Down the 'Pool

When I was at college I shared a house with a lad from Cheshire who was a Liverpool supporter, but despite that terrible character flaw he was a good bloke and we're still friends today. Back then one of our favourite tv shows was Alan Bleasdale's Liverpudlian comedy/drama "Scully" whose expression "DOUBLE YESSS!!" became a bit of a college-years catchphrase for us (ah, students). The show had a really terrific theme song by Elvis Costello — who also had a bit part in it as Scully's retarded cousin — which ended up on the b-side of "I Wanna Be Loved" even though I think it was a much better record.

Pity it's about a Liverpool supporter though. Come on you Blues!!!!!!!

Download: Turning The Town Red - Elvis Costello & The Attractions (mp3)

In case you've forgotten all about "Scully", here's a reminder.

Seasons come, seasons go

Though Spring officially started last week it's still a bit nippy here, but you can feel the season's change in the air. The sky is bluer, days are longer, lawns are turning green again, daffodils are sprouting, and everyone is waiting for that moment when they can shed their coats and jumpers and feel the sun on their faces again. Long, cold winters are tough but I wouldn't miss that feeling of renewal for the world, it's good for the soul and makes you appreciate the wonders of life and the passing of time even more.

For a change, here's something fresh, new (-ish) and Spring-like from one of my favourite albums of last year.

Download: Blackbird - Rachel Unthank And The Winterset (mp3)
Buy: "The Bairns" (album)

Lucky Dip

Download: Maybe Tomorrow - The Chords (mp3)

I wouldn't exactly call this a "forgotten" single but there were so many other blistering classic singles released in 1980 this one got lost in the crowd and only got to #40 so it's probably one of those records you had to have been there at the time to remember.

Where's the beef?

"On this occasion," said Jack, "that's exactly where you're wrong. You're all here as my guests, and you can order anything you like. The tab for this is being picked up by the British Leyland Motor Corporation, so expense is no object. Go for it, chaps. Let your imaginations run wild.
Roy ordered fillet steak and chips, Colin ordered fillet steak and chips, Bill ordered fillet steak, chips and peas, and Jack, who went to the South of France for his holidays, ordered fillet steak with chips, peas and mushrooms on the side, a touch of sophistication that was not lost on the others."
Jonathan Coe
The Rotters Club

This little scene really captures the dismal state of English dining in the 1970s and the nation's unsophisticated tastebuds in the days before any of us had ever heard of Balsamic Vinegar or Chilean Sea Bass and everyone's idea of upmarket grub was steak — always with chips. I don't want to come across like one of the Four Yorkshiremen or anything but I don't think I even ate a steak until I was in my late teens (I mean a proper one, not some frozen Findus thing made out of unknown cow parts) and I don't remember my mother ever cooking one at home, I assume because it was too expensive. I don't think it was something anybody had at home back then, it was a luxury treat you had in a restaurant when you were "pushing the boat out" or if someone else was paying, like above, though back then "steak" usually meant a puny overcooked fillet served up in a Berni Inn or Angus Steak House.

I ate more "real" meat at school (though I dread to think where that Liver came from) than I did at home where my diet was 99% packaged, processed and artificially-flavoured: spam fritters, fish paste sandwiches, instant mash, Pot Noodles, Findus Crispy Pancakes (God knows what they were made from) tinned meat pies, boil-in-the-bag Cod, and "international cuisine" meant Vesta Instant Chow Mein which came in a box. Pudding was usually something powdered and instant (and totally artificial) like Angel Delight. We rarely went out to eat either (unless you count the Wimpy Bar) except for when my Dad took my sister and me out for the day and we'd have lunch at this Italian place in Kensington (which, amazingly, is still there) where he'd eat this weird thing called a Lasagne — he was sophisticated my old man, he'd been to Paris! — while I'd always have double egg and chips, a meal that still gives me a Proustian rush back to my childhood.


With all the tinned, frozen, instant, and boiled-in-the-bag rubbish we were eating in it's no wonder we all looked so ill and pasty back then, the shit food adding to the general sickly air that seems to hang over the 1970s. Watch a TV show like The Sweeney and everyone looks like they smell of chip fat and ashtrays and has skin like an uncooked pork sausage (all that beige polyester didn't help the complexion either).

