Incidentally (Part One)

 

If you are a fellow aficionado of cheap and cheerful Northern Soul compilations you will know one of the downsides is that certain tracks crop up again and again, which is often a price worth paying to get unexpected or lost gems. One of the repeat offenders is Laura Greene’s ‘Music, Moonlight and You’, which is fine by me as I am incredibly fond of the spoken introduction, where Laura asks: “Oh, by the way, did you bring your guitar?” It is so gloriously incongruous: just that one mention of a guitar. And, being built that way, one day when Laura’s song was on my mind, I got to thinking about other compositions where guitars are mentioned incidentally. I was surprised that, of the ones that sprang to mind, a lot of them were by favourite artists. I really am not quite sure what that proves.

Quite correctly ‘Music, Moonlight and You’ is a perennial favourite on the Northern Soul scene. Laura Greene herself, as well as being a fine singer and an actress, in photos looks an incredibly beautiful lady. Her signature tune was written and produced by Teddy Vann, one of those names you know but may not be sure where from. I am pretty certain I first came across Teddy via his ‘Theme from Colouredman’, which was on Capitol Soul Casino, quite possibly the first Northern Soul compilation I bought way back when. He may be best known for the gloriously fierce ‘Love Power’, as recorded by the brilliant Sandpebbles and then by Dusty.

Laura released her version of ‘Music, Moonlight and You’ in 1967 on the flipside of an impressive gallop through the old Mickey Baker and Sylvia Robinson hit ‘Love is Strange’.  ‘Music etc.’ originally was recorded by Teddy with The Essex.^. Oddly The Essex asked if their lover had brought a radio rather than a guitar along, which for me really doesn’t work, but there you go. Teddy must have loved Laura’s backing track so much (bet it was that ‘Young at Heart’-anticipating violin break) that he used it several times, including for Frankie & the Classicals’ majestic ‘What Shall I Do’.

So, anyway, what other songs have incidental mentions of guitars? This is based around a list I made of ones that I thought of, without trying too hard, partly because making lists can be a fun way to waste time, as Buddy says in Barry Gifford’s Wild at Heart. The one that perfectly fits with Laura’s intro is ‘Gypsy Woman’ by The Impressions with that beautiful lady with hair as dark as night dancing around to a guitar melody, with her face all aglow from the campfire. Then, still in soul mode, there’s Dobie Gray’s immortal ‘Out on the Floor’ with the beat light and bright and the guitars a-ringin’.

I was going to add ‘It Will Stand’, but I nearly forgot that in the original by The Showmen there’s saxes blowin’ sharp as lightning, and it wasn’t until Jonathan Richman covered it that the guitars came in a-twanging. It was these lyrics Alan Horne memorably included in his life-changing 1981 Postcard Brochure alongside those of ‘Do You Believe in Magic?’. There was a 1977 Lovin’ Spoonful double LP set I had, part of Pye’s File Series, where John Tobler in his sleevenotes argued that there had only been two songs that lyrically captured the elusive essence of music’s power, and that these were ‘It Will Stand’ and ‘Do You Believe in Magic?’ What’s the betting Alan and the Postcard cats had a copy of that compilation as well?

On a Postcard tangent, my favourite ‘guitar-referencing’ song is ‘Red Guitars’ by The Bluebells, which is a wonderful call-to-arms that’s captured on full power sung by the ultra-cool Russell Irvine on the essential Cherry Red collection of early Bluebells demos etc., with its ‘Red Flag’ intro and suggestion of ‘Capital Radio’ coda. Incidentally, mention of ‘Red Guitars’ makes me think of Adrian Henri’s ‘Mrs Albion You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter’ with its “beautiful boys with bright red guitars in the spaces between the stars.” And there’s that Malcolm McDowell line Michael Bracewell loves to quote about being on a bus going to Lime Street station around 1960, and looking down into a shop window, and seeing red electric guitars: “They gave you hope, somehow.”

Eternally I will associate red guitars with Edinburgh’s Fire Engines and their frontman Davy Henderson playing a red Fender Jaguar strapped high and tight. I don’t remember any Fire Engines songs mentioning guitars, but one of Davy’s later artistic projects, the Nectarine No. 9, did have a compilation released through the recalled-to-life Postcard called Guitar Thieves. This featured a cover of the Velvets’ ‘Inside Your Heart’ which sadly I don’t think mentioned Martha & the Vandellas. But, to his eternal credit, Davy did later sing: “I slept with the Subway Sect.  The Subway Sect slept with me.  In the back of a Fender Jaguar.  Under a decaying tree.” This was in the glorious ‘End of Definition’, a right old racket, featuring Josef K’s visionary Malcolm Ross.

