A Nostalgic Playlist on the Subject of Relationships
I have been a member of Scopitones, the Wedding Present fan forum, since 2006 (that's me third from the right above, enjoying the company of some of my fellow forumites after a TWP gig).
One of the long-running threads on the forum involves the sharing and review of Spotify playlists, often with a specific theme. My playlists generally get a bit of a hammering, most of my fellow Scopitoners disapproving of my tendency to include lengthy prog / psych / experimental material that is often instrumental. Johnny Mac, for example, once commented:
'No words again. Words are good Stevie baby, they express emotions clearly, oh yeah, I get it now...Emotions Steve, they are these things that normal people feel, they can make you happy or sad and stuff like that, it's too complex for me to go into here, maybe have a read up about them on the internet.'
When someone chose the subject 'relationships', this gave me pause for thought. Topics like Covid, numbers and travel could be compiled easily, simply by searching for relevant key words in track titles. This time, I'd have to think about what the songs were about, for God's sake.
To my surprise, however, I put the playlist together in no time at all; and although some of these songs are by artists I seldom listen to these days, I had a thoroughly good time in the nostalgic wormhole down which it led me.
Hefner - The Hymn For The Cigarettes
When considering relationship-focused songs, my thoughts almost immediately turned to Hefner. The Fidelity Wars (2008) - the only album of theirs that I know well - is almost entirely focused on fractured, regretful relationships. My original choice for the playlist was 'Fat Kelly’s Teeth', a bleak and cynical tale of drunken infidelity: 'In the cold sober light, she's not nearly so pretty / But if I drink more gin, her grace might return.'
Another candidate for inclusion was 'The Hymn For The Alcohol'. Here, the narrator, meeting his ex six months down the line, who is a new relationship, reflects bitterly that 'whiskey is his drink - you never drank it with me, but now you drink it with him / I'm not good enough for whiskey, not good enough for you.' The combination of Darren Hayman's keening whine with the slightly saccharine country backing creates an achingly melancholy atmosphere, and the line 'it is just wishful thinking / that all this hard drinking / might lure you back to my ramshackle stable' is a piece of well-observed pathos.
Conscious, though, that I didn't want my playlist to be a one-paced collection of the slow and maudlin, I plumped instead for 'The Hymn For The Cigarettes'.
The stirring of memories by flowers, places, smells, foods, etc. is rather a cliché in romantic music and literature; however, I'm not aware of any other work that uses cigarette brands for this purpose: 'Lucky Strikes remind me of my friends out on the west coast / Camel Lights remind me of my ex-girlfriend at Christmas time.'
Hayman's concerns regarding he and his partner's incompatible tastes ('How can she love me when she doesn't even love the cinema that I love?') seem superficial at first, but he expands on this theme to explore their fundamental differences: 'What does she feel if she doesn't have the feeling that I have in my fingers? This joy I have could lift this ceiling from its rafters, but I'm not laughing.' The whole thing is framed by a ragged thrash (the pause... then '3, 4' count in at 3:15 is impeccably timed) that captures the bittersweet memories perfectly.
Kevin Ayers - Shouting In a Bucket Blues
A woozy psych-blues meander that's somehow simultaneously jaded, melancholy and uplifting. It contains some beautifully crafted lines - 'The distance that's between us, it just never seems to change / there's a whole mountain range of misunderstanding' - and Steve Hillage's lead guitar is lazily mesmerising.
David Bowie - Repetition
I became obsessed with Bowie at around 12-13, and whilst other favourites from the time have faded from my listening habits, this has never been the case with David.
There are many outstanding tracks on Lodger ('Look Back in Anger', which features simply breathtaking drumming from Dennis Davis, is a particular favourite), but it was 'Repetition' that captured my attention from the first time I listened to the album.
A weird, dislocated funk-disco-rock hybrid that features strangely elastic bass and layers of discordant guitar, it sees Bowie examine a dysfunctional, abusive relationship: 'Johnny is a man and he's bigger than her / I guess the bruises won't show / if she wears long sleeves.' Its calm demeanour somehow emphasises the horror of the abuse: 'but the space in her eyes shows through.'
Arab Strap - New Birds
Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton inhabited a world of casual sex and recreational drug use that was completely divorced from my own, dull middle-class existence, but captured it in a way that is simultaneously exhilarating and horrifying. Vignettes like 'Packs Of Three' ('It was the biggest cock you'd ever seen / but you've no idea where that cock has been') and 'I Would’ve Liked Me A Lot Last Night' ('The room stinks of poppers and the bog's full of bile') contrasted delicate, tuneful arrangements with brutally grim, explicit lyrics.
