the revolutionary spirit

in response to olivia's request for three songs, that evoke a certain mood:
1. what is your saddest song: shipbuilding/robert wyatt
well, i could choose anything off the last few joe strummer and the mescaleros album, esp.silver and gold, the final song, where he yells "ok, that's a take!" in the closing moments of the track - his last ever recorded utterance.
most country and western music, is as depressing as any indie song i could ever think of... joy division could have easily fitted in to the nashville scene, with all those tales of loss and regret... when robert gordon who i am a big fan of  - got himself into faron young, that opened-up a whole new can of old sad songs:

revolutionary spirit by the wild swans - that has a certain sadness to it, but is also uplifting at times... sometimes melancholic thoughts return from when i first heard the song back in the 80s... along with out of season by icicle works - both take me back to my days as an outsider, when i used to sit by campfires in the woods with friends debating the meaning of life(which mostly revolved around avoiding gainful employment and wearing old raincoats)... we were starting to fracture from society and forge our own way, but it was sad to realise that things weren't going to just fall into our laps.
truly though, despite being depressed as hell every time i played bad town by BSA, as it reminded me of living well out of the loop, in a dead-end place in life, the one song i can remember repeatedly playing whilst actually looking out of a rain-soaked window at nothing-ness is shipbuilding by robert wyatt:
here you have the song that really spoke about what was going on in britain at that time, i was of conscription age then, i could see the falklands war was a complete sham, instigated by a horrendous old woman in power at the time, to bolster her vote in the forthcoming elections... and there was talk of signing-up teenagers to go out and kill other teenagers, in the name of a patch of land, very far away. it really seemed like there wasn't any point to starting-out on life, as we were all hanging in the balance waiting to see what would happen next... there was no optimism at all. this came to pass, obviously... and life went on, but for a certain period, it was like the 50's all over again, it takes me back to sitting in my mother's lounge, watching the rain come down outside, the week after i'd been off camping in the lake district, to come back to a family falling apart in a country that was falling apart.
obviously this was a blip in the scheme of things - Rota Fortunae and all that... life did fall apart, but i picked myself up from the torpor and started all over again..
automobile noise/the blue nile - another low point, spending a day-out in glasgow, seeing the possibilities of what i could be doing, listening to this song on my red walkman, as i waited in buchanan street bus station, watching a light snow coming down, feeling the chill, the soundtrack to my broken home.

2. which song turns you on: rollercoaster/the jesus and marychain
maybe the swagger of something by jesus and marychain, when they were in their heyday - they were channelling kenneth anger/the velvet underground/the stooges, wearing leather jackets like i did, and i even looked like i was in the band(most indie blokes did at that point to be honest), but i was so identified by them(even though i didn't listen to them all the time, contrary to popular belief), people would avoid/start relationships with me, based entirely on them.
there was more to it than that of course, i'd quit my hometown and was living a life away from parents and felt free for the first time, like i was truly being myself - i was also meeting girls who wanted to be with me(as opposed to most of the local girls back home, who avoided me like the plague), so i could say that the music was soundtracking my own awakening. despite all this, my own relationships were slightly lacking in the actual danger of a JAMC song, and more closely resembled a lloyd cole song:
- i was never going to hang out with a cool arty woman, shooting drugs in an NYC loft, i would have been more inclined to bump into a fellow outsider in a library or indie club, much more my style...

3. what song scares me: crossroads/robert johnson
well apart from the obvious mind-bender - which i experienced whilst at a techno clubnight, back in the early 00's, the first scary song i can recall hearing is devil's answer by atomic rooster, although most of their songs were fairly scary to my 12 year old ears... dealing with madness, demonic possession, desperation... it should come as no surprise that vincent crane, the main mover behind the band was treated for bipolar disorder.

