Vinyl Diary, part 4: New Wave

In 1993, the rock press started to talk about something called ‘Britpop’. I had no idea what it meant, other than that someone had invented yet another music genre. The phenomenon went on to carry some cultural weight, although perhaps not always for the reasons celebrated by some commentators. Depending on your point of view, Noel Gallagher hanging around Downing Street with Tony Blair was either the zenith of ‘Cool Britannia’ or the precise moment at which rock music relinquished its risible claim to be the standard bearer for anything resembling a counter-cultural movement. Here’s a clue: If you’re sipping tea with the Prime Minister, you may still fancy yourself as a rebel, but you are most definitely inside the tent, pissing out. 

It is generally accepted that the first two Britpop albums were by Suede and The Auteurs. Suede had some good songs, but the production on their album was awful, spoiled by an excess of washy reverb and the vocals being too far back in the mix. The singer, Brett Anderson, wrote lyrics coyly alluding to vague homosexual encounters and once claimed in an interview that he was "a bisexual man who never had a homosexual experience". It seemed a bit lame, but at least he looked like a bona fide pop star.

By contrast, Luke Haines of The Auteurs, with his foppish hair and junk shop clothes, looked more like your well-read sixth-form mate who would sit at the back of the class making snide remarks. He sang like someone who had only previously performed in his bedroom, with the vocals all double or even treble-tracked; his weedy voice and cynical tone conveyed the impression of someone who was, perhaps, out to take some revenge upon the world. For all of the vocal limitations, his songs certainly had a bit of devilment and wit about them. When I heard ‘Showgirl’ on the radio for the first time, I was struck by the boldness of the opening few bars. The sudden drop after the line “I took a showgirl for my bride” sounded brave, assertive, brimming with confidence; it compelled me to shut up and listen. The songs on ‘New Wave’ appeared to explore a bohemian demi-monde of actors, musicians and dancing girls, stuck permanently between jobs and waiting for their big showbiz break. In ‘Valet Parking’, Haines sang “I’m sick of parking cars” and you got the feeling that he meant it. 

His lyrics could be acerbic, but were sometimes mysterious and allusive. On the splendidly cryptic ‘Idiot Brother’, he directed the following line at surely the only person in the world who would understand what it was about:

"And what about our fat friend
With the golden ear?"

I had no idea what was going on, but it was fun trying to guess.

'American Guitars’ was interpreted by some as a Britpop statement of intent, something along the lines of: ‘we’ve had enough of these bloody yanks influencing our pop kids’. But the lyric is clearly celebratory, with Haines -for once- expressing genuine admiration about something, perhaps in recognition of an authenticity that he felt his own work might have lacked:

 

"Some people are born to write, some people are born to dance
Thought I knew my place in the world, thought I knew my art.
Glad to be there, see them begin.
It was easy to see them, they were the best band to be in … American Guitars"

I really liked the sound of the group. The uncomplicated guitar and minimalistic piano always served the interests of the songs, while James Banbury’s cello added a certain je ne sais quoi to the proceedings. On ‘Bailed Out’ –which, in the wrong hands, might easily have turned out to be a bit of a plodder- Banbury’s deft lyricism lifted the track into another dimension.

Despite making a distinctive contribution to the sound, Banbury was viewed as a mercenary by the group leader. In the first volume of his memoirs (‘Bad Vibes – Britpop and my part in its downfall’ published in 2009), Haines, throughout the text, refers to him merely as ‘the cellist’. The book is bitter, bitchy and misanthropic, but there is also humour in the mix, with the author being honest about what a twat he could be at times.

‘Bad Vibes’ paints an illuminating picture of the thin line between failure and success, but it is even better on the thinner line between ‘modest’ and ‘massive’ success. The Auteurs famously lost out on the Mercury Music Prize by one vote to Suede; I don’t know if that made any difference to their respective trajectories, but Suede went on to be huge and The Auteurs didn’t. Haines eventually got over the disappointment and, henceforth, only felt sick about the injustice of it all once every couple of minutes.

