Vinyl diary, part 2: The Birthday Party

For a nerdish young music-obsessed Glaswegian in the late 70s and early 80s, the 'Lost Chord’ record shop had an almost mythical status. It was located in the bohemian West End, the part of town where poets, intellectuals, posh kids and people who played in bands hung out. If -like me- you lived on the dull south side, getting there required not only dedication, but an ability to decipher bus timetables which openly mocked the restrictive notions of linear time. Once inside that little shop, I’d spend hours fingering through rows of obscure or rare vinyl: rare imports, Japanese picture discs, bands I’d only read about in reviews and bizarre compilations of bands I’d never heard of; ‘Lost Chord’ had everything that the tragic obsessive might dream of. 

On one such visit, armed with all I had saved up from my shelf-packing job in a supermarket, I almost fainted when a flick-through one of the sections revealed a copy of ‘The Birthday Party’ by The Idle Race, an album I had been dreaming about for months. Having become a massive ELO fan, I was working my acquisitive way backwards through Jeff Lynne’s recorded catalogue. A previous visit to the shop had unearthed an American compilation of songs by The Move and, these being the days before the internet, I knew of Lynne’s first band, The Idle Race, only in mythical terms; their albums might have existed somewhere in the same way that Bigfoot might have existed somewhere.

I can't remember what I paid for it, but if the bored assistant with the long hair (they always had long hair) had asked for one of my kidneys, I would probably have considered it a bit of a bargain. But when I got the album home, it was not -to paraphrase PG Wodehouse- that I was underwhelmed by it, but I wasn’t exactly whelmed either. The issue was not so much that the songs were unlike either ELO or The Move, because there were times when you could clearly trace the musical lineage. It was more that they committed the sin of excessive frivolity. When you’re young and serious and you pay attention to what is said by the high priests of taste in the music press, there is perhaps nothing more heinous than music lacking in that quality beloved of immature males: heaviosity. And The Idle Race clearly lacked heaviosity. According to the New Wave Taliban, jolly-sounding tunes were OK, but only if (for example in the case of Talking Heads or XTC) there was perceived to be an ironic or subversive edge to the sound. The way that XTC, for instance, sang ‘Bap-ba-oo’ on ‘Radios in Motion’ with tongues firmly in cheek, was nothing like the way that, say, David Essex might have sang ‘Bap-ba-oo’. 

It bugged me somewhat that ‘The Birthday Party’ featured sound effects and vaudeville clips, as if it was some kind of novelty record. And as for the lyrics … who the hell writes songs about a man working as a skeleton on the ghost train, or a man in his thirties playing with children’s toys? Or how about a song about someone sitting in a tree? Consider, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, these lyrics as exhibit A:  

I often sit alone up in a tree
Waving to the ones that wave at me
I think well just how stupid can they be
Waving to a man up in a tree?

What they don't know is I am counting them
I even count the ladies and the men
I put the numbers in my little book
And only me can ever have a look

What the hell was Jeff on about? Having been introduced to his work through the wondrously lush and tuneful album ‘A New World Record’, I struggled to connect this weird Jeff Lynne – that young bloke on the cover without a beard- with the one I knew and loved, the master orchestrator and symphonic tunemeister, the bearded musical genius behind ELO. 

But had I listened without prejudice, I would have noticed that some of the motifs that would make him famous years later were evident here in nascent form; lush strings, layered harmonies, beautiful melodies and deft chord changes. It took me a while to get over myself and appreciate that the songs were just fine; in fact, some of them were much better than fine. Despite the gimmickry and the music-hall jokes, it was obvious that even this beardless and callow young Jeff knew where the melody monkey lived.

There is a muscularity and vigour in the playing and production (courtesy of Eddie Offord and Gerald Chevin) which prevents even the most whimsical material from sounding effete. As you might expect, there is a strong Beatles influence, but there are also one or two nods to The Kinks (particularly on ‘Lucky Man’ and ‘Mrs. Ward’). ‘The lady who said she could fly’ is beautiful and melancholic, while ‘Morning Sunshine’ is a lovely psychedelic pop ballad which would anticipate some of Lynne’s future triumphs. ‘End of the Road’ is so unremittingly jolly and English that it sounds almost parodic; in fact, it is simply a song that comes from the age before irony, from the days before pop music became aware of itself. The great thing about material like this is that it is exactly what it appears to be.

Although they were well thought of by the music press in the late 60s, The Idle Race failed to make a significant commercial breakthrough, a factor which would surely have influenced Lynne’s decision to join The Move in 1970. Although this album is of its time, there are moments when ‘The Birthday Party’ manages to transcend the gloriously sunny and naïve era from which it emerged; as ever with Jeff Lynne’s music, it’s all about the tunes.

The pedal bin in my kitchen sounds uncannily like The Move

The Move had a hit in 1971 with a song called 'Chinatown'. The track started with a gong, followed by some gentle wind chimes, before Bev Bevan’s thunderous drum roll kicked in. Every time I use the pedal bin in my kitchen, I am reminded of this song.

Let me explain how this happens.   

Rubbish in hand, I place one foot on the pedal in order to open the lid, which allows me to deposit some domestic waste. Once I remove my foot from the pedal, the lid closes, causing the bin to issue a metallic clang that sounds uncannily like the opening gong from ‘Chinatown’. Once that faux gong rings out, I am then compelled to mimic the thunderous drum roll and sing (with my internal voice) the first lines of the song: 

Bury a jar of shaoxing
When the girl is born
Surely you know the wine will age
Till she's fully grown

You may or may not be aware that these lines allude to a tradition of the Shaoxing province in China, in which a bottle of wine is buried underground whenever a daughter is born and is only dug up for her wedding banquet. It was quite an achievement for The Move to celebrate this tradition in song and get to number 23 in the British charts.    

