song of the week 36: felt - sunlight bathed the golden glow

Last night I went to the BFI to see Paul Kelly's new documentary "Lawrence of Belgravia".

The eponymous Lawrence (his surname is never used) is difficult to pin down: certainly eccentric, sometimes funny (wittingly or unwittingly), generally not particularly likeable though endearing on occasions, above all optimistically single-minded in a search for pop stardom which, to those looking on, seems doomed to failure.

Erstwhile lead singer of eighties jangly indie darlings Felt and nineties glam rockers Denim, these days Lawrence fronts the novelty synth-pop outfit Go Kart Mozart. In one of a series of interviews shown during the film, he claims that he's now "legally bonkers". Fleeting shots of methadone prescriptions and arrest warrants in his name suggest he might be right.

If he seems a bit at sea these days, that doesn't mean that some of the music he made all those years ago wasn't pretty fine:

song of the week 20: kane gang - the closest thing to heaven

In its time the Newcastle-based Kitchenware record label has been responsible for some great music. I've waxed lyrical elsewhere about the songwriting genius of Paddy McAloon and his tragically now defunct Prefab Sprout. Round about the time when the Sprouts were being conscripted, fellow North-Easterner Martin Stephenson (these days on a seemingly unending tour of undersized UK venues) signed to the label with his band the Daintees, soon afterwards releasing the classic 1986 Boat to Bolivia album. Equally the post-Microdisney work of Cathal Coughlan--first in the guise of Fatima Mansions with their "Keep Music Evil" manifesto, then latterly under his own moniker--was also foisted on an unsuspecting public by the Newcastle label. All good stuff.

This week's musical gem is a laid-back blue-eyed soul offering from the Kane Gang, another band from the Kitchenware stable. They had a sizeable UK hit with this single from their 1985 album The Bad and Lowdown World of the Kane Gang. All these years later there's little trace of them on the new-fangled internet--their website kanegang.com remains sadly unconstructed--so it seems unlikely that they're planning a reunion Greatest Hits tour soon. As ever, though, Wikipedia lunges in where other chroniclers of obscure pop fear to tread. Can you believe their startling claim that it was the Kane Gang who performed the music for the "Ooh Gary Davies" jingle for the perma-tanned erstwhile Radio One DJ?

How did we even get through the day before Wikipedia * existed?



* Davies also gets a ridiculously long Wikipedia entry to himself, but this discussion on the Word Magazine website seems more worthy of a link.

song of the week 12: scritti politti - overnite

Another of those greatest hits compilations we love so much saw the light of day this week. Hence another artist of yesteryear has been out and about doing the round of media interviews. Step forward, on this occasion, Green Gartside of Scritti Politti.

A couple of Scritti hits, "Wood Beez" and "The Word Girl", still get a regular airing on the likes of Magic FM but there's quite a bit more to the man and his music than this 1980s radio-friendly sheen. For one thing, his frequent references in both songs and interviews to 19th Century philosophical theory--the name of the band itself a homage to Gramsci--set him a fair way apart from his post-punk contemporaries.

He can still talk a good game these days, as testified by a couple of interesting tete-a-tetes broadcast last week respectively on the Guardian Music Weekly podcast and Radcliffe and Maconie's radio programme.

The Cupid & Psyche album of 1985 was the "one with the hits" but I'd argue that almost all his other albums are more interesting: Songs to Remember, his 1982 debut, is a bit clever-clever but has some good tunes nonetheless, like the lilting "Sweetest Girl", later covered by Madness. All these years later Green claims that he'd originally wanted Gregory Isaacs to sing it and Kraftwerk to play it. That would have been worth hearing.

It was a measure of the circles he moved in in the late eighties that the album following the hugely successful Cupid and Psyche, 1988's Provision, saw him hanging out with the likes of Miles Davis. Unlikely as it may seem, there were some similarities in the music of the two men during that period: they both made liberal use of studio techniques of the time--synthesizers, samples, drum loops and such like. (Difficult to believe in retrospect that in the eighties this would have been considered cutting edge.) The Scritti fanbase probably would have been attuned to expect as much but Davis's Tutu and Amandla albums (1986 and 1989 respectively) shocked and alienated many of his followers in the jazz community. His dalliances with artists with more of a "pop" sensibility--not only Green, but also the likes of Cyndi Lauper--didn't work in his favour either.

In all though, the "collaboration" extended only to a sum total of two tracks: on Tutu Davis covered Green's "Perfect Way" and on Provision he contributes an understated, almost apologetic, solo on the sublime Oh Patti.

As I say, the synth base of much of Provision make it a very dated sound to modern ears but if you can get past the 1980s keyboards I think there are some great songs on the album. It might be interesting to hear Gartside rework some of them with a more modern instrumentation. Can't see that happening though...

Enough already. Here's one of the less celebrated tracks:



P.S. Absolute--Scritti's greatest hits compilation--awaits your attention on Spotify

let's see those hands

As I was saying, one of the songs which probably does make my Motown top ten is "That's The Way Love Is" by Marvin Gaye. I remember where I was when I first heard it, as one of the millions of TV viewers gawping their way through Live Aid. Alas, Marvin Gaye wasn't there to sing it, having met his tragic end more than a year previously.

If memory serves, Paul Young and Alison Moyet were consigned to an obscure early afternoon slot, but I remember this as one of the highlights of the day. It's much better than Young's eighties-bass-heavy arrangement of "Wherever I Lay My Hat"--another Gaye original--and Moyet in particular really shows what a great set of pipes she had (probably still has). It also backs up my rather lazy theory that although there were some good singers in the eighties, they were often working with pretty average material. In my view, this is probably the best song either of them performed.



Then again, ain't nothin' like the real thing...

the 80s: were they as crap as this?

I know it's difficult to slim down the history of UK pop to three bite-size hour-long episodes but after watching the final episode of BBC4's recent Pop Britannia I was picking up the phone to jam the switchboard. (Can you still do that or do you have to try and bring the internet to its knees with a bombardment of aggressively worded e-mails?) Anyway, a tall order as I say to fit everything from the last thirty years into this last episode, but was there really nothing more significant in the pre-Britpop years than the New Romantics, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and the blimmin' Stock Aitken & Waterman "Hit Factory" (apparently worth ten minutes of an hour-long programme? come on!)? Am I wrong to have expected at least a passing mention for Factory Records and the Smiths? I mean, how much insight are you going to get from interviews with Rick Astley and Bananarama? Am I a hideous indie snob?