One of the reasons I think I liked ‘New Wave’ so much was the fact that I was -at the time- in a band which, to my ears at least, ploughed a similar furrow to The Auteurs. “If this is Britpop”, I thought, “bring it on”. My hope was that my own band might get a record deal on the back of some timely zeitgeist-surfing. We also hired, at considerable expense, a cellist to play on some of our recordings and the results convinced me that we were in transition from being half-decent (we were quite a solid unit) into something quite interesting. But finding a good cellist who would do the stuff that the rest of us were willing to do (paying for rehearsals, gigging in grotty pubs, paying for van hire etc.) was about as difficult as finding a unicorn that could cook; all the good ones wanted MU rates just to get out of bed.   

My band never managed to secure that elusive record deal. But I eventually got over the disappointment and nowadays only feel sick about the injustice of it all once every couple of minutes.

Let's play ... Quidditch?

When I was out for a walk the other day, I spotted a sign (pictured left) in the middle of Kelvingrove Park, where the University of Glasgow’s ‘Quidditch Club’ was holding an open session. The sight of the cavorting students made me stop and think. I wasn’t sure what to make of it; was this a good thing or a bad thing? Upon returning home, I told my 19-year old son about the Quidditch Club. He drew a look of disdain and uttered four words, the first two of which were “that is”, the fourth of which was “tragic”. 

I think I understand why he responded like that. The idea of people investing time and energy in a game that was made up by an author, a game made for flying wizards on broomsticks, does seem quite silly. Those students were only pretending to play a pretend game because they are not wizards, they don’t have broomsticks and they can’t fly. It’s obviously not a ‘real’ game, so they must be a bunch of losers. Well … perhaps not. According to my internet machine, there is a governing body (founded in 2010) called the International Quidditch Association. The version being played by those students is sometimes described as ‘Muggle Quidditch’, because it accepts that the participants aren’t wizards, don’t have actual broomsticks and can’t fly.  

After making that discovery, I reviewed my impulse to pass judgement. What is the difference, after all, between running around with a stick between your legs and, say, pretending –as I sometimes do- that a tricky putt on the 18^th green is actually for the US Masters?

Lots of young folk prefer to get their kicks sitting in front of a computer, so we should applaud the fact that the Quidditch Club members were out there having fun, taking part in an activity which involved physical exercise and social intercourse. There are worse things those students could have done with their time. They might have joined some ‘triggered-by-inappropriate-words-in-literature’ group and, instead of 'Quidditching' in the park, been out demonstrating their belief in equity and diversity by burning books or pulling down statues.

This made me think a bit more about the extent to which fantasy should be a legitimate part of an adult life. Is playing a game invented by an author a less authentic fantasy than some others we could name? Are students running around with broomsticks any more tragic than those who escape into works of fiction or those who follow football teams around the country or those who pretend that their tricky putt on the 18^th hole might win them a major golf championship? (Don’t answer that last bit, because you’ll just hurt my feelings).

Some would argue that there are plenty of problems in the world for us to solve and that frivolous pastimes just distract us from the serious business of improving the lot of the poor, the disadvantaged and the oppressed. But people who can only talk about serious stuff are, generally speaking, the sort of people that you wouldn’t want to be stuck in a lift with. 

The game of Quidditch is nonsense on stilts (or at least nonsense on a pretend broomstick), but a life lived without fantasy, fun and frivolity would, I think, be far less rich than one concentrated on purely utilitarian concerns.  

This topic is probably worth exploring in some depth, but I’ll leave it for the moment. I need to get back to practising my golf swing, because the US Masters is only a few weeks away. 

The view from the hole

Further to last week’s post, I have been involved in several interesting discussions with various folk over the merits and demerits of Doctor Peterson’s work. A lot of the criticism being circulated online claims that his views are somehow ‘dodgy’, but the critics don’t often get around to a full examination of those views, preferring instead to focus on how dreadful his audience is. 

The more interesting topic, I think, is to ask why Peterson’s message is resonating with so many young people. His recent speaking engagements in London (booked before the transmission of that Channel 4 interview) sold out in minutes. A few weeks ago, an American college campus invited him to speak at their 400-seat theatre. He was ‘no-platformed’ by the usual zealots, so the organisers of the event decided to book the only available local alternative, a 1,500-seat concert hall. It sold out.

