1. In the
Mirror – Field Music
2. The
State I am In – Belle and Sebastian
3. Inimigo – Mercenarias
4. Rock Europeu – Fellini
5. Ilha Urbana - Muzak
6. Sin in
My Heart – Siouxsie and the Banshees
7. Wax
and Wane – Cocteau Twins
8. Poptones [Peel Session] – Public Image Ltd.
9. Jack Kerouac – Gang 90
10.
Leave
Me Alone – New Order
11.
Vitamin
C – Can
12.
Antenna
– Sonic Youth
13.
51st
Anniversary – The Jimi Hendrix Experience
14.
Harvest
Moon – Neil Young
15. Effortlessly – Field Music
16. Constellations – Darwin Deez
17. Chemistry – Semisonic
18. Intentions – The Whitest Boy Alive
19. Ivy & Gold – Bombay Bicycle Club
20. Many of Horror – Biffy Clyro
21. Whitechapel – The Vaselines
22. Down from Dover – Nancy
Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood
23.
There’s
a Ghost in My House – R. Dean Taylor
It was around
this period that I came to realise that a spade was no longer called a spade but more likely referred to as a soil redistribution enabler. I knew this
because I was now working as a freelance transcript writer/audio typist, which involved
the production and delivery of customised
transcripts, presentations and summary documents for a broad range of clients.
I was given assignments at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Inland
Revenue, Ofcom, what was then known as the Competition Commission, Social Services, the Performing Rights Society (PRS), Stringfellows
(staff disciplinary hearings), the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC), and with various banks (Deutsche Bank, Citibank, UBS, Credit Suisse, etc.) and
private investment firms. It was interesting work but badly paid and quite full-on, although for someone adverse to stress I cope well when put
under it. I could handle the short notice, the tight deadlines and meticulous
nature of the business, but certain jobs – normally the financially orientated
ones – brought me into contact with some real burks. You know, the
sort who use the verb ‘disconnect’ as a noun to describe nothing more technical
than a difference of opinion. More to the point, when you’re being paid by the
minute to transcribe the unintelligible rantings of a banker who’s been
told they aren’t getting paid their yearly bonus – a dividend that would often amount
to more than double my yearly salary – it can do things to your morale.
Some people see no harm in the branding of language, of jargon,
discussing top-down strategies, taking helicopter views, of obfuscation. It
saves them the trouble of having to construct sentences that actually mean
anything, or communicate something approaching an actual idea. I doubt these
are the sort of people who listen to Field Music. If that sounds tenuous then
consider that Duffy won Best British Album of the Year at the 2009 Brit Awards,
Florence and The Machine the same in 2010, Lily Allen was given an Ivor Novello
Award, and Robbie Williams was honoured for his ‘outstanding contribution to
music’.
'In the Mirror' derives from Field Music’s
third album, ostensibly known as Measure,
released early in 2010. A slow burner, it begins with a portentous prelude
played out on the guitar: then drums, piano, guitar again, this time playing a
more measured riff, followed by bass, vocals, harmonies. Was this the moment
Field Music’s reviews began alluding to Steely Dan? It has something of that
about it.
Push Barman
to Open Old Wounds is a two-disc compilation by Belle and
Sebastian that gathers together their early EPs and singles. As far as I’m concerned you can do away with disc two: the first four tracks are alright, but if that’s
what you’re after you may as well buy the original EP, This Is Just a Modern
Rock Song. As for 'The State I Am In', it’s taken from Belle and
Sebastian’s first EP, Dog on Wheels, part of a trio released over the
course of 2007. I had Lazy Line Painter Jane and 3.. 6.. 9 Seconds of Light but not Dog on
Wheels, and so 'The State I Am' In was absent from
my collection. It’s a great tune and a reminder of a time when Belle and
Sebastian stood outside of the mainstream.
