~Kitten Wine~#24: 'Strawberry Dross Killed The Boss'

Blah blah blah.....Summer of '83....blah blah blah....last days of school....blah blah blah....sensory evocation of lost time....blah blah blah....Marcel Proust.....yada yada yada.....little rooms smelling of orris root....yada yada yada....same old same old.................

Yeah, it must be said that I do tend to furrow the same old groove in these Blogs but, like my literary hero himself, I really don't know of, or have anything else to write about. Sounding totally pretentious, my life really is my art!

And so we find ourselves once again on the streets of Bannockburn under the blood red skies of a Summer's evening. That Summer between school and work was a special time, one that only now I wish I'd kicked back and enjoyed just a little more. All of my friends were, like myself, upon the very threshold of manhood....the 9 to 5, the nights at the pub, the sensible behaviour were what we believed we were heading for, just as our parents before us had. But, as we would soon discover, we were also heading into a time of wild drunken revelry, of the pursuit of that special girl, of playing live concerts with our best friends, of that short period of time when you actually LIVE!
And one band that was special to me in that strange Summer of expectation was The Damned. Now it has to be said that The Damned were a curious band who had arrived on the waves of Punk, but quickly developed their own divine brand of psychedelicized pop-rock. It could be argued that after Morrissey(both as solo artist and of The Smiths), The Damned are the band that I have seen live on most occasions. I've also seen them do randomly massively different shows; from all out Punk thrashalong(Govan Town Hall, Autumn 1988), perfect mainstream pop act(Edinburgh Playhouse, Winter 1986) and curious melange of both(Glasgow Barrowlands, Summer of 1989 with both Brian James AND Captain Sensible on lead guitar duties).
In October 1982 The Damned released what I still consider to be their masterpiece, 'Strawberries', a tremendous blending of psychedelic pop and punk energy. It also came with a strawberry scented lyric sheet which stills smells to this day and which has more of a nostalgic pull than all the orris root in Paris! It was an album I played endlessly, and one which even at the time, I knew I would play in years to come to remind me of those days.
"And always remember// This is the happiest days of your life".
Indeed!
But it wasn't just the album itself that conjured up such an evocative sense of time and place, but some of the ephemera and doodles that accompanied it, so let's take a listen to some of those choice offcuts....that, my friends, is why we're here.
First up is a track from the 'Friday The 13th' EP which consisted of tracks that didn't make the final album cut. Amongst them is one of the most nostalgia tweaking songs I know of; 'The Limit Club'. Beginning sounding uncannily like the theme music to Current Affairs TV programme 'World In Action'(which many people used to believe was performed by Pink Floyd...it wasn't!), the song tells in beautiful psychedelic hues of a love affair being enjoyed as the world heads to an apocalyptic end, "I saw the sun set low on you// In a blood-red suns final rays"....aaaahh, just those lines take me back to that Summer and those last times we would play football until it became too dark to see the ball. What a beautiful piece of music.


At about the same time as 'Strawberries', Captain Sensible was ploughing his own solo field to great populist acclaim, and on his second solo single 'Wot' he included, for the B-side, a small compilation called 'Strawberry Dross' which was demos and short pieces of music that had been intended as rough sketches for songs for the album. The songs are all recorded on a portable 4-track studio with Sensible playing everything and singing. The tracks last between 30 seconds to a minute and are quite indicative of the 60s flavoured music Sensible hoped to include on the album, "Kaftan, grow my hair// I wanna be a Hippy 'cos i really don't care". There are a couple of dreamy little instrumental sketches as well which, for me, are my very own 'Vinteuil's Sonata', dragging me kicking and screaming back to world where strange aches and twinges in your arms and legs would be patronisingly described as 'growing pains'.....


.....which brings me to 'Seagulls'. An instrumental B-side(to the single 'White Rabbit') which again transports me to a world where getting to stay up after 11:00p.m was a result, where we no longer needed a baby-sitter on a Saturday night, where meeting girls from your class out of school gave you weird electric shocks in your chest.
About a year later, the band I was in at the time decided that we would stop all the Punkish nonsense we had been playing and would start writing 'proper' songs. We used this track, 'Seagulls', as the basis of our new sound. Listening to it again here just now I realise we actually didn't just base our sound around it, as rip it off completely. Musical magpies? No, thieving bastards more like!!


And we end with the musical sigh that is 'Life Goes On', one of two vocals that Sensible contributed to 'Strawberries'. And what an aching, poignant, Jack-Daniels-at-4:00-in-the-morning-discussions-on-the-meaning-of-life track it is. Over a bassline that Nirvana stole for 'Come As You Are', Sensible finds himself in disparate, melancholy mood reflecting on the hardships and dreariness of life before jubilantly exclaiming that life is there for the taking, just grab it by the scruff of the neck and make it yours! "And always remember// This is the happiest day of your life".....I remember listening to this line back at school and wondering if they really were. You are always being told that they are, but I wasn't so sure then. I knew they were special but didn't reckon on having to wait over a quarter of a century to find out.