Much of the criticism characterises this audience as ‘alt-right angry white males’ (although mostly male, Peterson’s audience is clearly mixed); that level of analysis -and it is an act of generosity to describe it thus- will get us nowhere. 

The Independent published an article about the Channel 4 interview under this headline:  

'When white men feel they are losing power, any level of nastiness is possible.'

That wasn’t just intellectually feeble; it was utterly reprehensible. This kind of thing actually reinforces one of Peterson’s key messages: namely, that identity politics is a dead-end street and -at the end of that street- lies a whole heap of trouble. When I was growing up, to have assumed (and judged) someone’s views from their ethnicity, age or gender would have been considered discriminatory, vulgar and racist; now it has become the norm.  

We are in a deep hole with this stuff, yet some folk want to keep on digging. I’d suggest that one of the reasons for Jordan Peterson’s popularity is that many people have decided that they don’t like the view from that hole.  

Take the Red Pill

If there is anyone out there who still hasn’t watched Cathy Newman’s Channel 4 News interview with the Clinical Psychologist Jordan Peterson, I would strongly recommend that you check out what was a wonderfully illuminating piece of television. I found it riveting, but I’m not sure if that was in spite of -or because of- the interviewer’s insistence on trying to put words into her interviewee’s mouth at almost every turn. If you try counting the number of times she says “so what you’re saying is …” before inserting a ridiculously skewed interpretation of what he has actually said, you will need all of your fingers and some of your toes. It is evident that ‘listening’ and ‘responding to what the other person has actually said’ were not part of Ms Newman’s game plan.   

Some have argued that it was her job to challenge Peterson and not to just nod in agreement with whatever he was saying. This is a fair point and, if Channel 4 News applied that principle across the board, it would certainly present itself as a more balanced source of information. Peterson may not be right about everything, but even when he's wrong, he has reached his position because he has at least considered the available evidence. But, in an age in which feelings appear to trump reason, he is regularly libelled as a neo-Nazi, slave-trading, baby-eating agent of the patriarchy, or something.

Ms Newman’s lazy assumption was that her guest was an ‘alt-right' misogynist provocateur. Her researchers (I’m assuming she will have had some help) must be pretty dim if they thought that some back-of-a-fag-packet observations on this man’s significant academic oeuvre would cause him to recant his views. Mainstream news outlets regularly claim moral superiority over so-called 'fake news' sources, so examples of this kind of shoddy practice deserve to be highlighted and ridiculed.

There is a sense in which the exchange also illustrated what can happen to polite discourse once certain difficult topics are declared ‘off-limits’. Perfectly reasonable people who might, under normal circumstances, be prepared to discuss those difficult topics, start to retreat from debate. Once you’ve witnessed some poor sod raise his head above the parapet only to be monstered as a misogynist /racist /transphobe /Islamophobe (they’re all the same thing), it makes sense to keep your opinions to yourself. But people who shout those magic ‘shut-down’ words to dismiss their opponents eventually lose the ability to argue. And, when they come up against someone who won’t shut up and won’t back down, someone prepared to use logic and reason to make their points, the shouters have nowhere else to go. They don’t have the tools to argue because they’ve never had to do it; once their magic words lose potency, shouters are stuck in a very deep hole.   

I have been following Jordan Peterson’s work since his experiences at Toronto University dragged him into what -for shorthand purposes- I'll call the 'cultural debate'. During that time, he has conducted himself with dignity and intelligence. He has had exactly this kind of discussion many, many times and is way too smart to be intimidated by folk who, rather than listen, choose to project their own ‘evil Nazi’ fantasies onto him simply because he doesn’t share their worldview.
His critics, generally speaking, don't want (or are not equipped) to refute his arguments. Their standard approach is:

1) Try the magic words, like misogynist /racist /transphobe /Islamophobe.

When that doesn’t work,
2) Adopt the 'straw man' approach (like Cathy Newman) by deliberately misinterpreting his arguments ("so ... you're saying that all women are stupid?").

When these tactics fail (and they always do), resort to:
3) Playing the 'victim' card.