I assume that my Cornish friend wanted his CD back. Why else would I have
included 'Inimigo'
by Mercenarias, 'Rock
Europeu' by Fellini and 'Ilha
Urbana' by Muzak lined up in a row. The disc in question is of course The Sexual Life of
the Savages, a compendium of São Paulo post-punk I’d borrowed a year
earlier. These three tracks are distinct enough – 'Inimigo' echoes The Slits, 'Rock
Europeu' brings to mind The Stranglers, while 'Ilha Urbana' sounds like Magazine jamming with Joy Division – but
obviously they’re all sung in Portuguese. I’ve tried to mitigate this disparity
by following up with something in the same vein, but sung in English.
I think it was the Roz Childs who played
me Siouxsie and the Banshees – 'Happy
House', 'Israel', 'Spellbound'. I’m
guessing she had The Best of Siouxsie and
the Banshees. It was one of those moments when you realise you like
an artist without really knowing much about them or the names of their songs or
whether there’s a particular record you’re meant to own. I don’t know why I
took a chance on the album Juju but
I’m glad I did. 'Sin in my Heart' is
the standout track. The tempo slowly increases throughout the duration the song,
Siouxsie Sioux plays a simple guitar part, which is the tune’s signature, freeing
up John McGeoch to add Adrian Belew-style licks over the top.
I wanted to revisit the Cocteau Twins’ record I’d flirted with in my
youth, provided by the guy who’d go on to introduce me to Portishead. The album
was Garlands, and the tracks that had
taken my fancy back then were 'Wax and
Wane', 'Blind Dumb Deaf' and 'Shallow Then Halo'. I suppose we have
YouTube to thanks for all this retrospective knowledge. I certainly wasn’t
going to buy a copy of Garlands to
find out – not now, in my financially stretched state – and ended up
downloading 'Wax and Wane' after
concluding that it was probably my favourite of the three tunes that were the
favourite of the eight on the original record.
Post-punk… it was something that I hadn’t really given much thought.
Wasn’t it just another word for new wave? No, new wave was poppier and took itself less seriously. Blondie were new wave. The Ramones, Talking Heads and Devo were kind of new wave. In the UK, maybe Buzccocks and The Undertones. You could dance
to new wave. You might be able to dance to post-punk too, but there was
something about it that felt too earnest or preoccupied with the avantgarde. [Incidentally, I once transcribed an
event for the PRS where Feargal Sharkey, formerly of The Undertones, was one of
the speakers. Would you believe he opened his panegyric on copyright by quoting
the first four lines of 'Teenage Kicks?' To be fair, Feargal didn’t write the
song, John O’Neill did, but who in attendance knew?]
I can’t remember where I first heard 'Poptones'
by Public Image Ltd. It took a while for Keith Levene’s repetitious groove and
Jah Wobble’s undulating bass to persuade me that the song would be worth
putting up with Lydon’s howl for, which might be why I don’t recall its origins. On listening more closely
to the lyrics – again, more than likely on YouTube,
possibly the Old Grey Whistle – I was quite taken aback.
Drive to the forest in a Japanese
car,
The smell of rubber on country tar.
And hindsight does me no good,
I'm standing naked in this back of the
woods.
The cassette played pop tones.
It’s
a song concerning abduction and sexual assault, told from the perspective of the
victim, inspired by a news' article Lydon had come across in a national
newspaper. A girl was bundled into the back of a car and driven out to the woods,
violated, and left for dead. All the while the perpetrators played the same tune over and over on the car's cassette player, providing a monotonous and surreal backdrop to the girl’s
savage ordeal.
'Jack Kerouac' by
Gang 90 is another track taken from The Sexual Life of the Savages, but
not quite as punk as three that featured earlier – more like Talking Heads – so
I pushed it back. I’m not sure how much I like this tune but I deemed it worthy
back in 2010, and so it remains. 'Leave Me Alone' is taken from New Order's second album, Power,
Corruption & Lies, and has little in common with the post-punk of Joy
Division. Again, no idea what inspired me to include this track, but I find Bernard Sumner’s guitar to be evocative of Bobby
Wratten’s with The Field Mice.
