Why Didn't You Tell? (Part Eight)

 

Some things are meant to be, it seems. Why else would there appear on the local high-street, in the depths of winter, a stall selling secondhand CDs at £2 a time? You’re hardly going to get rich that way, not round our way. And there were not too many records to set the pulses racing. A Soul Jazz CD, not the label but an excellent Verve Jazz Club compilation from 2006, and War’s The World is a Ghetto seemed to be about it, until in the last box there appeared a sealed copy of Always Sunshine, Always Rain by Spike and Debbie, from 2018, which piqued my curiosity and prompted me to take a chance.

To be fair, it wasn’t really a wild shot in the dark, as a quick shufti at the sleeve revealed it was credited to Spike Reptile & Debbie Debris, which suggested I would be on familiar ground, as it got me thinking of Spike Williams who had been in Reptile Ranch, part of the same scene in Cardiff the Young Marble Giants came through, and who was later in Weekend with Alison Statton. And it turned out I was right. Though I would be deducted points for not guessing that Debbie Debris was the Debbie Pritchard who sang ‘Simian’ on The Gist’s Embrace The Herd LP. Anyway, the Spike and Debbie CD turned out to be a rather wonderful thing, even if I was half-a-dozen years late in finding that out. I had absolutely no idea it existed.

Anyone who knows and loves ‘Simian’ will have a sense of the odd charm of Debbie’s singing, and similarly anyone who has come across Spike’s work with Alison Statton in Weekend and afterwards will know what a way he has with melodies. The CD covers three discrete entities the duo worked as. First off is Table Table, who were very much part of the early 1980s experimental pop underground. I think originally this was Debbie with Lewis Mottram (as on ‘Simian’) but it became more of a Spike and Debbie thing, with whoever was around. And seemingly Table Table ran parallel to Weekend, so it’s tempting to trace connections in sound and influences. The growing interest in African and Latin sounds which was a huge part of Weekend’s appeal can also be distinctly heard in Table Table.

Then there is Spike and Debbie’s post-Weekend mid-to-late 1980s outfit, Bomb and Dagger, a collective named in honour of an anarchist / socialist pub in their Splott part of Cardiff. Bomb and Dagger specialised in an infectious mess of Latin sounds, jazz, highlife, rumba, soukous, and whatever, with the benefit of hindsight summoning up sounds played on the radio by John Peel and Charlie Gillett, and released here by labels such as Earthworks, Stern’s, and Globestyle before the twin edifices of house and hip-hop seemed to sweep everything else away.

At the time I certainly had no idea about Bomb and Dagger, though from all accounts they were a huge live draw in Cardiff and admirably were a highly politicised or agit-prop outfit, heavily committed to supporting the Miners’ Strike and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, as reflected in the excellent ‘Strike’. As well as the selection of tracks on this Spike and Debbie CD there are a couple of performances from a Welsh TV show available on YouTube which are totally joyous, and very much of their time in the best possible way. The third part of the story is the Pepper Trees, which was Spike and Debbie in the mid-1990s making slightly more straightforward pop, with on the excellent ‘Nomansland’ the odd sensation of the Madonna singing something melodically akin to the Lightning Seeds’ ‘Pure’.

Since getting the Spike and Debbie CD, I have found myself thinking of the YMGs / Weekend / The Gist / Alison & Spike’s sphere of activity and their quietly revolutionary music for a variety of reasons, not that I needed any encouragement. One of these reasons was finding in a charity shop a copy of A Constant Source of Interruption, a 16-track 1990 Rough Trade compilation, which contains classics such as Aztec Camera’s ‘Oblivious’, Jonathan Richman’s ‘That Summer Feeling’, Girls At Our Best’s ‘Politics’, Rainy Day’s ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’, Arthur Russell’s ‘Let’s Go Swimming’, Vic’s ‘Stop That Girl’, Weekend’s ‘View From Her Room’, Raincoats’ ‘No-One’s Little Girl’, and Robert Wyatt’s ‘Shipbuilding’. In other words, just over half of the record includes some of my very favourite things ever.

Coincidentally or not, I recently read William McIlvanney’s The Kiln and this passage jumped out at me: “He read the poetry again, cover to cover. His favourites then were his favourites now. Was that a good sign or a bad? Youthful perceptiveness or a failure to mature? Maybe it was yet another example of repeated behaviour.” Does that apply to my reaction to this Rough Trade collection? Maybe.