On youtube, the average Channel 4 News interview gets a few thousand hits. On big stories, the numbers might head somewhere north of 100,000. The Newman-Peterson interview, at the time of writing, has had more than six million views. Once it went viral, Channel 4 announced that it had consulted ‘security experts’ (but curiously, not the police) because of ‘vile misogynist abuse’ received by their presenter. With the help of their ideological allies in the press, they attempted to switch the narrative from ‘hectoring presenter embarrasses herself with civilised professor’ to ‘female presenter bullied and exposed to vile misogynist abuse’ from Peterson’s so-called ‘army of trolls’. Make of that what you will. As a fan of his work, I’d be more inclined to thank Ms Newman for handing him such an epic victory.

However one chooses to interpret the interview, it feels like something significant may be happening.
It’s not unusual for the younger generation to rebel against what is on offer from the world created by their parents and, when I listen to the kind of conversations that are going on, when I check out some of the podcasts, I get the sense that a cultural shift may be taking place. Jordan Peterson appears to have connected with a young audience in search of authentic meaning, an audience that suspects it could get a better deal than the one they’ve been told is the only one on the table. We assume that young people need their information delivered in bite-sized chunks, yet many of them clearly have the appetite to absorb long and deep discussions about complicated political and philosophical ideas.        
(To take one example, Joe Rogan’s podcast with Petersen and Professor Brett Weinstein lasts for 2 hours 45 minutes and has been watched by 3 million people).

Some young people seem to have worked out that television and newspapers aren’t going to help them. Why trust a tired medium in which demonstrably partial people have set themselves up as the entitled gatekeepers of information?
They seem to have worked out that, by and large, teachers and college professors aren’t going to help them. Why trust a profession in which the intellectual gene pool is so dismally shallow? Lots of young people understand that when someone is in favour of every kind of diversity except intellectual diversity, that person is more of an indoctrinator than an educator.   

When critics point out that Peterson’s message is not exactly 'new', they overlook an obvious point: To many young folk, what he’s saying seems new because, generally speaking, they will have been taught by people who adhere to the dead-end ideas of post-modern cultural relativism. And the people who taught those people will, generally speaking, have been taught by people who also adhered to those ideas. And the people who taught those people … you get my drift.

In the science fiction film ‘The Matrix’, the rebel leader Morpheus offers the main character Neo a choice between two pills: red or blue.

"This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill: the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill: you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."

The hero must choose between the convenient falsehoods maintained by the blue pill and the inconvenient truths revealed by the red.

Having been trained to react to cultural relativism’s trigger words, drilled to respond to the poisonous diktats of identity politics, young people are now being 'red-pilled' by Jordan Peterson. If we are to avoid hurtling towards a nightmare post-dialogue age wherein 'right' and 'left' are literally unable to communicate with each other, I can't think of a more important job or, indeed, a better man to do it.

If you haven't watched it, here's the interview.

Vinyl Diary, part 3: Against Nature

As a tragically obsessive consumer of music, I am used to the idea of expectation out-performing reality. It has too often been the case that the act of imagining the tantalising possibilities of an eagerly-anticipated album has provided rather more fun than the experience of actually listening to it. Having learned to live with that kind of disappointment, it was always a particular treat when something managed to match my hopes and expectations.    

In the mid-80s, I had been a fan of the cult (i.e. chart-avoiding) band Microdisney. The talents of composer Sean O’Hagan and singer /lyricist Cathal Coughlan were finely balanced, with an ever-present tension between their sophisticated music and the somewhat caustic lyrics. O’Hagan’s love of the Beach Boys and Steely Dan was obvious, while Coughlan’s default mode of righteously-vented spleen helped give the songs something of an edge.  

Such was the talent of these two men that, when Microdisney disbanded in 1989, it seemed obvious to their small-but-dedicated fan base that something else, something special, would emerge. For what seemed like months, I scoured the music press in the hope of some news until, at the fag end of the decade, the splendidly eclectic Snub TV featured a video of Cathal Coughlan and The Fatima Mansions performing a song called ‘Only losers take the bus’. Filmed in a deconsecrated synagogue, it featured Coughlan, besuited and bound at the pulpit, staring down the camera to perform a rip-snorting track based on a tough electro-rhythm, some kick-ass rockabilly guitar and a typically spiky lyric, seemingly focused on a self-made millionaire with unhinged views. I particularly loved the crazed injunction in the instrumental breakdown to “Get these dead bodies off my race track!”   