But at least we were thin. I was surprised to find out that we actually ate more calories in the 1970s than we do today but we still looked like rickety runts, while the vast smorgasbord of cheap food and dining options we have now is creating a nation of obese tubbies. I don't think it was because everyone was working out either, back then a gym was a place you only went when you were at school. Perhaps just getting through the day in 1970s England kept us slim, we didn't spend all day on our bums in front of a computer and drive everywhere. So maybe the next slimming fad should be "The 1970s Diet": wake up in a freezing cold flat, walk five miles to work, stand on your feet in a factory all day, carry your shopping home from the supermarket, eat a pile of spam fritters, instant mash and processed peas for tea, have a big bowl of Angel Delight, smoke twenty Rothman's, and the weight will just fall off.

Download: Barbecue - Orange Juice (mp3)
Download: Bangers and Mash - Peter Sellers & Sophia Loren (mp3)

Something for the weekend

Green Cross Man came to our school once to give us a talk on road safety. He didn't teleport into the room though so I think it might have been an imposter.

Junior Choice

She went for the singles this time


I posted that one a while ago, so how about the b-side instead?

Download: (There's Always) Something On My Mind - The Pale Fountains (mp3)


Good choice, I think we'll play both sides of that. Roddy Frame wasn't much older than you when he wrote these.

Download: Just Like Gold - Aztec Camera (mp3)
Download: We Could Send Letters - Aztec Camera (mp3)


Really? That old chestnut? Oh, go on then.

Download: God Save The Queen - Sex Pistols (mp3)

Dilly Dally

Back in the 1980s the statue of Eros* which had stood in the center of Piccadilly Circus since 1893 was moved over to it's present, less grand location on the corner outside The Criterion Theatre, apparently just to improve traffic flow through the area. I remember being really pissed off about this at the time and was surprised it didn't cause more controversy — that was also around the time British Telecom got rid of our red phone boxes without any public consultation and that caused only a small ripple of protest too. It seemed just another example of how the character of the city I loved (and the whole country) was being ruined by the forces unleashed by Maggie Thatcher and everything had to be sacrificed at the altar of capitalist "progress" — in this case the growing number of cars that were taking over the city — so one of London's most iconic and beautiful landmarks just got booted aside. Somehow I can't imagine this happening in any other city in the world, it would be like the French shifting the Arc de Triomphe a little to the left so Parisians could get to the Champs Élysées a bit quicker.

Even though it happened 20 years ago Piccadilly Circus still looks "wrong" to me and poor old Eros seems a little diminished removed from it's former pride of place in the centre. You probably can't buy drugs there anymore either. Not that I ever did you understand, but it seemed that every time I sat there I was asked by some shady-looking bloke if I wanted to.

Anyway, that little rant was really just an excuse to post this track, a lovely tune that was on the b-side of the "Shout To The Top" 12" single.

Download: The Piccadilly Trail - The Style Council (mp3)

*Yes, I know it's actually a statue of Anteros but everyone calls it Eros.

Jazz Hands

The British aren't exactly renowned for their jazz chops, we've produced a fair bit of talent in that area but, compared to the American giants, the ranks of Great British Jazzmen is a small club on a par with Important French Rock Bands or Great German Comedians. But Tubby Hayes was one of the few who could blow with the best of them anywhere in the world as he shows on this storming big band number which, pardon the expression, swings more than a Doberman's balls.

Yes, I am aware that is the second reference to canine scrotum I've made this week. Just a strange coincidence I assure you.

Download: The Killers of W1 - Tubby Hayes Orchestra (mp3)
Buy: "Tubbs' Tours" (album)

Photo from the Soho Nights exhibition.

As a little early Something For The Weekend extra, here's a great clip of him doing it live. For a bunch of guys who look like librarians and school teachers they're really cooking.

Sleeve Talk

On a whim the other day I dug out my copy of David Bowie's "Diamond Dogs" album to play for the first time in donkey's years and looking at the sleeve reminded me just how freaky Bowie used to look and how I was a little creeped out by him when I was a kid. With his bony frame, dodgy eyes, wonky teeth, milk-bottle pallor and outlandish costumes he looked like a zombie in a gay horror film. I still remember back in 1973 going round a friend's house after school and his older sister had just bought a copy of "Aladdin Sane" which he got out to show me and we both stared at the sleeve photos — especially the one on the inside gatefold — as if we were sneaking a peek at his Dad's porn magazines, something about it looked a bit pervy and illicit. Sounds silly I know but I was only 10, and I loved science fiction too but Bowie seemed to be coming from a far weirder place than Star Trek.