A lot of what I write is about the summoning up of lost memories or treasured experiences through the beauty of my favourite records, and sometimes I find that the deepest memories are evoked by the oddest of records. Can a bunch of unused demos or out-of-character instrumentals really take me back to happiest days of my life?

Damned right they can!!

~Gordon~

Griff says; Farewell, My Lovely

I predict that the Streetlamp's Ray, lover of all things twee and poppy, is going to LOVE the song I'm writing about tonight, and he's going to be simply in heaven when he sees the accompanying video. The band, Soda Shop, is that most pleasing of twee-pop combinations, the boy/girl duo. In this case, the boy is Drew Diver of Horse Shoes and the girl is Maria Usbeck of Selebrities. Legend has it that the two met by fate at an Embassy concert in Brooklyn, New York and the rest, as they say, is history.


Soda Pop's debut 7" single, Farewell, is newly released on Shelflife Records and can be ordered 'here'. A free MP3 of the A-side can be downloaded 'here'. The song itself is a winning combination of; 50's mode tightly arpeggiated guitar, light glockenspiel flourishes, 60s girl-group style reverbed female vocals, and the whole is saturated with a bang-up-to-date dream-pop cool. Basically, it's classic early pop meets modern, fey and jangly indie-pop. Imagine The Shangri-Las meets The Softies, if you will. Yeah, I know, sounds amazing already, doesn't it? Here's the video:

Soda Shop - Farewell from Drew Diver on Vimeo.

Griff
xx

First Degree Burns: The MacDonald Sisters

As it's Burn's Night tonight here in Scotland, I thought I'd celebrate(along with the vegetarian haggis, neeps, tatties, and of course a liberal dram of the Scottish Water) with an appraisal of a long lost Scottish curio....The MacDonald Sisters. A quartet who combined Ronettes glamour with 100% Gaelic singing.
I know what you're thinking....surely this is a 'Griff Says' piece? But no, it really is me who's writing this. I suppose therefore the law of averages suggests that Griff's next Blog will be all about a band who started out on Crass Records and ended their days on Sarah, and almost certainly called The Guermantes Way(and if you spotted that joke.....well done!)
The MacDonald Sisters came to prominence around 1963 and almost immediately won over both the Folk and the Pop music cognoscenti. Their blending of 60s pop glamour with full on Gaelic Folk was an instant success, their Puirt-A-Beul (Mouth Music) stylings in particular being especially spellbinding. Their songs tended to be versions or re-interpretations of Island songs; shanties, songs of the sea and the islanders battles with inclement and ferocious weather etc.
The sisters began appearing on TV shows both north and south of the border to great acclaim, but these tended to be the type of shows that went out live and therefore any tapes that may have existed have either vanished or simply been wiped. One devoted fan was Harry H Corbett of 'Steptoe & Son' fame who, when awarded his own TV special, invited the sisters to appear on his show.

The BBC filmed a documentary on the girls in 1969 called 'A Song Of Crotal And White' which brought one Daily Record reviewer to froth "their voices together got to nerve endings you didn’t know you had"....obviously not Billy Sloan then!
As the quartet's nationwide popularity began to wane, they maintained a constant profile within the Outer Hebrides, especially on their home island of Lewis.

So why the new wave of interest now?
Well, we have both Creation Records and Teenage Fanclub to thank for this.
First off, Finlay MacDonald of The Fannies is the son of Kathleen MacDonald who was responsible for the incredible vocal arrangements and it is he who has compiled a new overview compilation CD, 'Sòlas Clann Dhòmhnaill'(Songs Of Clan Donald) which is being released by PoppyDisc Records, an offshoot of Creation legend Joe Foster's Rev-Ola Records.
Also, back in November, The MacDonald Sisters got together at Glasgow’s top Gaelic nightclub, Ceòl ‘s Craic, at the Centre for Contemporary Arts for their first live performance since 1977. The night also culminated in a showing of a revamped/re-edited version of the BBC documentary(which I'm hoping BBC4 may show sometime soon).
I have to admit that this all may be a bit of an acquired taste and that any one not Scottish may find the whole thing a little bewildering, but dear Friends, you've trusted Griff and I so far, so why not trust us one more time?
Get yourself a good peaty Single Malt, breathe in that sea air, and discover those nerve endings you didn't know you had!


Slàinte mhòr!!