That thing with the pedal bin is not the only aural cue that inserts itself, uninvited, into my daily routine. Whenever I power down my laptop, it issues a series of little notes, the first four of which are exactly the same as the introduction to Radiohead’s ‘Everything in its right place’ (from the album Kid A … or maybe Kid B; I always get those two mixed up). You may remember the song from the soundtrack to the film ‘Vanilla Sky’. It gets played when the Tom Cruise character is driving down a wide city boulevard early one morning when nobody –as in nobody- else is around. I think it’s because the character is dreaming or he’s on drugs, or he’s possibly dead; or perhaps it’s a metaphor for his state of mind. Whatever.   

The PC that I use at work (another sly machine), in the process of powering down, plays the opening two notes to Colin Blunstone’s 1972 hit ‘Say you don’t mind’. It’s a string quartet that plays on the track, but the PC does a decent job of imitating it. The song was written by Denny Laine, by the way; he was in Wings (the band that The Beatles could have been).     

   

It’s not just things in my house and at work that insist on playing pop songs. A few years ago, I was a regular shopper at a certain supermarket chain. Whenever they made an in-store announcement about special offers and so on, the first two notes of the electronic clarion preceding each notice resembled the coda to Tubeway Army’s 1979 number 1 hit, ‘Are ‘friends’ electric?’ Every time the store manager updated the customers on the "roast chickens now reduced in our rotisserie", I was compelled to follow that phantom coda, drifting off in an electric dream. ‘Together in Electric Dreams’ was a top 3 hit in 1985 for Phil Oakey and Georgio Moroder. The story goes that Oakey, thinking it was just a rehearsal, recorded the vocal in one take.   

Everything reminds me of music. And, once I’m reminded of a piece of music, it sticks in my head until I’m able to distract myself by inserting something else in its place. On the train into work the other day, I couldn’t shake off 'Ai no corrida', a Quincy Jones hit from the early 80s. I neither own nor particularly like this tune and I can’t even remember how it got into my head, but it took me most of the day to expunge it.  

And while we’re on the subject, I’d like someone to explain this to me: How come you can ‘hear’ music in your head? The act of hearing, surely, involves the primary auditory cortex receiving auditory input? But nobody was playing ‘Ai no corrida’ on the train that morning; if I wasn’t ‘hearing’ it, what exactly was going on?

This is not just about old songs; some modern stuff is catchy too. Lukas Graham’s ‘Seven years old’ (225 million hits and counting on Spotify) has recently taken up residence in my brain, demanding attention. He’s Danish, you know. I can’t, off the top of my head, think of any other Danish pop stars, although John Grant’s ‘Queen of Denmark’ was a beautiful album from 2010, featuring not only a song about a sweetshop but one about feeling like Sigourney Weaver in ‘Aliens’

And I feel just like Sigourney Weaver
When she had to kill those aliens.
And one guy tried to get them back to the Earth.
And she couldn't believe her ears.

John, clearly, isn’t that big on rhyming.  

 

There is no escape from this sort of thing. It extends to everyday conversations and close encounters at work. I was talking recently to a colleague about how to keep oneself amused during particularly boring meetings (not, if anyone from work is reading, that I ever have to attend boring meetings). My answer was that I play my favourite albums in my head, or, alternatively, take my musical cues from the conversation.

If anyone ever says: “What’s it all about?” my internal rejoinder has to be ‘Alfie’.

If someone starts a sentence with “To cut a long story short”, I have to sing (internal voice, again) ‘I lost my mind’.

If anyone asks “Who knows?” my response has to be: ‘not me; we never lost control’. 

And, if someone –perhaps at the end of a tricky piece of negotiation- says: “Where do we go from here?”, there is only one fitting reply:  

Is it down to the lake I fear?

Aye aye aye aye aye aye

Aye aye aye aye aye aye 

Here we go.

(If you were not born an embarrassingly long time ago, you may need to look some of those references up).

A friend once suggested to me that this insistence on ‘hearing’ music was probably due to a ‘condition’, perhaps some form of musical autism. In the immortal words of Otto Harbach (music by Jerome Kern):

I chaffed them, and I gaily laughed

The desire to ascribe ‘condition’ status or to concoct some phoney-baloney diagnosis for perfectly normal human activity is a modern phenomenon that I’m convinced will both amuse and mystify our grandchildren. My guess is that most people who love music (and particularly musicians) have music in their head most of the time. If that is the case, then the ability to hear it in everything is neither a gift nor an affliction; it’s more of a predilection, like a disposition to gardening, spotting trains or binge-watching zombie films.

The Zombies had a huge hit in 1969 with ‘Time of the Season’ and I’ve got an unusual version of the song on an album by the Japanese pop outfit Ippu Do. Their front man, Masami Tsuchiya, joined the English band Japan for their final tour in 1982, wherein his guitar pyrotechnics enlivened a largely electronic oeuvre. I caught one of the gigs on that tour, which was recorded for the live double album ‘Oil on Canvas’. 

Oh … and Colin Blunstone, who lives inside the PC in my office, was also in The Zombies. 

The Move - 'Chinatown'