Of all the iconic images on his 1970s sleeves the one on the front of "Diamond Dogs" is probably the freakiest, showing Bowie as some mutant half human-half dog stretching out across the gatefold like a depraved Ray Harryhausen creation. The original version of the painting was even more perverted with the dog half of Bowie proudly displaying his meat and two veg like a centerfold in Dog Fancy magazine, but when record label execs saw early proofs they worried that some shops wouldn't carry it so the poor old dog was neutered by having his todger airbrushed out.

The cover was painted by Belgian artist Guy Peellaert who had just published a book of paintings called "Rock Dreams" which depicted various rock legends (Dylan, Sam Cooke, Hank Williams, Bowie himself) in fantasy settings. Bowie saw an exhibition of the paintings at Biba and commissioned Peellaert to do the cover which apparently ticked off Mick Jagger as he was after him to do The Stones next album too. In the end Peellaert did both "Diamond Dogs" and "It's Only Rock and Roll" that year, though Bowie beat them to the shops by several months and his cover is far more striking. Take that, Mick.

"Diamond Dogs" was Bowie's last Glam Rock album and his last proper rock album of any kind for the rest of the decade and I think it's fallen through the cracks in his catalogue between his Ziggy pomp and the Thin White Duke/Berlin era and doesn't get the attention they do which is a shame as I think it's a better album than "Aladdin Sane" — though I'll resist the temptation to call it the dog's bollocks.

Download: Big Brother/Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family - David Bowie (mp3)
Buy: "Diamond Dogs" (album)

Picture Post

Download: Glow Girl - The Who (mp3)

Image from the Skingirls gallery.

Something for the weekend

Yes kids, this is how awful things were before the internet was invented. We actually had to go to places and talk to real people. I really don't know how we survived.

In My Room (Again)

I'm not planning on doing many repeats and/or requests around here but a lot of people have asked me to repost these tunes since I took them down nearly two years ago, and as they're about the rarest and hard-to-find songs I've ever written about I thought this post was worth a second go.


Most Saturday afternoons in 1977 you'd find me in my bedroom listening to the Kenny Everett show on Capital Radio which was the perfect way to fill some of that dead time between getting back from the shops with my Mum and the football results coming on Grandstand. It wasn't just the adventures of Captain Kremmen (which you can download here) that kept me listening, like myself Kenny had a major ELO obsession and was constantly playing their then-new "Out Of The Blue" album. He must have played the entire double album (parts of it several times over) and this was before I got my own copy so I was glued to the radio. Kenny's musical tastes leaned heavily toward the polished and elaborate like ELO, he was the sort who thought "Sgt. Pepper" was the pinnacle of western civilization and that snotty punk stuff was just horrible. I thought so too at the time, it just sounded like a moronic racket to my ears and whenever my sister played the first Clash album I'd take the piss by singing "White Riot" in a retarded D.P. Gumby voice.

Another album that got heavy play on his show I ended up buying was "Looking Over My Shoulder" by Scottish singer/songwriter Chris Rainbow. If anybody has heard of him these days it's as lead singer of The Alan Parsons Project in the 1980s (I'm so glad to say I never knew he was) but in the 70s he recorded three solo albums which are to The Beach Boys what ELO's were to The Beatles, full of sunny, intricately-arranged pop symphonies with heavily multi-tracked vocals. While a lot of "Looking Over My Shoulder" now sounds as dated and cheesy as the shirt he's wearing on the sleeve some of it still quite gorgeous.

"Dear Brian" is a fan letter to Brian Wilson who at that time was still a recluse, drugged out of his head in a sandpit somewhere. Over it's sublime six minutes he laments the destroyed tapes and lost outtakes that ended up on a studio floor and implores Brian to "step in the sandbox" and make music again. The ghostly "In And Out And Round About" washes in like a mist coming off the North Sea and gets a bit Proggy (but in a very pretty way) with some highly pretentious lyrics and a grand church organ arrangement. Kenny played this a lot and would get all wobbly over the whispery ending.

