to clean up, but that’s the situation that always flashes through my head when I hear this song. Well, that and Z-Man yelling “This is my happening and it freaks me out!” at the top of his voice, but that’s to be expected.
366 Songs 075: Between The Bars
This was, maybe, the second Elliott Smith song I ever heard? Maybe the third – I might have heard “Ballad of Big Nothing” before this one. This was, nonetheless, the one that cemented by love of Smith, in large part thanks to the way that his voice cracks as he tries to reach the right notes of the chorus (The “Pee-ple” that always seems a little out of his reach) that sounded just right to the broken hearted boy that I was back then. It helps that it’s also just a beautiful song, of course, but I know without a second’s hesitation that the performance and not the material of this one was what made me a believer.
It’s a song that sounds so fragile, you expect it to burst like a bubble midway through; the delicate double-tracked acoustic guitar finger-picked, the mumbled vocals and broken, romantic lyrics (“The people you’ve been before/That you don’t want around anymore/That push, and shove, and won’t bend to your will/I’ll keep them still”), all adding to make it as much a confession of love and vulnerability as much as a song.
It’s so complete in and of itself that the “orchestral version” that appeared on the Good Will Hunting soundtrack sounds like a mess in comparison, despite a lovely string arrangement; with the echoed vocal and strong, sweeping strings, it sounds too syrup-y and unsubtle in comparison with the original.
Worse still, Madeline Peyroux’s cover, which attempts to recast the whole thing as some kind of Tom Waits-influenced torch song, and just misses the mark, becoming the dirge that the original so barely avoided. There’s an interesting interpretation somewhere in here, but this version just… isn’t it. It’s a shame; there are good ideas, and Peyroux’s a great vocalist, but this entirely misses the mark. Sometimes, the simple, straight-forward ideas are the best.
366 Songs 074: The Ghost At Number One
Firstly, I can’t believe that I’ve not actually done a Jellyfish one of these, yet. Secondly, I can’t believe that I’m including this song in a series where I’m speeding through songs, instead of spending a ridiculous number of words on it (Seriously! The bassline! The harmonies – or three part vocal with the “There’s a party at the pearly gates/How does it feel/To be the only one” section, which I still just love! The fun bitterness of the lyrics! The pretty damn perfect evocation of the Beach Boys’ sound, a la Pet Sounds! Come on, people), but… this song always reminds me of my second week of college, finding the single in HMV and knowing that it’d be hours until I could go home and play it, hear it for the first time. The weird, thrilling sensation of this faux illicit material burning into my mind as I sat and tried to concentrate on whatever drawing lesson was happening that afternoon, just thinking to myself “I really want to hear the new Jellyfish song, dammit…!”
366 Songs 073: Blood Money
There was a period shortly after the release of Primal Scream’s Exterminator when I was having one of those… emotionally intense periods, as the kids don’t say; those times when everything seems charged with too much significance, and many of your personal relationships seem to go to shit all at the same time without any warning or reason. Unsurprisingly, the free-jazz-funk-meets-Quincy-Jones-meets-John-Barry-soundtrack of much of the album, and especially “Blood Money” and “Insect Royalty” seemed incredibly apposite for this whole period – This song, in particular, conjures memories of wandering around Edinburgh somewhat aimlessly as the sun was setting, waiting for… someone that I can’t even remember, now, but knowing that I wasn’t quite myself and not knowing just what to do to change that.
(The bass line and horn section of this song, by the way, are just amazing.)
366 Songs 072: Try Try Try
This song will only ever mean the morning after a spectacular night before in a borrowed flat with a girl who I hadn’t even imagined could possibly want to lean in and kiss me like that. Despite the fact that it’s a song about the falling apart of a relationship (“I can’t get over you/But I try, try, try, try”), it sounded every bit as optimistic and excited about the future as I felt as I sat there opposite her, unable to stop smiling and almost unable to look her in the eye, in case she’d reveal that the whole thing was just some extreme practical joke any minute. The day after I went back to real life, I bought this single and listened to it endlessly for the next week.
366 Songs 071: A Nanny In Manhattan
It’s been a stupid year so far; January was a rollercoaster of things and reactions and whatnot, but everything from February to March felt like a massive, horrific downer. Things Went Wrong, in such a way that upper case letters for the start of each word there makes sense and feels right, and as a result things like productivity went out the window in favor of feeling bad about myself, life and the whole shebang. I’m… hopeful, maybe…? optimistic, cautiously… that things may be closer to turning around and allowing me to breathe sometime soon (And I mean that at least partially literally; I have the flu of all things right now, and breathing isn’t easy), but that doesn’t change the fact that I am an appalling thirty entries behind in 366 Songs – and so, I’m changing things up, at least for the next few entries. No long(ish) essays, but instead songs and in as short as possible an explanation, why they’re something that is part of my personal psycho-geography. Trust me, you’ll understand it when you see it in action. To start with…
…the spectacular “A Nanny in Manhattan” by Lilys, which was the soundtrack of my first trip to New York in… 1998, I think? I had discovered it via the Levi’s ad that it was the soundtrack to, and taken the obsession with the frantic uber-retro with me to New York where I wandered around Greenwich Village and other places that had only ever been fictional to me, lovelorn over a particular girl and wanting the emotional equivalent of this song’s irrespressibility and immediate snap into action to come into my life.