'New Birds' is a monologue about an encounter with an old flame that reverberates with sadness, regret and what might have been. 'And she just asks you straight out if you want to come and stay at her flat / but you make sure you get separate taxis and you go home and there might be a slight regret / and you might wonder what you missed / but you have to remember the kiss you worked so hard on - and you'll know you've done the right thing.' The way that Moffat's disconsolate mumble is followed by a brutal, abandoned finale is truly, utterly moving.
Lisa Hannigan - I Don't Know
If you've read my Fall blogs (or heard her appearance on my radio show), you'll know that my wife and I have rather disparate music tastes. This song is a rarity: one that sits right in the middle of the slim intersection in our musical Venn diagram.
The studio version of the song is here. It's simply lovely, capturing the tentative curiosity of a new relationship: 'I don't know if you can dance / If the thought ever occurred to you / If you eat what you've been given or you push it round your plate.' But what you really need to watch is this video, one of my absolute favourites. It captures Lisa and her band playing in what looks like the best pub ever.
Spearmint - Isn't It Great To Be Alive
The first Spearmint song I fell for was 'We're Going Out', a funky indie-stomp that celebrates that feeling of 'ah, sod it, let's just go out' ('forget the money; we'll manage, whatever'). The joyful, Motown/Northern Soul-inflected 'Sweeping The Nation' is another cracker.
Despite the celebratory nature of the title refrain, 'Isn't It Great To Be Alive' is a bittersweet tale of unrequited love: 'Waiting with you by the phones / so you could ring your man / sometimes it's not that great to be alive.' Although musically it doesn't do anything especially remarkable, it's skilfully balanced: a raw, fuzzy rhythm guitar, shimmering chords, and a touch of strings that add a melancholy flavour.
Without resorting to melodrama, it builds and tautens impressively over the last minute as the narrator walks in the rain, reflecting on his crushed hopes: ''Cause if I can't be with you / I don't know what I'm going to do / except fill myself with thoughts of you / it's the closest thing to being with you.'
Allo Darlin' - Heartbeat Chilli
I was unconvinced of the merits of Allo Darlin' to begin with. That name, for a start... (apparently it was inspired by the shouts of market traders that Australian singer Elizabeth Morris used to hear regularly when she worked in Soho). Song titles like 'Kiss Your Lips', 'Woody Allen' and 'My Heart Is A Drummer' - plus the deployment of a ukulele - suggested a level of quirky tweeness that in normal circumstances would turn my stomach.
But when I saw them live (at the Deaf Institute in Manchester) they more than won me over, songs like 'Dreaming' being woozy pieces of melodic jangle that avoid excessive sugariness by virtue of the strong melodies and Morris' charming but robust delivery.
'Heartbeat Chilli' - a fragile kitchen-sink romance framed around a lightly choppy ukulele and floating pedal steel - still sounds (on paper) a million miles away from something that I would normally listen to. But musical love can be an unfathomable beast sometimes.
BMX Bandits - It Hasn't Ended
I went to university in 1987, when fey C86 jangle performed by earnest young men in NHS specs and tattered cardigans was very much de rigueur. I listened to a lot of it at the time, and the odd track still provides a bit of pleasing nostalgia, although acts like The Brilliant Corners and The Weather Prophets haven't aged terribly well.
To be honest, most BMX Bandits material is a little too self-conscious and limp for me, although I've always had a soft spot for 'Kylie's Got A Crush On Us' (Teenage Fanclub's determinedly overloaded version is better, however). But somehow 'It Hasn't Ended' hits a very sweet spot indeed.
The lyric is heartfelt enough, but does stray into saccharine cliché ('I just want to make you finally see / that not being with you is torturing me'). What the song has going for it, however, is a charming melody and a fantastically moving coda: the moment that the trumpet hits that high note (3:20), leading into that gloriously uplifting guitar line is just heart-wrenching. It's one of those moments that remind you that music is one of the most important things in life.
Clem Snide - Made For TV Movie
We all have them, those artists that we think are utter genius that somehow fall on deaf ears whenever we try to promote them to others. Clem Snide are most definitely one of those for me. The first song I ever heard by them was 'Ice Cube', a ragged lo-fi ramble in the style of Harvey Danger or Number One Cup. More representative, however, are their fragile pieces of down-tempo, brittle indie-country such as '1989', 'The Sound Of German Hip-Hop' or 'Tiny European Cars'.
