world of twee

I notice that on its weekly new album reviews page, last Friday's Independent awarded a solid, if unspectacular, three stars out of five to the new offering by a band called Stornoway. Probably fair enough: from what I know they're solid, if unspectacular, purveyors of generally inoffensive tunes. Reviewer Andy Gill's parting shot though is that "they can't rock and roll for toffee". The general tone of what he says seems to suggest that he'd like to add "...and you kind of wish they did, frankly".

But Andy, there have been many, many bands who in their time have been totally unable to rock and roll. And as far as I'm concerned I'm not sure we would have wanted it any other way.

Besides all the glitzy New Romanticism and power pop around at the time, in the early 1980s a number of bands were quietly making names for themselves in a kind of off-shoot of the indie canon which was being established during these years. These were bands who had none of the testosterone-fuelled swagger and posturing of the leather clad metal rockers of the early seventies, none of the phlegmy vitriol of the punk rock explosion. Yes, they had guitars but none of the meaty riffs which had been rife in the previous decade. They played chords in the form of rhythmically percussive syncopations or delicately jangly arpeggios, sometimes in a gentle, almost Latin style.

These were bands usually made up of whey-faced (often Scottish) young men--occasionally women--wearing long tweedy coats with collars turned up against the wind and the rain. Regulation hairstyle (both sexes): long at the top--often quiffed--and short at the sides.

As if to celebrate the general wilful rejection of machismo, fans of this music, typically self-deprecating, proudly labelled it "twee".

And some of it was pretty good...

• Orange Juice - Falling and Laughing (1980)
• Everything But The Girl - Night and Day (1983)
• Aztec Camera - Walk Out to Winter (1983)
  
• Bluebells - I'm Falling (1984)
• Go-Betweens - Bachelor Kisses (1984)
• Lotus Eaters - First Picture of You (1984)
• Wedding Present - Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft (1987)
  
• My Bloody Valentine - Strawberry Wine (1987)
  
• Bradford - Skin Storm (1988)
  
• Blue Nile - Headlights On The Parade (1989)
• Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas (1990)
  

More recent decades have continued to produce their share of "tweeness" and hoorah for that. Here are some of the bands who held out against the Mancy swagger of those brash Oasis louts during the Britpop era:

• Lush - Sweetness and Light (1990)
  
• Blueboy - Boys Don't Matter (1994)
• Bluetones - Slight Return (1995)
  
• Belle and Sebastian - If You're Feeling Sinister (1996)
• Trash Can Sinatras - How can I Apply? (1996)
• The Sundays - Summertime (1997)

...and here are some from the last ten years or so. These days they're sometimes Norwegian, like the Kings of Convenience. Occasionally, like the Postmarks, they're (whisper it) American.

• Spearmint - Scottish Pop (1999)
• Kings of Convenience - Toxic Girl (2001)
• Camera Obscura - Lloyd I'm Ready to be Heartbroken (2006)
• Postmarks - Goodbye (2009)

I've just finished reading "Falling and Laughing" (see also above) by Grace Maxwell. It's the fantastically uplifting account of her partner Edwyn Collins's recent return to music-making and a life of at least partial normality after suffering two massive strokes in 2005. It seems that in their early days Orange Juice used to revel in the Twee philosophy:

They used to say they were 'anti-rock'. In the early days, Glasgow audiences used to chant 'Poofs! Poofs! Poofs!' at them. They liked that just fine. There was a campness in their delivery, deliberately affected to annoy the manly men of rock.

Take it away Edwyn...



(Spotified--more or less--here, if you're wondering...)

edited highlights

Notable musical events of the last ten days, briefly:

• The London Jazz Festival, particularly a mesmerising performance by the Tord Gustavsen Ensemble. So moved was I that I shelled out for the new CD which I then queued up like some kind of Scandinavian piano jazz groupie to get signed by the man himself.
• Finishing "Bringing It All Back Home", an enjoyable account of the musical loves of bolshie Yorkshire TV presenter and rugby league aficionado Ian Clayton. A good read and an unexpectedly harrowing last chapter...
  