366 Songs 070: Taxman
As my wife and I sat in front of the computer last night, realizing just how much money we’d have to pay in taxes this year, somewhere in the back of my mind was the idea that this song and the Billy Bragg album title Talking to The Taxman About Poetry were the only two good things to ever come from taxes, at least when it comes to pop culture.
(For what it’s worth: I know about all the wonderful things that I support that are funded by my taxes, and I’m happy to have my money go towards said things. I was just in a bad mood because of how the annual taxes calculations were going, really.)
But “Taxman” by the Beatles is one of those classic, perfect pop songs that changed everything. Whether it’s the bouncy, amazing bassline, the guitars that cut into the song instead of provide the kind of easier-on-the-ear melody of pop music before this, the tumbling-over-itself guitar solo or the wonderful, wonderful backing vocals (“Yea-eah, I’m the Tax-mah-ahn” indeed), this is one of those things that just sounds so correct and complete that you can’t really imagine it in any other stage – or, for that matter, by any other band. Sure, lots of people have covered this song, or outright stolen from it (Hi, the Jam!), but it’s never, ever sounded as right as it does in the original Beatles version. All pop music came from this, in so many ways, and I love that about it.
366 Songs 069: I Thought I Caught (David Holmes Remix)
I mentioned this one yesterday; a remix by David Holmes of a Delakota album track that was just… wonderful, and weirdly central to my shifting musical tastes of the time when it appeared. The original version of “I Thought I Caught” was a relatively straight-forward song, with some nice guitar and a truly bizarre, shrieky chorus, but… really? It’s nothing much to write home about.
The remix, though, is just… space-rock-tastic. It comes from that strange period when Primal Scream and David Holmes had apparently started swapping old jazz fusion records and thinking along similar lines for what to do with their remixes, as long as that meant taking things beyond the usual and more towards extreme de- and re-construction. This remix, along with Kevin Shields’ “If They Move, Kill ‘Em” remix for Primal Scream and David Holmes’ “If You Tolerate This, Then Your Children Will Be Next” remix for the Manic Street Preachers, all stick out in my head as being things that reprogrammed my head slightly, taking my listening from the jaunty, retro-jangle of Britpop or the modern psychedelia of Big Beat to stranger, more out there sounds.
If nothing else, what Holmes does to the bassline in “I Thought I Caught” is worthy of adoration and praise all by itself, I mean, come on.
366 Songs 068: The Rock
There’s possibly no song that sounds more like the summer to me than this one.
I can’t really explain why; there’s something about the sampled guitar riff, looping around and yet feeling so remarkably open and spacious despite that (I “see” music, if that doesn’t sound ridiculous; I listen to things and imagine them as images and visual ideas as much as I can deal with them as music, or as feelings, and I’ve been that way for years. The riff in this song is thin, and starts with two large loops, before falling into tighter formation as it reaches the point it starts to repeat) that just makes me think of warm weather and bright days and late, light nights, with the vocals sounding suitably lazy and discombobulated that I can imagine them being sung by someone half-asleep, happily out of it as the night draws to a close and people are going home in t-shirts and grins.
Delakota are one of my weird touchstone bands, a half-remembered (if that) act that are somehow at the center of my personal musical memory. They existed for an album and a handful of singles, before going on to bigger and better things (Unless I’m misremembering, most if not all went on to do something or other with the Gorillaz in some way, with the singer of the band, Cass Browne, writing a lot of the backstory/merchandise). They weren’t the most original band, or the most enjoyable, but there was an inspiring variety to their influences that I remember really appreciating at the time, a sense that they didn’t want to sound like a Britpop band but instead wanted to try their hands at everything else, instead (There are a couple of great remix b-sides, one by David Holmes, one by Royal Trux, that made other tracks of their album sound spectacular). This song, “The Rock,” was their second single, and there was something in the tension between the guitar loop and the piano in it that made me realize I wanted to hear more from them. That, and the happy confused melancholy of the lyrics (“But nothing came/It’s alright, I won’t be leaving”).
Even now, more than a decade after this song appeared – Hell, more than a decade after the band fell apart – there’s something comforting in this song for me, in its happy acceptance of failure and messiness.