Download: Dear Brian - Chris Rainbow (mp3)
Download: In And Out And Round About - Chris Rainbow (mp3)

All of Rainbow's albums are out of print now and go for rather large amounts of money as he's something of a minor cult amongst fans of 70s soft pop.

BRUCIE BONUS: Here's a track from the album I didn't include in the original post, this was a single.

Download: Give Me What I Cry For - Chris Rainbow (mp3)

The End of The Road

ABC's "The Lexicon Of Love" album is one of the high watermarks of 1980s pop, released in 1982 it's shiny surfaces and theatrical romanticism pretty much set the template for the flashy, hedonistic, post-modern decade to come. Which makes it a little ironic that the day I bought it I found myself in a place haunted by the once-glamourous ghosts from another pop era and as a result it's always linked in my mind with rather more dismal surroundings than the grand, velvet-draped ballroom you imagine ABC playing it in.

I bought the album one Saturday afternoon when I was down the King's Road in Chelsea with some mates and when we stepped out of the Our Price record shop with our purchases it started to piss down with rain — real monsoon-like buckets of it — so we ran to take shelter in the nearest boozer, which happened to be The Chelsea Drugstore.


This was the first and only time I'd been in there and had no idea then about it's legendary past, to me it was just this dingy place I'd walked past a million times that never looked very inviting. But when it opened in 1968 The Chelsea Drugstore was one of the epicenters of Swinging London counterculture and hangout for the beautiful people, with three glitzy floors containing a bar, restaurants, clothes and record shops and a late-night chemist. They even had a delivery service made up of young girls on motorcycles wearing purple catsuits — it doesn't get much more groovy than that. It's most famously mentioned in The Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want" as the place where Mick Jagger went to get Marianne Faithful's "prescription filled" when they lived together on nearby Cheyne Walk and she had a heroin habit. It's also where the record shop scene in A Clockwork Orange was filmed.


But the youth culture parade is always moving on and the place must have already seemed like a relic from another era in 1976 when Punk and the Sex Pistols emerged from Malcolm McLaren's shop "Sex" down the other end of the King's Road, and far as I know The Drugstore's last fling with pop history was in 1980 when it was an early hub of the new futurist/electronic music scene with it's Monday night "Sci-Fi Disco" run by a young DJ by the name of Stevo who later founded Some Bizzare records and discovered Soft Cell, The The, and Depeche Mode. By the time I ran in there soaking wet in 1982 it really looked like the party had gone somewhere else, the place was almost empty and with it's dingy lighting, dusty black walls, tatty black carpet and cheap chrome trimmings the vibe I got was more of a working man's club for ageing Motorhead roadies. The rather shabby atmosphere was compounded by the appearance of a stripper on the little stage, a young girl who had that pasty-skinned, bored Reader's Wives look common to nearly every stripper I've seen in a grubby English pub. It was all a bit sad and felt more suited to a seedy Pulp song than the glamour of Swinging London.

Looking back now, it might have turned into a shabby dive but at least it had some character which the King's Road is sadly lacking these days as it's become just another bland British high street with no trace of the vibrant counterculture and underground scenes it once spawned. When I walk down there now all I see are the ghosts of what used to be there: The Great Gear Market, Shelley's, Fiorucci, Robot, Flip, American Classics, Acme Attractions, Johnson's — they've all gone, replaced by mobile phone sellers, supermarkets and dry cleaners, not exactly the sort of places you can imagine a youth explosion starting from. The Chelsea Drugstore is long gone too, and in a perfect illustration of how far the King's Road has fallen, on the site of what was once the hippest, most-happening scene in London there now stands a McDonald's. There's a giant metaphor for all of modern pop culture right there too.

I don't think anyone needs me to post any tracks from "The Lexicon of Love" so how about all the b-sides of their first three 12" singles instead?

Download: Alphabet Soup - ABC (mp3)
Download: Theme From "Mantrap" - ABC (mp3)
Download: Mantrap (The Lounge Sequence) - ABC (mp3)
Download: The Look of Love (Part 3) - ABC (mp3)
Download: The Look of Love (Part 4) - ABC (mp3)
Read: "King's Road: The Rise and Fall of the Hippest Street in the World" (book)