The Kiln, one of those books which have haunted me since finishing it, has at its heart the summer of 1955 when the book’s narrator, Tam Docherty, was 17 and living in a small town on the outskirts of Glasgow. It is a time close to Tam’s heart, a summer which in a way changed everything, and a lost domain he revisits 40-odd years later, while wallowing in middle-age doldrums. It is such a great book and starts with a quote from Tam’s long-time friend Jack Laidlaw, which I like very much: “You must find the way to let the heat of experience temper your naivety without reducing your idealism to ashes.” Fans of McIlvanney’s Laidlaw books will be delighted at the cameos from a teenage Jack.

Similarly, Michael Head fans might be pleased to note Tam’s hero is John Garfield: “It isn't just that Garfield does look a little, it seems to him, like his real father. It is that Garfield exudes a style that might have come off the streets where Tam is living. Of all his heroes, Garfield translates most easily into his own idiom. Tam feels as if he's seen him at the dancing.” I don’t remember any mention of Ida Lupino though.

This is a great passage that really grabbed me: “Anything you choose to do will be good, for you are seventeen and you are going to university at the end of the summer, and you are probably going to be a writer, though nobody knows that but you, and you feel you have enough energy to populate a small country.” Again, coincidentally or not, I have also recently  read another great book with a sort of similar theme, Rob Massey’s Indian Summer, published by Beatnpress, though this one’s written in the present tense and the narrator has just left college and has returned to his hometown.

I know nothing about Rob, though I assume he is the person who wrote a great article on F. Scott Fitzgerald for the Autumn 2023 issue of modernist magazine Detail. I loved that and I love his slim novel. Deliberately, I assume, his prose echoes idealistic youthful floridity, which certainly some of us indulged in when we were young, but it is a bittersweet read, with for me echoes of Le Grand Meaulnes or Jack Kerouac’s Maggie Cassidy.

Indian Summer takes place in an unspecified small town on the outskirts of London, out in the suburbs or the Home Counties, possibly the outer limits of Herts. or Bucks. with London as the promised land to escape to. Likewise, the time it takes place is not mentioned, but to me it feels like 1982. I could easily be wrong, but the mention of three million unemployed kind of reinforces that. Rob’s good on that issue, the whole grim ritual of signing-on at the dole office that looks like a Victorian workhouse, where you look round at some of the older people queuing up and think: “It’s the world weariness of it all that gets to you in the end, the downtrodden looks, the sense of desperation. It’s where the latest crisis of capitalism meets its reality.”

Essentially this is the story of Artie, “a suburban hepcat”, a dreamer who is determined to spend one last summer doing nothing but what he wants to do, resisting the world of work: “It’s artificial and imposed. We’d rather be doing other things, sitting in cafes, listening to music, talking about philosophy, talking about books, forming bands, writing fanzines, looking through magazines and second-hand clothes. We’ve got our own world and that’s how we want to live it.”

The book contains great detail on sharp schmutter, if you are that way inclined (and I very much still am!), with lots of mentions of things like Henley tops (didn’t we call them grandad shirts?), Matelot stripey t-shirts, buttoned-up jerseys, polo shirts, pale blue jeans, desert boots, and Wayfarer shades (which Artie bought from the local hipsters’ store – which I hope is a nice Orange Juice reference) and deck shoes, which I like to think are the old-school blue boating plimsolls you got for a few quid in Millets and which were a summer staple. Taffy from Hurrah! once defined summer to me as being the time for Ramones t-shirts and deck shoes. Don’t ask me why that sticks in my mind.

I love Indian Summer not just for what it is but very much for what it’s not (to echo Bob’s ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’). I don’t recall any swearing, and there’s very little in the way of namedropping (books, records, performers, brands etc.), no family, no drugs, but plenty of beer (to swallow your dreams with, I guess). All of this must have been part of a series of specific decisions, which is admirable. Similarly, there is no direct mention of mods, that would be far too vulgar, though the French equivalent, les minets, are in there.

Young Artie seems very strong on French aesthetics, dreaming of hanging out with Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo on the Riviera, zooming round on Vespas, listening to cool jazz. What else? Well, sex and violence are there, sure, but only hinted at. And there’s loads of great non-specific music, like jazz, soul, ska, and beat noise with Rickenbackers and Hammonds a-gogo, plus big red semi-acoustics hinting at the underground sounds, floppy fringes and moptops, of the Bunnymen, Teardrops, Postcard, Factory, and so on. The sad thing is Artie faces difficult decisions: do you settle for a job in a company office where they don’t even know your name, or do you chase your dreams in a pop group?