• Music quiz ignominy for Billie Piper At The Gates of Dawn, who put massive effort into finishing bottom of the table at the Three Kings. I was particularly pleased though to dig out Augustus Pablo (so to speak) to up our score slightly in the Obscure Reggae round.
  
• Mozzer on Desert Island Discs: utterly compelling listening. Kirsty Young is good at her job, striking a nice balance between ex-teenage Smiths devotee and gently probing journo. Seems Steven Patrick is actually quite fond of his old mum and dad. Ah bless.
  
• This week's contribution to the "gratuitous oldie" slot comes courtesy of Liz Kershaw on 6 Music. It seems TT main man Mark Hollis went on to make some interesting music, which I admit I need to investigate further before pontificating about here. In the meantime, how's about this for some good-time eighties synth pop...
  

Talk Talk - Such a shame

hoping to take you away...

Lately I've been flicking through a book called "The Beatles' London". It actually gives more information than anyone could humanly want about every location in the capital where the Fab Four played, recorded, were interviewed, stayed, lived, worked, went out to eat or listen to music...

In an attempt to come to terms with the subject, I went along this morning to London Walks' "Magical Mystery Tour" which, as I was hoping, presents some of this information in a more digestible form, taking in as it does a handful of the major venues in a leisurely two-hour stroll. I've done these walks before and always find them good value at £7 a pop. I do tend to find myself heavily outnumbered by foreign tourists though.

Almost all of the stories which the guide told were ones I'd heard before but it was nice to be reminded of them. I hadn't realised though that I'd walked past Trident Studios many times without knowing it and that it was here that not only the Beatles laid down tracks like "Hey Jude", "Dear Prudence" and "Martha My Dear", but also that many early Bowie and Elton John singles and "Walk on the Wild Side" (amongst others) were all recorded.

Nor did I realise exactly where that 1969 roof-top performance happened. In June 1968, the Beatles commandeered number 3 Savile Row as Apple headquarters and it became a social centre for friends, fans and fellow celebrities as much as a set of offices for serious business matters. Frequently riotous goings-on over the following four years--chronicled in a book by "house hippy" Richard DiLello--did little to endear the band to their straight-laced pin-striped-suited neighbours and they reached a head on 30th January 1969 when the band spontaneously decided to go up to the roof to play songs from what became their Let It Be album (see below). The local constabulary--still stationed less than 500 yards up the street--pulled the plug twenty minutes into the show.

No tour of London Beatles locations would be complete etc etc... and, sure enough, to end the tour we hopped on the Jubilee Line to the Abbey Road studios. The Beatles made the vast majority of their recordings here so there's no doubt that this is the location which had the greatest influence on the band's music. There's not much to see from the outside though, apart from a wall where fans are encouraged to scrawl ill-conceived tributes, a blue plaque reminding everyone that one Edward Elgar was laying down some wicked tracks at Abbey Road a cool thirty-three years before the Beatles jumped on the bandwagon...oh and there's "that" zebra crossing.

talk talk

Will Kaufman: 'Woody Guthrie - Hard times and hard travellin'' at the British Library, 25 February, and
Barney Hoskyns discussing Tom Waits and 'Lowside of the Road' at Waterstone's, Gower Street, 4th March.

The thing about music is that even with those singers or musicians who aren't right up there with your favourite singers or musicians, there's usually something you can talk about.

And the thing about talks about musicians is that they give you an authoritative, nicely-distilled account of the life and work in as little as an hour. I had a brief Tom Waits phase, in the early 1990s I think when, finger on the pulse as ever, I listened mainly to his early-eighties Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs albums. "Lowside of the Road", though, the new Waits biography, weighs in at a hefty 650 pages and I'm just not interested enough to plough through that.

Hoskyns divides the story into two parts. Waits spent much of the seventies hanging around bars in Santa Monica and song titles like "Closing Time", "The Piano Has Been Drinking", "The Ghosts of Saturday Night" and "Bad Liver and a Broken Heart" give you a pretty good idea of his lyrical concerns in those days. Then in 1980 (Hoskyns's part two) Waits met and married Kathleen Brennan, under whose seemingly Yoko-esque influence he suddenly distanced himself from long-time associates and adopted a more experimental and theatrical approach in his music, viz.