Athens
When I entered into the transcription business, the company I worked for would send me to places like
Deutsche Bank in Liverpool Street or Citibank in Canary Wharf, to transcribe
redundancy meetings and disciplinary investigations. Occasionally I might be
assigned something a little more glamorous: a round table seminar at the Home
Office, hosted by the then Secretary of State for International Development,
Douglas Alexander; a Barclays’ AGM, chaired by Andrew Neil; a symposium at the
Financial Times.
I used to like freelancing at the Competition Commission on Southampton Row
in Holborn until some old boy gave me a telling off for being late back from
lunch. The buffoon had read the clock wrong, and I received a panicked phone
call from my employer asking where I’d got to – what a waste of a cup of coffee.
Companies wishing to effect takeovers would plead their case to a panel of
adjudicators, very often chaired by someone with the word ‘sir’ before his
name. These guys would barely look me in the eye; as a transcriber, I must have
been beneath them. I asked to be assigned jobs at the Health
and Care Professions Council instead, where you could help yourself to
sandwiches and the red-faced legal assessors were more than happy to talk with you, and would
make eye contact while doing so.
But the Competition Commission was very well placed, and if I felt
I had the time I would make a detour through Covent Garden or Soho, maybe to
browse through records I could ill afford, or to look for second hand clothes.
This may be how I came across 'Vitamin C' by Can, although I can’t be
sure. Can had been on my radar for a while, due to their supposed influence
on groups like Stereolab and The Fall. I couldn’t really see it. Perhaps I
needed to listen to an album other than Ege Bamyasi, which I procured from
the Richmond Library.
I don’t think this was how I came by 'Antenna' by Sonic Youth –
that was more likely from The Wilkinsons. I’ll concede to enjoying Sonic
Youth’s more tuneful elements, and 'Antenna' is no exception. The
stuff that sounds like the free-form breakout in Pink Floyd’s 'Interstellar
Overdrive' I don't like so much.
'51st
Anniversary' by Jimi Hendrix was certainly a London discovery –
in one of the bookshops on Charing Cross Road (not Foyles, possibly Borders). '51st
Anniversary' was the B-side to 'Purple Haze' and only appears on the CD
re-issue of the album Are You Experienced as a bonus track. I’ve never
owned any Jimi Hendrix, but during my first year at university the guy who used
to room next to me played him a lot. '51st Anniversary' possess a groovier melody than a lot of Hendrix’s work, freed from the
psychedelic diversions that normally predominate.
'Harvest Moon'
was almost certainly a Wilkinson intervention, played in a car on the way to Pen Y Fan, Wales. 'Harvest Moon', and the album of the same name, was recorded in 1992 as a kind of sequel to Neil Young’s Harvest recorded
20 years prior, to the extent that many of the same musicians appear on both
and it was recorded on analogue devices to create the same sort of sound.
One
of things I like about Field Music is that they don’t dress much differently now to when I first saw them play live in October 2004. They obviously don’t care for the vagaries of fashion, which is the best way to be. They
don’t really do colour; instead, navy blue, grey, olive drab, black, white. A shirt may be accompanied by a suit jacket, a T-shirt with a
cardigan. Press shots rarely reveal their feet, but they must surely wear shoes (as opposed to kicks).
Haircuts are sensible and don't appear to change much.
My job required a level of smartness. This didn’t bother me for I had enough shirts to be getting on with, wasn’t much into trainers anyway,
and my hair was getting progressively shorter. On my days off, I’d walk to
Richmond and look in Gap and Limited Offer for cheap clobber that could double
up as workwear. ‘Limited Offer’ isn’t really called that: most people know it
as Uniqlo. If you pay full price for anything in Gap or Uniqlo then you’re a
mug. The French have laws against this sort of thing, but in the UK life is one
perpetual sale, and because everyone loves a bargain we‘re constantly buying
things we don’t need. The shops know this and budget
accordingly. They know that summer jacket isn’t worth £60, but if they pretend
to us it is then we’ll snap it up it when they cut the price in half, sometimes after only a matter of weeks.