The reason I mention all this is that the book pretty much ends with the narrator realising something is changing at the end of his wild summer: the favourite shirts are brighter, the dances looser, the rhythms funkier, the refrains jazzier, which captures nicely that gradual shift in 1981 and into 1982, which Weekend were very much a part of, along with say Pigbag, Fun Boy Three, A Certain Ratio, Kid Creole, and so on. This is also pretty much where Michael Bracewell’s Souvenir starts, though he means it all in a pejorative sense rather than a celebratory one, something he had touched on before in his England is Mine:

“The burgeoning jazz revival that centred around the reinvention of Soho as a 1980s version of its 1950s heritage (a kind of death by cappuccino for The Face generation), saw performers such as Carmel and Working Week taking the club spotlight in a way that reasserted pop as fashion-conscious entertainment and little else.” Really Michael? I love your writing, but that passage continues to annoy me immensely. Oh well, on this one we shall have to agree to differ, I guess.

Anyway, what do I know? I mean, standing at that stall looking at the Spike and Debbie CD, I had a sense of something familiar about the sleeve design, which incidentally was by A.M. Leka and Aleksandra Mladenovic. I should have recognised Leka’s name, not least from a collaboration he did with Vic Godard. Similarly I should have recognised the record label’s name, tinyGLOBALproductions, if only for the ‘Commercial Suicide Man’ 45 which Vic Godard recorded with label regulars The Nightingales back in 2018.

And a quick look at Bandcamp or Discogs reveals tinyGLOBAL have released many, many records by names that are more than familiar to me, such as the Band of Holy Joy, Bitter Springs, Blue Orchids, and that’s just the Bs. I guess for me the label’s headline releases from recent years should have been the highly regarded solo sets by The Wolfhounds’ Callahan who seems to have gained a couple of forenames, but I confess I haven’t been keeping up.  

More recently the label has attracted attention for releasing lost recordings by John McKay, but the one that really caught my eye was The Last Glam in Town, an unexpected final stand by (John) Rossall, a name I recall vividly from when I was a kid and The Glitter Band were my idols. In fact, John co-wrote the group’s holy trinity of hits, ‘Angel Face’, ‘Just For You’, and ‘Let’s Get Together Again’, the last of which is movingly reprised on this surprising set.

I guess one of the reasons why the Spike and Debbie CD felt familiar was that the artwork echoes The Gist’s Embrace The Herd, though to be honest this didn’t dawn on me until later. Looking through my back pages here, I notice that in May 2011 I wrote about Embrace The Herd that “The Gist left us with so little which hinted at so much, and now I want the LP somehow to develop further its various themes.” Well, patience pays off, for tinyGLOBAL have put out (at least) two archive sets of lost recordings by The Gist, which predictably I had no idea of until recently.

I particularly love the second of these, Interior Windows, from 2019, and that’s partly to do with the fact it includes the ‘lost’ C81 track ‘Greener Grass’ and the debut Rough Trade 45, ‘This is Love’. Come to think of it, that themed run of Gist skewed-lovers-rock singles (‘This is Love’, ‘Love at First Sight’ and ‘Fool for a Valentine’) forms another holy trinity for me. Also included are two versions of ‘Stones and Sunlight’, with Debbie P. singing the song that also appears in the Table Table sequence on the Spike and Debbie set and which reflects the growing interest in incorporating elements of African sounds in the music, moving beyond reggae as the ’exotic other’ influence, a direction that would be heard more clearly in Weekend and Bomb and Dagger.

The real gem for me on Interior Windows is the beautiful ‘How To Be’ which the label succinctly and smartly sums up as: “The minimal arrangement of this solo doo-wop tune obscures its psalmic undertow.” As they say elsewhere in the liner notes, some of the tracks, such as this one, have a sort of Beach Boys 1970s home demo vibe, and I particularly love it when Stuart Moxham does his languid deadpan occasional crooning where he has a Kevin Ayers or Syd Barrett sings Hoagy Carmichael thing going on.

Last year (I found out belatedly) tinyGLOBAL (who, incidentally, are lovely people to do business with) put out another set of Stuart Moxham offcuts, Fabstract, spanning his rather varied career, from a YMG unused organ riff through to a collaboration with Louis Philippe. In fact, yet another tinyGLOBAL release back in 2020 (you may not be surprised to learn I was oblivious to it until recently) was the Stuart & Louis set, The Devil Laughs, which is really rather beautiful, and makes me feel guilty as I haven’t over the years kept up with Stuart’s solo recordings.