Davy’s always kept a little Marc in his heart, so it is worth mentioning the old T. Rex b-side ‘King of the Mountain Cometh’ with its wild witch wizard from Esher playing his song on a Fender guitar. And Jonathan Richman sang an ode to the Fender Stratocaster, but that’s too blatant for us here. We, however, can allow his tribute to the Velvets with its lines about a Fender bass’ spooky tone and the band’s twanging sounds of the cheapest type.  

Still on a Postcard theme, Roddy Frame urged us to grab that Gretsch before the truth hits town. I never rated Dennis Greaves’ The Truth either. Were there any Orange Juice songs mentioning guitars? Hmm. Could you count ‘Satellite City’ where the OJs leapt onstage though they couldn’t play? And Edwyn Collins gets a consolation prize here for using ‘incidentally’ in a song. The only other one I can think of immediately is The Faces’ ‘Cindy Incidentally’. Plus, there’s Edwyn’s later ‘Campaign for Real Rock’ and its mention of the smashed guitar ritual. The song’s references to ‘Rag Mama Rag’ and a “raggle-taggle gypsy” also ring a bell for some reason.

As for those Postcard phantoms and archetypes, Subway Sect, there is that line in ‘A Different Story’ about making guitars talk information, and the band’s line in interviews at the time was about wanting to end rock music. As was pointed out in a review of Vic Godard’s What’s The Matter Boy? for the short-lived New Music News in the summer of 1980 by one Bill Lee (or rather Steve Walsh moonlighting from Manicured Noise) the irony was that Subway Sect were all along “roots enthusiasts”. Vic later mentioned “Jimi’s guitar” in the wonderful ‘Americana→Fire’ from the 2002 Sansend set, a record which opens with a reference to Dean Parrish’s ‘Bricks, Broken Bottles and Sticks’. Or am I making that up?

There is a Bernard Rhodes / Oddball connection between Vic and Dexys Midnight Runners whose Kevin Rowland spoke out against those noisy and crude guitars on ‘Let’s Make This Precious’. And apologies for this digression, but that same incarnation of Dexys had, at the end of their tumultuous 1982, a hit with the excellent ‘Let’s Get This Straight from the Start’, featuring the Brothers Just on backing vocals. Being particularly slow on the uptake, I have only recently realised this is in name almost the Just Brothers, coincidentally or not, of ‘Sliced Tomatoes’ immortality, the track that features what I would call the best guitar work in Northern Soul. Vic Godard has said it may have been this track and its seeming proximity to ‘Nobody’s Scared’ that inspired him to adapt that song into ‘Instrumentally Scared’ which opened proceedings when Subway Sect played their Northern Soul set live in March 1980.

Again, I have to confess to being remiss in not realising (or rather strongly suspecting) that the Brother Just Jimmy Thomas who appeared on Top of the Pops with Dexys performing ‘Let’s Get This Straight’, and who really got into the spirit of things, was the same Jimmy Thomas who recorded ‘Where There’s a Will’ for Mirwood in 1966 and, when later living in the UK, wrote and recorded ‘The Beautiful Night’, both of which are cherished Northern Soul favourites. Jimmy also, I think, appeared with Dexys on a 1982 TV Christmas special performing Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’ (something which, pre-YouTube, I suspected I had dreamed up) as well as ‘Let’s Get This Straight’.

They were introduced on the show by David Essex, which is apt as I have recently read on the Backbeat site, in an obituary of Jimmy, that it’s him doing the profound bass “James Dean” aside in David’s ‘Rock On’. So, if that’s right, then it makes sense that it’s Jimmy who is the conversational foil to Kevin Rowland on ‘Reminisce (Part One)’ and who utters the immortal line: “New York? Man, that’s 3000 miles due west?” God, I love that song. And I know what Kevin meant about how you learn from experiences like these: “You know what I’m talking about”. Please do bear in mind, this may all be wrong, and maybe hordes of Dexys disciples have already said all this before much better.