When the mini-album ‘Against Nature’ appeared on Kitchenware Records, it lived up to my fanboy dreams. I had no problem with the fact that it didn’t sound like a coherent band project, because I was charmed by what appeared to be a sonic snapshot of where a talented singer-songwriter’s head was at; indeed, the absence of focus felt more like the presence of possibility, a promise of future riches to be forged through Coughlan’s idiosyncratic eclecticism. The collection contained nods to Microdisney on ‘The Day I Lost Everything’ (featuring a splendid monologue referencing both Jimmy Tarbuck and Santa Claus) and ‘You Won’t Get Me Home’, wherein the writer wallowed in his fascination with losers and grotesques:  

"The Prince of Caledonia, he drives a diesel van

and he peddles skag in Hamilton. He's the reality man, reality man."

'Bishop of Babel’ was, to all intents and purposes, a power ballad, while ‘13th Century Boy’ represented a jolly, if slightly skewed, take on Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s chart-dominating disco formula; it may have been intended as a pastiche, but it worked pretty well as a pop tune.  

Freed from the pressures of working for a major label and writing for a band, Coughlan essayed his love for Scott Walker through a couple of particularly haunting tunes. The lush synths of ‘Big Madness’ set a disconcertingly mellow backdrop for a chilling lyric, which opened with a killer boasting of his exploits with a “weeping spinster” before going on to explore the territory between romance and dangerous obsession. ‘Wilderness on Time’, featuring just voice and harpsichord, was raw and full of longing, set off by a wonderfully unhinged opening line:

"When my taxi arrives
Say that I'm dead, having swallowed my leg"

Hearing Coughlan on this kind of vocal form, you can’t help but wonder why he didn’t become the voice of his generation; his singing is beautiful, expressive and just dripping with gravitas. In Microdisney, his grouchy misanthropy (at times, outright nihilism) had been ameliorated by O’Hagan’s deft tuneage, but once Cathal got the keys to the car, the listener had to endure an altogether bumpier ride. He went on to make more thematically coherent albums with The Fatima Mansions, although there were times when the band’s dreary muscularity bludgeoned the tunes into a bloody pulp and it was frustrating to hear a man with a golden set of pipes opting for the kind of testosterone barking favoured by vocalists with a fraction of his talent.

On stage, Coughlan and the Mansions could be electrifying. I remember one gig at Glasgow University when he deliberately whacked himself in the forehead with the microphone and drew blood. I had actually driven past him and the band in town earlier that day and –for a fraction of a second- had been tempted to roll down my car window and shout “Only losers take the bus!” Thankfully, I thought better of it. If a guy could deliberately whack himself on the head with a microphone, who knows what he might have done to an idiot fan pathetically trying to ingratiate himself by half-wittedly demonstrating his knowledge of an obscure band’s oeuvre?

His solo work since the demise of the Mansions has been articulate, sophisticated and sprinkled with occasional gems, but contains way more shade than light and is, to my ears, somewhat thin on melody; the fact that beautiful melodies do occasionally break out makes one suspect that, in shying away from pop music, Coughlan is cutting off his nose to spite his face.

In that sense, ‘Against Nature’ might be viewed as the template for a brilliantly off-kilter pop career that never quite happened.

Here's a link to that first TV appearance:

Only losers take the bus

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.

Vinyl diary, part 1: K-Scope

I recently bought my son a turntable for his birthday and, since he owned no vinyl, I spent a couple of weekends scouring various second hand and charity shops in the hope of assembling an interesting little ‘starter’ collection for him. In the modern parlance, I was able to put together a decent selection of ‘vinyls’ for his nascent collection, including records by Bootsy Collins, Robert Palmer, Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Funkadelic, Steely Dan and Stevie Wonder. Yes, you’re right; that is a ‘tragic dad’ kind of selection, but I’ve learned to embrace the tragedy, so don’t judge me. As well as the stuff I was able to pick up in the second-hand shops, I donated a few items from my own collection. As the saying goes: ‘Greater love hath no man than this: that he is willing to give away his vinyl copy of ‘The Isley Brothers Greatest Hits’.  