Despite the cynical marketing ploys and the mediocre merchandise, I did
used to like gliding around the aisles of Limited Offer. I don’t so much now but the branch they had in Richmond felt industrial, like a low-rent version
of Muji. They would also play good music. I’d listen carefully and try and
identify what might be a song’s title, or a phrase distinctive enough that it
might bear results if I typed it into a search engine proceeded with the word
‘lyrics’ – the same as if I heard a song playing in Beyond Retro in Soho or
Borders on Charing Cross Road.
I have Uniqlo’s music policy to thank for 'Constellations' by Darwin
Deez and 'Intentions' by The Whitest Boy Alive. They occupy the same
ground, a buoyant sort of easy-listening indie with congenial vocals, conducive
to shopping for rudimentary clothes in primary colours. I
decided to separate these two tracks with 'Chemistry' by Semisonic.
Although it dates back to 2001, it makes the same sort of impression. It’s not
my intention to make any of these songs sound unhip by association. If
anything, somebody at Uniqlo was doing a good job.
It’s by no means improbable, but I did not discover either 'Ivy & Gold' by
Bombay Bicycle Club or 'Many of Horror' by Biffy Clyro while shopping in Uniqlo or
Gap. It was probably from the radio that I was drawing
much of my inspiration – in the car on the way to and from shopping for food and other things. My partner mocked me for liking 'Many of Horror' – Biffy
Clyro was what moody teenage boys listened too, she said. I knew nothing of them so couldn’t really say anything other than I thought it was good tune.
Conversely, my partner liked Bombay Bicycle Club. I wasn’t
aware of this at the time but it turned out that their latest material
represented something of a departure. Their first album comprised of standard
indie fare in the vein of, say, The Mystery Jets or Vampire Weekend. In 2010,
they released Flaws, which appeared to be inspired by the burgeoning indie
folk scene and groups like Fleet Foxes, Great Lake Swimmers, Beirut. Not that
this would have made much difference to me either, because the flip side of all
of that was Mumford & Sons, and I had no time for Mumford & Sons. And
for the first 53 seconds, I didn’t have much time for 'Ivy & Gold'.
Then the chorus arrives, shifting abruptly, and only momentarily, from G to D
minor. Normal service resumes and then there it is again, that brief shift to D
minor, before the verse carries on as if nothing had ever happened.
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Sofia
The
Vaselines are an alternative rock band from Glasgow, once beloved by Kurt Cobain. They had only ever
released one album, but in 2010 they reformed and put out another. Guess what:
I came across it in a record shop in central London, propped up on the counter
behind a sign saying ‘Now Playing’. 'I Hate The 80's caught my ear, but I
hung around long enough to hear 'Whitechapel', which is reminiscent of
their song 'Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam', which Kurt Cobain performed in
tribute for the album MTV Unplugged in New York.
I doubt very much it was the same day, but I discovered 'Down from
Dover' playing in Beyond Retro in Soho while looking for checked shirts.
It’s a Dolly Parton number, but the version playing was by Nancy Sinatra and Lee
Hazlewood. The song tells the sad story of a girl that gets knocked up by a guy
from Dover who promises to return for the birth of their child. He doesn’t, and
the baby’s stillborn anyhow, almost as is if, ‘she knew she'd never have a
father's arms to hold her.’ Lee Hazlewood’s baritone seems especially deep, and
Sinatra’s voice trembles with emotion. It’s incredible.
'Down from
Dover' featured on the 1972 album Nancy & Lee Again
and allows me to reach further back in time and finish off with the Motown soul
of 'There’s a Ghost in My House' by R. Dean Taylor. I knew the song by way of The Fall and their version of it. I have no idea why I chose now to incorporate it, but like many of these odds-and-sods, I downloaded it from iTunes.
In 2009, I managed a trip to Athens with my partner. In early 2010,
we ventured to Sofia (a very cheap holiday). Later that year, I secured
future employment working for a small engineering firm in Brentford. It provided
the time, and afforded me the money, to attend a friend's wedding in Thailand in
August, before starting employment in October. It snowed heavily for the first
time in years. My brother got married (the one who recorded Orbital for me, not
the Beastie Boys). A Fullers' pub crawl, trip to Brighton, camping in Wales. What does The
State I Am In bring to mind? Shopping.
[Listen to here.]
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