Anyway, you can’t reference Bernie Rhodes and not mention the Special A.K.A.’s ‘Gangsters’ with its threat of guitars being confiscated. Interestingly Bernie’s old boys seemed to excel at songs about the pop process, in the spirit of The Byrds’ ‘So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star’ and getting an electric guitar and taking some time to learn how to play, which sort of links to The Clash’s ‘Garageland’ and its five guitar players sharing one instrument back in the garage.

It's easy enough to think of other Clash songs mentioning guitars, which perhaps doesn’t help us fight against the group’s tiresome detractors. So, there’s Joe bellowing “You’re my guitar hero” in ‘Complete Control’ while on the flip of ‘Clash City Rockers’ there’s the ‘Jail Guitar Doors’ going “clang clang”, just like the early Subway Sect’s discordant sound. I guess you could argue ‘Stay Free’ fits in here, with Jonesy practising daily in his room, while ‘Hitsville UK’ definitely does with its stolen or used guitars. Then there’s the “public service announcement with guitars” at the start of the superb ‘Know Your Rights’. Hands up who’s still got their sticker? And anymore for anymore? Probably.

Of their contemporaries there’s The Jam with that guitar-shaped swimming pool in ‘To Be Someone’ and in ‘When You’re Young’ Paul Weller’s falling in love with any guitar and any bass drum. At the time of their symbolic split there was ‘Beat Surrender’ with Paul vowing to come running to the sound of your strumming. Ironically, by the time he sang that on Top of the Pops, he had put his guitar away for a memorable dance-off with Tracie. And there’s the rub, because most of the performers mentioned so far would define themselves as being anti-rockism or combatting rock while the guitar is too often seen as a symbol of solid rock music.

“Never listen to electric guitar,” said the Talking Heads in the surreal ‘Electric Guitar’, while The Members’ Nicky Tesco (when he was a doppelganger for Frankie Abbott from Please Sir!, no less) sang about the proverbial Johnny sitting up in the dark of his suburban bedroom “annoying the neighbours with his punk rock electric guitar” in the classic hit ‘Sound of the Suburbs’.

I feel obliged to mention that Ziggy also played guitar, though I was more an Alvin fan when it came to Stardust. As a kid, I recall tossing up whether to buy Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel’ or Alvin’s ‘Jealous Mind’ with my 10^th birthday present money in Welling’s Ajax record and electricals shop. ‘Jealous Mind’ won, and its b-side was a number called ‘Guitar Star’ (both songs, incidentally, were written by Peter Shelley, though of ‘Love Me Love My Dog’ fame rather than the ‘Love You More’ one, I hasten to add). I must confess I didn’t think ‘Guitar Star’ was in the same league as ‘Jealous Mind’ or ‘My Coocachoo’, but it has a certain charm now in a very Elvis sings Jerry Reed’s ‘Guitar Man’ meets the Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Nashville Cats’ playing clean as country water or those D-I-Y enthusiasts with their washboards in ‘Jug Band Music’.

Sticking with the pre-punk 1970s, another favourite incidental mention of guitars is in Mott the Hoople’s ‘All the Way to Memphis’ with Ian Hunter singing about losing his “six-string razor”. At the time I was probably too young to really appreciate Mott (at least in the way Mick Jones did: an early Guy Stevens connection there!) but loved the hits like ‘Honaloochie Boogie’, ‘Roll Away the Stone’, and especially ‘The Golden Age of Rock & Roll’ which I guess is where I first heard of rockabilly.

 It was not until the late 1980s that I realised that the classic rockabilly party aside is a reference to the 1950s Hugo & Luigi hit ‘Rockabilly Party’ which I first heard on, I think, a Stuart Colman radio show on Capital. His programme back then was always worth catching, and I recall one night hearing Stuart read out an arcane request from the late great Penny Reel. Stuart is perhaps best known for producing Memphis’ ‘You Supply the Roses’, the one-off single by James Kirk and Steven Daly on Alan Horne’s Swamplands label. Many years later, unexpectedly, we would find James walking down his strasse with his old Stratocaster singing ‘Any Old Iron’ on his supremely cool Marina LP You Can Make It If You Boogie.