as a child however, i recall being scared shitless of some dark wooden cottages that my grandad was visiting(they were just regular old folk homes), but they reminded me of hansel and gretel(surely that scariest story ever, by the aptly named brothers grimm), and i ran off screaming they were witches houses - this public information film, that used to be shown constantly on tv in the 70's would frighten the life out of me, and (which i suspect was the idea) put me off going near wooded areas with dark water:
was it really necessary to scare kids like that? all of this(coupled with watching too many hammer horror films), seemed to be encapsulated in the music of atomic rooster.
i didn't realise this until i started listening to them, back in '93 whilst on a road trip to cromer, and we passed thru some foggy landscapes and dark wooden farm houses - it all came flooding back to me...
this final track however, struck a chord with me, a few years back - i really did feel i'd reached the crossroads and all that would entail: the story of robert johnson going to the crossroads at midnight, on a deserted highway, and meeting a dark and foreboding stranger - who gave him a guitar that he could suddenly play without any effort, coming home days later - unrecognisable to anyone who knew him... that's a fear that i always have, that one day i'll return home and no one will know who i am anymore... not to mention my fear of selling-out to get what i want, making a pact with the unknown.
what is it that connects all three? awakening, i suppose... coming out of my sheltered existence and finding myself, being who i wanted to be, and ignoring the superstitions and fears of the past.

Keep Searchin

one of those moments... iit happened to me years ago when i bought a castle records comp of singles by the zombies... they were familiar to me through the well-known tunes, but listening to the album, i realised there was more to this band that i'd realised and all off a sudden i was a zombies fan.
revelation.like when i watched a gig by the dead 60s - and it dawned on me how fcuking good they were.
all yesterday i'd had runaway by del shannon stuck in my head, courtesy of the american graffitti soundtrack album i'd been listening to - and i had a del shannon greatest hits album kicking about... i'd played it a few times, but never really listened to it, even after i'd read that johnny marr wanted the smiths to be like a del shannon song(although i always thought the smiths were more like the wild swans, but i digress).
so bang! i had a real jones for del shannon material this morning and listened to that greatest hits cd this morning... excellent stuff, over-wrought, clever and sometimes primitive, like scott walker without any pretension, with lots of dum-dum-dum paff jesus and marychain breaks... where had this artist been all my life... yet again i'm left thinking that i should have gotten into him about 20-odd years ago, and how life would have been etc....
now i'm acquiring mostly all his stuff (nearly 20 albums of various periods in his life).
maybe there's a connection with del shannon and the wild swans...

the ballad of the band

You're fearless and brave -
you can't be stopped when you're young
You used to fall in love with everyone
Any guitar and any bass drum

back in the 80's, i was in a band called the sherbet fountains.
we were my hometown's premier pop band, in my mind... there were some seriously talented people in the band(and me...), davie who could play any instrument, laz who was a west coast pop art muso, allison who sang very well and maggie who played real instruments like the violin and my one drumbeat for every song we did.
we were into felt, velvet underground, jesusandmarychain and the local indie glasgow bands who were taking the popworld by storm at the time... it was nice being a local popstar for about 10 minutes.

that's me in the brylcreem and buddy holly glasses...
i had a battered old drumkit and blagged the audition over some other aspiring people... the fountains were already a band who'd played parties and such before i joined... so i dragged my self down to an old school building and got myself a position... felt quite good at the time, like i had just joined the coolest gang in town.
we played around kilmarnock and the west coast... i was a very busy musician for someone who was so inept at playing anything(i've since attempted to learn how to play), as i was also in a blues band and a rival indie band, which caused me no end of hassle at times - having to schedule rehearsal sessions around all three and play gigs, and remember songs.
i wanted to follow allison's influence and become a bit more like louis phillipe, whereas laz wanted us to be the byrds(i think)or early pink floyd and dave was more into the REM side of things and probably loads of other clever bands... all classic stuff though, we were very mature in our listening habits and i can still hear a lot of that music today and not feel embarrassed.

i would just like to state for the record here and now, that the velvet underground got me into rockabilly...they always did have that touch of country about them(i was and still am a lloyd cole fan too), so there.

it all fell apart as bands do... allison went off to glasgow to join other bands and be a musician for a living now working with the very cinematic heist, maggie found gainfull employment, and us lads became an instrumentals band, playing all the usual guitar cover versions- before i gave it all up and went off to college, leaving town never to really return.
funnily enough dave and laz went onto better things, the band became more well known, and they became local indie heroes for a time.
dave eventually came down to england and we lived not far from each other without knowing... and laz became a glasgow indie icon, which is kind-of what i think he wanted to be be anyway.

that's kilmarnock taken from the station... btw.
we're all still making music - dave has his tesco chainstore mascara, and laz has his innumerable persona to harness his many talents as a songwriter - both of them producing some very fine material.
me, i'm working under the name of the helvatones, making suitably bluesy and sometimes jazzy sounds...