My favourite Clem Snide song is 'Moment In The Sun' - proof that one needs no more than two chords with which to uplift and enrich the soul - but it didn't really fit the playlist brief. A multitude of CS songs do though, and after some deliberation, I went for 'Made For TV Movie', from their astonishingly good 2005 album The End Of Love.
Eef Barzelay has a beautifully broken voice, and it shines better than ever here as he invites you, over a sparse country strum, to watch a Lucille Ball biopic with him. I know that Ball was a huge star in the US, although she means less here in the UK; this doesn't reduce the impact of lines like 'Well I heard he used to beat her / like she was a conga drum / they always slept in separate beds / but somehow they had a son.' And there's an almost unbearably hilarious pathos to 'even though the club was hoppin' / 'twas the pills that she was poppin' that did her in.'
Billy Bragg - The Short Answer
Life's a Riot with Spy vs Spy was released when I was 14, and I fell head-over-heels in love with it. I bought the chord book, which came with a flexi-disc that described how to play each song, something that I can still do, albeit only semi-competently.
Although songs like 'Between The Wars' and 'Which Side Are You On?' (the latter feeling increasingly pertinent in recent years) cemented his reputation as a political commentator, Billy has always been a romantic at heart. Many of his songs soundtracked my teenage infatuations: 'St. Swithin's Day'; 'The Saturday Boy'; 'Greetings To The New Brunette'. And of course, he wrote possibly the greatest, bleakest song about the desperation of love ever recorded, 'Levi Stubbs' Tears'.
But it's Workers Playtime that I always return to. Released in 1988, when I was at university, I have a lot of history with this album that I won't go into here, but it's one of the very few albums that - after a few glasses of wine - I can sing confidently (if not necessarily tunefully) all the way through without hesitation.
There are so many other tracks from the album that I could have picked: the 60s jangle of 'She's Got A New Spell'; earnest piano ballad 'The Price I Pay'; the tender 'Valentines Day Is Over'; the achingly sad 'The Only One'. But for me, 'The Short Answer' strikes a perfect balance between romanticism and domestic reality: 'I remember you said to me / that no amount of poetry would mend this broken heart / but you can put the Hoover round / if you want to make a start.' It also rhymes 'trousers' with 'spouses' - who else would have the nerve?
The French - Porn Shoes
The French were a side-project of Hefner's Darren Hayman. Their sole album, 2003's Local Information, was largely constructed using vintage synthesizers and drum machines. In truth, I don't really care for the album that much. It's rather cold and arid, although 'Gabriel In The Airport' ('we've had enough world music for a little while... plasticine video guy') has an appealingly sardonic tone.
Opening track 'Porn Shoes', however, captures the awkwardness of first-date nervousness in excruciating detail. He dresses in Ben Sherman, Calvin Klein and Levis and prepares his favourite pasta dish; she wears 'gold shoes with diamante' that make her feel sexy, but they 'weren't what he expected' - 'he thought they looked like porn shoes / like the porn stars wear in porn films.' The sparse musical accompaniment emphasises the coldness of the encounter: 'He hoped she would spent the night / but leave soon in the morning.' It's a superficially pretty tune, but its cynical emptiness is chilling.
Damien Rice - I Remember
Rice's debut album O (released in 2002) is another of those rare works that sit in my wife and I's Venn diagram intersection. We listened to a lot when we first got together; it's very much a new relationship album, extravagantly intense, dark and urgent. It also frequently teeters on the edge of being ridiculously overblown: 'The Blower's Daughter', for example, either pins down emotional obsession with a heartfelt passion or is overwrought navel-gazing, depending on your mood and/or point of view.
Lisa Hannigan contributed vocals on O and its 2006 follow up 9. She was far from just a backing vocalist, though, many of the songs being framed around the conversational interplay between their contrasting voices. This is very much the case with 'I Remember', an intense tale of lust and obsession.
It opens with Hannigan's beautifully hesitant expression of infatuation ('The first time that I saw / your head around the door / ...mine stopped working... time stopped moving') accompanied by Rice's delicately picked guitar. (I have also tried to learn to play this, with substantially less success than was the case with Billy Bragg.)
As the guitar becomes more forceful, Rice delves into the darker side of the relationship: 'I hope that my sanity covers the cost / to remove the stain of my love... this is love, this is porn.' The second half builds a frenzied whirl of droning guitar and urgent strings which finally ebbs away with a clipped, malevolent coda. It might be a touch bombastic for some, but it always blows me away, although not as much as the extravagantly extended live version below. Not only is Hannigan's vocal pure and perfect, it throws in a frantic, intense wah-wah psych-rock finale.
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