No doubt, by this stage, those who know me will have been waiting for a mention of Hurrah! and their classic line about waking up to the smell of fresh cut grass, with those jangling guitars in Paul Handyside’s ears: the sound of the end of summer 1982 in all its magnificence. It still sounds great to me. It would be many years before I saw Kitchenware’s promo film for ‘The Sun Shines Here’ in all its ragged suede jacket, distressed white jeans and ‘Do You Believe in Magic?’ autoharp glory. It features ‘guitar hero’ Taffy Hughes pre-Fender Jaguar, though it is worth adding his handsome red model is still going strong, and featured prominently in recent very special performances he played, with soulmate Sylvia Hughes as The Girl With The Replaceable Head. Ah life.

Also, from that early phase of Hurrah!, there’s ‘Saturday’s Train’ where Paul sings about how, for a moment, he thought he heard the phone ring, then realised it was just his 12-string. Easy mistake to make: “The beat is hot and bright, guitars are ringin',” as Dobie Gray memorably sang on the title track of Neil Rushton’s Inferno Records Northern Soul compilation, which was such a big part of my musical education at the start of the 1980s and, with the emerging Kent LPs and old folk rock or ’60s garage sounds, plus inevitably the Velvets, helped shape the way ahead post-punk, for some of the artists and audience alike.

A big part of the new scene were the Jasmine Minks, on Creation Records, and on the title track of their Scratch the Surface LP Jim Shepherd sings about needing to play his guitar in the street. For some reason, in my mind, that always connected with Pete Townshend’s line about taking out his guitar and playing just like yesterday on ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, but we are getting into the realm of classics there which I tend to have conflicted feelings about. I must mention, however, The Beatles’ ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, and particularly the gorgeous Damon & Naomi version. I also completely love Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Homeward Bound’ with Paul Simon travelling with his suitcase and guitar in hand.  

For me, a true pop classic is The Accidents’ ‘Blood Spattered with Guitars’, a one-off single from 1980 on the band’s own Hook, Line n’ Sinker label. I vaguely, and maybe inaccurately, recall reading about the band in the mod fanzine Maximum Speed in a mini article with the irresistible heading ‘Accidents Will Happen’ then heard the single just the once on John Peel, but never found a copy until many years later, and that was for pennies which was a sweet feeling after all that time.

It is such a great song, vaguely predicting the future sound of Hurrah! as noted in YouTube comments (not by me!), and reportedly the title refers to the band’s singer Terry Ruffle (who sadly died a few years back) continuing to play his guitar after cutting his hand on the strings, and at the end of the set having a blood-spattered white guitar. It echoes a story Viv Albertine tells in her memoir about going to watch Subway Sect very early on and seeing guitarist Rob Symmons also continuing to play with blood pouring from his hand. Rob himself refers to this in the incredible second part of his Subway Sect story in the Summer 2024 issue (no. 66) of Ugly Things which comes with some wonderful photos.

On a mod-related theme, I used to have an old joke about that line in Dire Straits’ ‘Sultans of Swing’ where Guitar George knows all The Chords, and how this was hardly surprising given the shared Deptford and wider South London connections. Oh well, please yourselves. Deptford’s favourite sons, ATV, in their big hit ‘Action Time Vision’, argued that chords and notes don’t mean a thing. This, in my view, is such a classic mod song. And appropriately, it turns out that it was someone who used to be part of The Action’s inner circle, the journalist Nick Jones, who provided the link between Mark Perry and Miles Copeland in the early days of punk. So, there you go. Additionally, in ATV’s cover of the Mothers of Invention’s ‘Why Don’t You Do Me Right’ Mark can be heard calling out “guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar”. I have just realised, snob that I am, that I have never heard Zappa’s original.

Tangentially, on an ATV theme, Lawrence, way back when he was in Denim, in his hit ‘Middle of the Road’ rages against “riffs and guitar licks” before concluding: “It’s your right to choose who you listen to. It’s your rock 'n' roll.” That has always, maybe misguidedly, reminded me of ATV’s ‘You Bastard’ and Perry’s plea to leave his rock 'n' roll alone.

There are, I am sure, many more songs with incidental guitar mentions, some of which I am aware will be favourites and many more which undoubtedly would not be for me. While writing this, I suddenly thought of ‘Warm Love’ and the line about bringing your guitar along when we go with Van Morrison to the country to lay and laugh, sing and have some fun in the sun, which I suppose brings us nicely back to where we came in with Laura.