It also gives me the opportunity to ask: is it dangerous to assume the Dean Brodrick that Louis made the Rainfall and Jean Renoir LPs with for the Japanese market in the early 1990s is the same person that appears on the Ilkeston recordings across The Gist and the Spike and Debbie records? And, in that case, is this also the same person who played on the Go-Betweens’ Liberty Belle as Dean B. Speedwell? These things can worry one.

One of those Ilkeston recordings appears on Stuart’s Fabstract set, and that is ‘Last Summer’ which appears on the Spike and Debbie CD in a different form. Someone surely has put together a spreadsheet on who sings what and plays with whom on these archive sets. And, in a loose connection, when standing at that market stall perusing the Spike and Debbie CD the title ‘Seaport Town’ should have rung a bell or two, as this Andrew Moxham song also appears on the wonderful Alison Statton & Spike record Tidal Blues.

That small set of Alison & Spike records from the 1990s, originally issued by Vinyl Japan but now it seems salvaged by LTM, has as time passes become increasingly important to me. I guess it suits me that these records seem to expand upon the side of Weekend that was about the ballads, albeit with scattered gently experimental elements of traditional folk music, Latin rhythms, jazz and beyond. As the pair put it in the liner notes for The Shady Tree: “Over the years we’ve encountered incredible sounds from many cultures and tried to capture some of the mystery of that unidentifiable instrument or unfathomable timing in our music.”

One thing I hadn’t realised until this recent binge on music loosely associated with the YMGs is that Paula Gardiner who plays bass on the Bomb and Dagger recordings also plays on the first few Alison & Spike records. Fellow addicts of connectivity will appreciate the fact that this is (one presumes) the same Paula Gardiner who would be composer and musical director for Alan Plater’s The Devil’s Music trilogy of radio dramas which has at its heart a piece of music that links five generations of Welsh women all called Meghan.

Based on original material researched and collected by Jen Wilson of the Women's Jazz Archive in Swansea, the stories start in the 1880s when rebellious spirit Meghan the First, defying her father’s chapel strictness, goes to see a performance by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a choir of emancipated slaves from Arkansas, and is given a copy of their Plantation Songbook which becomes a family talisman. The melody from the spiritual ‘Roll Jordan Roll’ is handed down through the generations, via a Swansea tearoom and the Suffragettes to the present day where Megan the Fifth is a jazz guitarist preparing to perform at the Brecon Jazz Festival, an event Bomb and Dagger played at in their day.

I have very fond memories of hearing all three parts of The Devil’s Music on the radio. Presumably this was on the now lost but initially invaluable BBC digital station Radio 7 in the early 2000s. Alan Plater is, I would add, one of my heroes, and I would warmly recommend grabbing a copy of his jazz and Socialism-based memoir Doggin’ Around if you stumble across a copy. Where else would you find stories from the 1960s of someone who worked with The Watersons and Joe Harriott? And I still believe his Beiderbecke trilogy is one of the most subversive and entertaining things ever produced for television. The books are even better, by the way.

Anyway, yes, Alison Statton and Spike. You may guess what’s coming: oh yus, tinyGLOBAL put out a new Alison & Spike record in 2018, and I have only very recently found this out. How come no-one mentioned it to me? So, it’s called Bimini Twist, which sounds wonderfully like something Mina might sing in an old Antonioni film, but the disc is named after a fisherman’s knot, apparently. I know I am biased, as I truly believe Alison is one of the best singers ever, and that she and Spike make a great songwriting team, but this is a truly exceptional and very lovely record, one I have listened to a lot lately.

It's got that lovely warm homemade DIY feel that their last record (a mere 20-odd years earlier), The Shady Tree, also has, and is instantly recognisable as Alison & Spike. There’s no radical change from what went before. It’s just that Alison & Spike do it better. At times, like on ‘Open Portal’, there are almost intimations of a Northern Soul beat with a Beatles melodic thing going on, but generally it’s that quietly subversive trademark experimentation at work. I particularly love the minimal torch song ballad ‘Curse or Pray’ which I can imagine being sung softly by Helen Merrill or June Christy, maybe with Barney Kessel or Kenny Burrell or Barry Galbraith (now there’s another holy trinity!) on guitar providing the main accompaniment. Ah life. I just hope there will be more some day from Alison and Spike, and that someone remembers to tell me next time.