~Gordon~

Where Is The Soundtrack continued; 'In The Name O The Wee Man'

'In Nomine Patri' by The Alternative

As I stretch myself out across the chaise longue, sweet sherry in hand, I find myself once again reflecting back on my last days of High School; the rolling, sun dappled Balquiderock hills, my pressed linen shirt, my white sta-prest, my tennis cardigan draped over my shoulders, blonde fringe flapping in the breeze as Sebastian puts some Lotus Eaters record on the Dansette....and then I realise I'm mixing up a romanticised version of my last school days with an old episode of Brideshead Revisited!

But in truth, I WAS thinking back to final days at High School recently as Griff and I had been discussing writing more about the *ahem* 'angrier' music we used to listen to, and not just sticking to the Twee/Folk/Acoustic blueprint we had been following so far.
I was compiling a list of tracks to write about and noticed that they all seemed to come from around the time that I was finishing school, and I was somewhat shocked and surprised to realise that in those last days at the old school, my favourite song at the time was 'Antichrist' from The Alternative's 'In Nomine Patri' EP.
It has always troubled me, especially of late, that my last school days weren't the romanticised pastel hued remembrances of say, 'The Catcher In The Rye', Christopher Isherwood, 'American Graffiti' or even 'Dazed And Confused', but were in fact thuddingly underwhelming uncool days of badly dressed faffing about in a schoolboy Punk band. Good at the time....not so good to look back on whilst trying to crochet some Evelyn Waugh-meets-Él Records re-imagining, or reconciling one's self that Arthur Rimbaud had written Une Saison en Enfer by the time he was 16!

It was a strange time those last days of school; not only was the glue that had bound everyone I had known since the age of 5 coming undone, casting us all to the winds, some never to be seen again, but even the aforementioned schoolboy Punk band I spoke of earlier, The Cakes, was starting to unravel, almost as though the onset of serious puberty was causing a diastrophism amongst longtime friends.

As for my musical tastes of the time, they seemed to hinge around The Damned, The Dead Kennedys, Crass, The Passage, Cabaret Voltaire, The Stranglers, The Birthday Party and a few bands who only released one or two records; The Paramedic Squad, The Scrotum Poles, Surface Mutants, Diagram Brothers and so on. Things would change pretty soon, slowly at first thanks to Cherry Red's 'Pillows And Prayers'(of which a full blog will follow soon) which Griff and I latched on to passionately, and both The Smiths and The Fall were lurking just out of sight, waiting to strike and change my life(and my listening habits) in perpetuity.

But before all of that seismic shifting of lives, friends and tastes, all I would rave about was 'Antichrist' by The Alternative. It seems insane now, but I had forgotten all about it until I started researching this Blog. This was a song whose praises I hollered from the rooftops at anyone who would listen....which was often nobody. I was mesmerised by this song; by it's squalling atmosphere building intro, to it's snarled Scottish accented opening salvo, to it's cavernous drum heavy pounding rhythms and raging vocals....the kind of thing you REALLY wished U2 would do until you realise that what you actually wish is that U2 simply didn't exist!
I think the word for this song is 'blistering'!

I remember putting it on EVERY mixtape that I compiled for people that Spring, and whenever friends came round to the house I would play it to them, insisting that this was the greatest record ever made....and it was by a Scottish band! Hurrah!!
But nobody ever took any notice. Most sat there with glum bewilderment as I sat forever enthralled by such an exciting piece of music. Why didn't they get it? Why didn't they share my ferocious enthusiasm? It WAS good, wasn't it? No....it was BRILLIANT!! But only I seemed to get it.
The Alternative came from Dunfermline and their first release was on one of Crass's 'Bullshit Detetctor' albums. Now usually these albums were simply unlistenable but on this instance the track by The Alternative is far and away the best thing on it.
The 'In Nomine Patri' EP followed, again on Crass Records. In fact it could be argued that The Alternative followed the Crass blueprint a little too closely; Crass had the Dial House commune, The Alternative had it's own communal dwelling known as The Pad; Crass had the motto 'Anarchy & Peace', The Alternative had the motto 'Autonomy & Peace'....see what I'm saying?
Nearly all of the 'Bullshit Detetctor' albums are rubbish, but a lot of records released on Crass Records by other artists were often very good indeed(more of which in later Blogs), and for me 'In Nomine Patri' was the best, and 'Antichrist' it's standout track. Listening to it now I still get a bit of a shiver at it's immense power, especially in the early section(a warning to anyone listening for the first time, you really have to get beyond the opening minute of build up to appreciate the actual song it's self), and it feels right that I should be using the ~Streetlamp~ to shout it's praises all over again.

Now if only Sebastian would put some Poison Girls on....the scones and cream are beginning to hum in the mid-day sun.

~Gordon~