Fortuitously #5

 

On any list of the good things in life, those things we hold dear and which help ward off the darkness and evil that threatens to take over the world, I would have to include torch songs and film noirs, which if you think about it too closely seems a little illogical given the subject matter of these, but, oh, you know. And somehow one mentally brackets torch songs and film noirs, but should that really be the case? Well, while you are considering that, I will tell you about Film Noir, a 1989 record by the great jazz ballad singer Audrey Morris which, for me, is just about perfect.

Fortuitously #4

 

John Sebastian has been very much on my mind. And the way things work the more I have found myself thinking about and listening to John Sebastian the more I have come across his presence. So, for example, I recently stumbled upon footage from the Summer of 1984 of John onstage in New Jersey with REM performing ‘Do You Believe In Magic?’, complete with autoharp. The smiles on Michael Stipe and Mike Mills’ faces you just would not be able to wipe off, no matter how hard you tried. This was so astonishingly wonderful that I got into quite a frenzy, which was a bit daft as I was meant to be sitting quietly before heading round to the local GP surgery to have a blood pressure check-up. Needless to say, the reading was not good, and the nurse suggested I was feeling anxious. Ha! I was tempted to explain, but how the hell do you tell a stranger about …?

Fortuitously #3

 

I am no expert on the work of Lucy Sante, but one of my favourite pieces of music-related writing comes in her Maybe The People Would Be The Times essay collection, which I chanced upon. The piece I love is the first in a short story sequence which has at its heart musical fact and appreciation, with special loving focus on The Paragons’ ‘Florence’. I would never claim to be a die-hard doo wop aficionado, but I suspect there are few among us who have not succumbed to something in that musical sphere, and ‘Florence’ is for me as good as it gets. And the writing by Lucy on this occasion is exquisite.

Fortuitously #2

 

I still bumble blindly around on YouTube sporadically, and occasionally take an unexpected turning and strike gold, such as when I discovered a collections of clips of The Feelies performing live at the Peanut Gallery, a bar in their home town of Haledon, New Jersey, on May Day 1983, which sort of blew my mind as it was everything that I had dared hope The Feelies live might be. I wasn’t even aware The Feelies were active in 1983. And yet there they are, immortalised on film, in grainy black and white, performing a special commemorative Crazy Rhythms set which is amazing in so many ways.

Fortuitously #1

 

There’s a lovely line in Chronicles where Bob talks about a three-minute ballad that “made you stand straight up and stay right where you were. It’s like someone had pulled the cord to stop the train.” He wasn’t talking about ‘From the Cradle to the Blues’ by Margaret Lewis, but he could have been. Simultaneously sophisticated and raw, with Margaret’s phrasing a complete joy, if you can say that about a song that has such a bruised, brooding air about it: “It's a long, lonely road to travel and lose.”

‘From the Cradle to the Blues’ first appeared as the flipside of ‘Goin’ to St. Louie’ (“to get lost in a crowd, can't stand this silence, it's too doggone loud”), a 1959 single on the RAM label of Shreveport, Louisiana, run by Mira Smith who appears backing Margaret as Grace Tennessee, playing her electric blues guitar accompaniment for this rockabilly torch song. It is among many numbers composed by Mira with Margaret, something I first heard on a 1995 Ace CD Lonesome Bluebird, and with my limited knowledge of Margaret’s career I assumed it couldn’t be beaten. I was wrong.

Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Twelve)

 

Every once in a while, there is a particular piece of music that has been made specifically for you, and it feels like all roads have led to this point in time. This is very much the case with ‘Perseverance Flow’, composed by Joshua Abrams and recorded with his colleagues in the Natural Information Society. It is on record a 35-minute work, perfect as a single-track CD, and is essentially a cyclical rhythmic passage repeated throughout that time which, as you listen again and again, reveals infinite variations, imagined or real, with the percussion, bass, clarinet and wheezing harmonium working together to create patterns that are incredibly emotional, indeed spiritual and mesmerising. It is perfectly titled, as it is one of those recordings where it becomes impossible not to go with the flow, and before you know it you are dancing around the room, completely absorbed: “We dig repetition in the music, and we're never going to lose it.”

Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Eleven)

 

There can be something oddly pleasant about being discombobulated. There sometimes is a certain pleasure to be found in having one’s conceptions challenged. This may be particularly true of the arts. It may apply to times when your understanding about a certain sphere of activity is turned upside down and inside out. Just take, for instance, Brenda Ray’s Walatta which is one of my most-played CDs over the past year-and-a-half. It is a record around 20-years-old, but it is only relatively recently that I have been aware of it, and that was all down to a seemingly random Spotify recommendation, which in true try-before-you-buyify style made me rush to track down a physical copy.

Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Ten)

 

You know, recently, out of the blue, I received a Bandcamp notification to let me know there was a new release from Stacy Epps, her first full-length recording since The Awakening in 2008, a record which was a pivotal and I guess totemic set from the very early days of YHO. Thinking about that record seemed to whisk me back in time to the formative days here, which perhaps with the benefit of rose-coloured glasses did feel like a time of awakening, of opening up, perhaps a period of relative enlightenment, with Obama headed for the White House amid a sudden glut of young cosmic soul adventurers sharing often abstract, spiritual, fiercely independent music. Ha. All the way from ‘Yes We Can’ to ‘Oh No You Can’t’. What was it the man sang? “Once there was confidence but now there is fear / Once there was laughter but now only tears / Once there were reasons for our optimism / But now we're all drowning in a sea of cynicism.”

Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Nine)

 

There are some things about 2025 I would be quite happy to forget, events that leave me feeling cold inside, and there are some things from this year that I hope will be with me forever. I am pretty sure that seeing Bonnie Dobson perform on a baking hot summer’s evening on an old boat moored near Canary Wharf is something I will never forget, and I know that this is a memory I shall cherish. She was backed by The Hanging Stars (minus a couple, plus a few, apparently) who made a glorious chiming folk rock racket over which Bonnie ably projected with the grace and grit of someone far younger than her 84-years. It was an incredibly moving occasion.

Why Didn't You Tell Me? (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.

Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Seven)

 

Dub is in the air, it sometimes seems. And on NTS, my radio station of choice, you never seem to be too far away from some variation on the dub template, which is a cause for celebration in these desperate times. Among the station’s residents is Jack Sapsed whose monthly All Fruits Ripe programme is usually a great listen and generally features dub in all sorts of mad varieties.

Back in February of this year his show ended with the More Rockers mix of Virginia’s ‘Rainbows’, one of my very favourite things in this whole wide world and one of the greatest examples of prime Bristol blues & roots from back in the day. On the same show Jack also played the Smith & Mighty mix of ‘Love to the Power of Each’ by Dub Ghecko, which completely threw me as it also featured the unmistakable vocals of Virginia. And it sounded amazingly wonderful, yet it was completely new to me. As someone who privately prides himself on knowing a thing or two about dubby downtempo music of the 1990s, that hurt!

Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Six)

 

I guess many among us can think of occasions when we have heard or read about a live performance and then let our imagination float free in a way that allows us to picture ourselves in that particular venue on a specific night. Naturally we will let the romantic in us take over, even if deep down inside our submerged realistic self will tell us we’ve got it all wrong. For me, The Way Out of Easy, that magnificent live recording of the Jeff Parker ETA IVtet, immaculately packaged by International Anthem, is the perfect example. In my wildest fancy I was there, standing at the front, nodding along ecstatically, grinning madly.

Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Five)

 

Over the past few years, I have read an absurd amount of John D. MacDonald books and have grown to envy the way his stories flow so beautifully. He makes writing seem easy. It’s not. But then MacDonald worked diligently at being an author, in a disciplined, professional sense, which is partly why he was almost ridiculously prolific and why there are still plenty of his books left for me to read. He certainly could spin a cracking yarn, and some of his novels I would rate up there with the very best.

A particular favourite is A Flash of Green, a book dedicated to “Sam Prentiss, Jim Neville, Tom Dickinson, and all others opposed to the uglification of America.” It is essentially an environmental protest tale, with a strong theme of populist political corruption, and even some easily manipulated violent far-right Christian fundamentalists, so when reading it you can easily lose track of the fact it was published in 1962 rather than in the present-day. And it’s not without precedent in the author’s extensive canon, as 1959’s misleadingly titled The Beach Girls touches on the relentless tide of redevelopment threatening to tear the heart and soul out of a Florida marina community.

Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Four)

 

I’ve got to be honest: I do like a bit of incidental whistling in a song. In fact, I used to have this line about the holy trinity of incidental whistling being the Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Daydream’, Subway Sect’s ‘A Different Story’, and Otis’ ‘Dock of the Bay’, and how, in some way, symbolically these tied into Alan Horne’s Postcard Records Brochure, from way back in 1981, and how this really mattered. I would argue that it still does. Anyway, nowadays, I have a new whistling favourite, this being The Cheques’ ‘Deeper’, a song I heard first by way of Northern Soul Fever: Volume Two, a vintage 2CD set from the Goldmine/Soul Supply set-up which I found nice and cheap not too long ago.

Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Three)

 

“Betrayal takes two, who did it to who?” That line of Richard Hell’s has been buzzing round my brain since reading the books in Len Deighton’s superb spy trilogy, Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match, in rapid succession at the very start of this year. The series was written and based in the early-to-mid-1980s Cold War-era, featuring intelligence officer Bernard Samson. This is the first in a trio of trilogies featuring Bernard: is there a word for that? Not that I know of. Ennealogy doesn’t quite cover it. Words are funny things, aren’t they? You can feel lost without a book, and you can lose yourself in a book. This particular trilogy is perfect for getting lost in.

Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Two)

 

Dora Morelenbaum performing live at the Jazz Café in November 2024 was one of the highlights of the year. It was such a joyous show, and when she sprang into her lovely interpretation of Bobby Charles’ ‘I Must Be in a Good Place Now’ I almost melted in delight. It was so gloriously unexpected and unbelievably perfect. And it was not the only cover version performed that night. Months later I haven’t stopped grinning yet.

Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part One)

 

Discovering Vera Caspary’s fiction has been a highlight of the past few years. I suppose you could say she wrote books that might be conveniently classed as suspense, mystery, detective, crime, noir, or none of these. They are really psychological studies that defy categorisation. What Vera’s books tend to have in common are strong, independent, career women, with some unusual themes, such as PMT-related depression. Anyway, Vera had a great way with words. To use a phrase of her own: “To write well is to write clearly.” And she did.

Rather like her contemporary Dorothy B. Hughes with In A Lonely Place, Vera’s most well-known work Laura is available in a handsome edition as part of The Feminist Press’ Femmes Fatales series. And, yes, it is the book that spawned the classic Otto Preminger-directed film noir, memorably starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews. But then Laura has been a magazine serial, a play, a novel, a film, a song. All of which suggests Lionel Blair and Una Stubbs (I nearly wrote Baines there!) effervescing in the fondly remembered Give Us A Clue.

Coincidentally ... Or Not (Part Two)

 

Act One

“I put a seashell to my ear, and it all comes back,” said Rod McKuen memorably in his poem The Gypsy Camp, with that beautiful setting by Anita Kerr and the San Sebastien Strings. That line, which many of us heard first via the immortal ‘Barefoot in the Head’ by the supremely cool A Man Called Adam, has been in my thoughts recently. This was partly through hearing ‘Night and Day’ by Everything But The Girl played very shortly before Jessica Pratt took to the stage at the Barbican on “strange and unsettling day” after the US election. It sounded so right, and I hope it was Jessica’s own choice. If not, it was still an inspired selection.

Coincidentally, or not, I had been thinking about that song, and how it was a huge part of the summer of 1982 for me, just as Jessica’s Here in the Pitch was this year. But also, how Tracey and Ben, largely because of that song, performed a handful of numbers with Paul Weller onstage at the ICA right at the start of 1983, only a few weeks after The Jam’s last concert. And I am still wondering why I wasn’t there at the ICA.  I was, however, there to see Speakers Corner Quartet a few days before Jessica’s Barbican show. Both of these recent performances were pretty incredible. Maybe just as incredibly it had been 38 years since I had seen a live show at the ICA.

Coincidentally ... Or Not (Part One)

 

Things fall apart. Oh yes. The old fabric is torn away, or disintegrates, and all that. But, sometimes, when you least expect it, things fall into place, and new patterns and stories emerge. So, towards the end of January this year, things were looking pretty grim. It was a tough time, but one bright spot was the Pauline Boty exhibition at the Gazelli Art House in Mayfair, which was a revelation. I went early one Monday morning, soon after opening time, and was the only one there. It felt a privilege to be there, alone with Pauline’s now famous works of art, at a time when her reputation’s at a high. This being, as her evangelist Ali Smith argues in her Autumn, part of the cycle where cultural figures are ignored, lost, rediscovered, and so on.

Incidentally (Part Two)

 

“It is odd what you remember and what you forget.” – Graham Greene, Getting to Know the General

In the bedroom of Frank Pierson, the wealthy young American boy who followed Ripley, in the fourth novel in Patricia Highsmith’s series, “pop singer posters were tacked to a vast green pin-up board above the brown table, the Ramones slouching in blue jeans”. I have recently revisited the book, one I read 20-odd years ago, and was delighted to find that mention of Joey, Dee Dee, and co. was there, being the thing that stuck in my mind down the years. Oddly, though, I didn’t think they were named. Instead, I thought there was simply a reference to four brothers in leather jackets and ripped jeans. I got that bit wrong. Nevertheless, for a book published in April 1980, though set in the summer and early autumn of 1978, the Ramones mention is a lovely incidental musical detail, and a pretty cool one too. I can’t remember, can’t recall, as a lovely old June Brides song goes, any other contemporaneous nods to the band by a major author. I could be wrong.