Is it music? Is it theatre? Beats me. Great though, isn't it?

Will Kaufman is professor of American literature and culture at the University of Central Lancashire, which means he gets to read and write about Woody Guthrie and is paid for it. Cuh eh? As a semi-professional folksinger for over thirty years, he also gets to sing Guthrie's songs. He makes a decent job of it too.

Born in oil boom town Okemah Oklahoma, Guthrie moved to Texas when the Depression set in then, with thousands of other "Okies", was driven from his home by the drought and ferocious winds of the Dustbowl and moved to California. Here he travelled round the migrant camps chronicling the Okie sufferings in the face of the outright hostility of the local community and the unions' struggle for acceptable working conditions and a decent wage.

As a songwriter, Guthrie was prolific to the point of manic obsession: huge amounts of material survive in the Woody Guthrie Archive, hundreds of song lyrics, many of them never put to music and some of them scrawled on bits of newspaper, napkins from restaurants, bus tickets, anything he could write on that happened to be to hand at the time.

Pictures and music like this tell you all you need to know about the Dustbowl. No wonder whole communities were uprooted and forced to move hundreds of miles away from their homes...

fever pitch

Just finished reading Nick Hornby's "Songbook" which seems to be a slightly extended version of his "31 Songs" in which he writes about a selection of his favourite tracks (nice work if you can make a pile of money out of it).

Judging from his choices I think I share about 60% of Hornby's musical taste: I like the same singer/songwriters (Aimee Mann, Ben Folds), some of the same bands (Teenage Fanclub, The Bible) and I too can remember a time when Rod Stewart made good records, but I also thought a lot of his sentiments about music in general were spot on:
- sometimes you hear a great simple, unpretentious pop song on the radio and play it over and over again for days ("I'm Like A Bird" by Nelly Furtado is his example),
- people whose favourite song reminds them of their honeymoon, their student days, a foreign holiday, and so on, don't really like music much: "if you love a song, love it enough for it to accompany it throughout the different stages of your life, then any specific memory is rubbed away by use" ("Thunder Road" - Springsteen),
- whatever music critics say, we need happy, uplifiting music ("Ain't That Enough", Teenage Fanclub), not stuff which reminds us how crap life can be ("Frankie Teardrop" by Suicide).
- "solo acoustic shows [can give you] a little too much meat and potatoes and not enough dessert."

My favourite passage is the claim he makes for Ian Dury's "Reasons To Be Cheerful" to be adopted as the new national anthem and to be played at sporting events and state ceremonies: "Just imagine: Before each England international, David Beckham sings, 'Summer, Buddy Holly, the working folly, Good Golly Miss Molly and goats,' while the rest of the team chants, 'Why don't you get back into bed?' The boost to national morale would be incalculable."

reelin' in the years

On a bit of a Steely Dan kick at the moment, I finally got through Brian Sweet's not-very-imaginatively-titled biography, which has been gathering dust on my bookshelves for ages. Predictably, really only anally retentives need apply. Also, scandal mongers will have to look elsewhere for the dirt to be dished.

Frustratingly, until the solo recordings of recent years, Becker and Fagen seem to have had their tongues so firmly planted in their cheeks that anything they said about their work had to be taken with a huge bag full of salt. Legendary for their attention to detail in the recording studio, they would often ask musicians to play the same song as many as 20 or 30 times until they got what they considered to be an acceptable take. Yet there are no accounts of their bad tempered nature or that they were even considered difficult to work with (not in this book anyway), and the finest session musicians of the time queued up for a chance to play on their albums.

A couple of interesting facts which came to light:
- after "Gaucho" Donald Fagen applied for a job as pianist in Bob Dylan's touring band. (He lost interest before hearing back about it.)
- Michael Omartian's piano solo on "Ruby Baby", one of my highlights of "The Nightfly" is based on the Kinks' "You really got me going". (It's true. Listen to it.)

Some more stuff:
- discussions about the book on Amazon.
- info about the updated edition which goes up to the "Two Against Nature" album.