Those shopping trips took me back to the days when my Saturday afternoons would be spent browsing, buying and generally hanging around record shops. Over the years, I bought some really mediocre stuff, but also discovered some artists that I treasure to this day. Such was my devotion /addiction that, at one point in my (admittedly rather sad) life, the cultural highlight of the year would have been HMV's January sale. For someone whose disposable income went mostly on music, that seasonal temptation to gorge on the discounted goodies was impossible to resist.

My son's taste in music is much more eclectic than mine’s would have been at his age. One of the reasons for that, I think, is that I had to physically go out to find and buy music, whereas he merely has to browse and download (and let’s not get into the subject of whether or not downloading music for free is stealing, because I’m right and you’re wrong). The act of investing energy, money and time in acquiring something gives you a greater emotional stake in an artefact. My son’s musical taste may be wider and, in that sense, more culturally sophisticated than mine’s ever was, but I’d argue that my deep connection with certain records is based not only on the physicality of the artefacts, but on what it cost me to get familiar with them; having committed to buying an album, I had little choice but to stick with it and give it a chance to lodge itself in my consciousness. My boredom threshold, out of necessity, was located several miles down the road; had I had the ability to click a mouse and browse through a million digital files, I wouldn’t have developed the relationships I have with certain pieces of music.             

Since acquiring his groovy new turntable, my son has confessed that he has started to spend his spare cash on vinyl, mostly obscure groove-based foreign stuff. Part of me feels like I have helped open up a whole new world for him, but another part feels like I may have administered his first dose of heroin.

The examination of my own dust-gathering vinyl collection allowed me to re-connect with some music I had forgotten about. One gem I had (almost) forgotten is ‘K-Scope’ by Phil Manzanera. It was released in 1978, but I reckon I picked it up in one of those HMV sales sometime in the early 80s.                     

Manzanera was the guitarist with Roxy Music and, although ‘K-Scope’ is billed as a solo project, he was smart enough to surround himself with some really talented people, including Mel Collins, Eddie Rayner, Tim and Neil Finn, Simon Phillips, John Wetton, Bill and Ian McCormick, Andy Mackay, Paul Thompson, Kevin Godley and Lol Crème. That’s quite a cast list and the quality of musicianship is evident throughout, something which might not necessarily have impressed any young Turks who’d still have been fighting the punk wars when this album was released.   

The lead vocals are handled by various folk, but Manzanera’s finely honed art-pop sensibilities give the album compositional consistency. ‘Remote Control’ is a brief and sparky slice of prog-punk, while ‘Slow Motion TV’ sounds like a cross between The Stranglers and 10CC (in a good way). ‘Hot Spot’ is probably as close as the album gets to sounding like Roxy Music (albeit with their disco shoes on) and there is much to love about the languid Latin-reggae groove of ‘Cuban Crisis’, the tale of a loser musician (‘just a dime-a-day tunesmith’) pining for his departed girlfriend.  

Manzanera’s guitar work is distinctive without being flashy; the beautiful colours and textures he creates on ‘Gone Flying’ might have sounded more like Eno’s ambient work were it not for the rhythm section of Philips and McCormick cooking up a quiet storm. The highlight of the album, I think, is ‘Walking Through Heaven's Door’, which appears to delineate a drug-fueled adventure in an unnamed foreign city. It starts out sounding like an 80s take on ‘Surf’s Up’-era Beach Boys, before John Wetton’s gut-churning bass pulls it into the kind of menacing groove territory once occupied by Magazine or early Simple Minds, before an extended end section, replete with hypnotic mantra, lulls us towards anthemic oblivion. 

When I bought ‘K-Scope’ I considered it quirky and charming, but maybe just a little bit too ‘prog’ around the edges; now, several decades on, it sounds witty, fresh and sparkling. Check this out:

Walking through Heaven's door.