BEATS OF LOVE 

90. The Stars In The Sky And The Stones In The Earth By Sewell & The Gong

TORN BETWEEN two great purchases. 

For its sheer musicality alone, Music From Memory's mind bomb of a compilation Dream Dolphin's Gaia: Selected Ambient & Down-tempo works (1996-2003), wins hands-down, but for the overall package I'm slightly more sold on the less subtly persistent genius that is Sewell & The Gong's Tonight We Fly EP.

My missus came home with a baby pink electric guitar a few months ago. For weeks, it just sat in the corner doing nothing. Eventually, I started picking it up, softly plucking the strings, and practicing with some online tutorials until it actually sounded good. Then I turned up the amp, and the noise was truly dreadful. Fast forward to the heatwave: I finally migrated outside, ditching my socks to strum away quietly and sheepishly in the sunshine.

Bird lover, artist and compiler of the great A Crushing Glow comps Matt Sewell is a much more accomplished self-taught guitarist than me. Although he'd probably disagree. All four tracks are standalone gems that are all unique musical expressions, but today at least this takes my fancy. Multi-instrumentalist Chris Tate sprinkles a touch more magic by building the atmosphere effortlessly. Creating a summer solstice song that's both airy and weighty. I'm back in head-nod heaven. My favourite place.

I will not get started about Glastonbury other than say that when Rick Astley was taking the stage, I was thankfully oblivious. And instead opening this beautiful Test Pressing complete with screen-printed sleeve. In truth, Matt Sewell's signed illustration was the selling point. 

This is even lovelier than his lovely Gayatri Mantra sleeve.  

https://sewellandthegong.bandcamp.com/track/the-stars-in-the-sky-and-the-stones-in-the-earth

BEATS OF LOVE

89. See No Rain by The Ya Ya's

RECALL PAUL Newsome milling around Royton with his guitar way back in the mid-eighties as I walked home from school. I must have had detention. He also had really great hair.

 

Our paths only crossed on the train many years later, me heading home from town; him heading into it. He still had really great hair. His band, Proud Mary, should have been right up my street, but something in the rhythm sounded a little stiff. That is unforgivable for a bar-room-boogie rock band. I was never sure if the culprit was Greg’s Americanised vocal delivery or the band's chemistry itself, but either way, it left me a little cold.

They famously blamed ill-timed assistance from Noel Gallagher for their failure to launch, but in truth, they were less than the sum of their parts, sounding more like highly competent session players than a living, breathing rock band.

Paul’s solo effort, Electric and Palms, was a far better-crafted affair. Replete with Elvis’s legendary backing singers, The Sweet Inspirations, it showcased a more restrained palette that swapped derivative rock and roll for genuine soul. Yet, it still sounds self-consciously cosmic in all the wrong places. Ironically, it is exactly the album Gallagher has spent the last two decades striving to make. The last time I saw Paul, he was enthusing about his new life in LA while I was busy talking up British jazz. The lucky bastard still had really great hair.

The Ya Ya’s, Paul’s first outfit, should have been his breakthrough but remained a strictly local phenomenon, and by local, I mean confined to Royton and Oldham's Roscoe Street. Their prophetic seven-inch single is getting scarce now. On it, the slight stiffness in his vocal delivery is instantly forgivable, wrapped as it is in that casual indie-pop charm. Crucially, his brother’s backing vocals do the heavy lifting, elevating what is otherwise a fairly pedestrian track into something well worth spinning.

Far too many musical careers sound infinitely better when played in reverse, making it tempting to ignore everything after a debut single. 

 SONGS THEY NEVER PLAY ON THE RADIO 

20. Julian Cope: Fried with, and the Death of the Synthesizer 

PART ONE

I CAN vividly recall the coach trip to Wembley Arena from Oldham's Chronicle offices to see Prince and playing Copey's debut solo album World Shut Your Mouth on the Walkman all the way there. It was and is quite like no other record in my collection. Well, maybe the excellence that is the follow-up Fried.

After being a bona fide pop-star, he, in reckless homage to Syd, attempted to uglify himself. Even cutting himself up like Iggy with his mike-stand, but even the criss-crosses still looked pretty. This fabled anecdote is wonderfully recounted in his important autobiography, Head On/Repossessed.  

Teardrops manager David Balfe insisted on splashing his massive keyboard lines all over their LP's until it all got too much and Copey went solo. Skating around his kitchen in Tamworth on the latest Blancmange LP, he invented a pastoral psychedelia made with more childlike organs and oboes. Still under the influence of LSD. 

My father hadn't been long dead, and I was filled with a rage that LSD definitely helped temper. Luckily, I wasn't signed to a major with a musical point to prove. The album kicks off badly; Bandy's First Jump and Metranil Vavin make a familiar racket that defeats the objective of going solo. Elegant Chaos improves things somewhat with its lyrical genius, but still sounds like a refined version of the Inspiral Carpets. Albeit, half a decade earlier.

However, side one closer Kolly Kibber's Birthday is astounding and creates a true dilemma.  In Particular Nobody trenchantly notes 'I can't decide what I love most. The 16 beats to the bar drum machine. Rhyming Liverpool with junior school. Or the two note guitar solo.' Basking in this unique velocity gave me and Jeff our finest musical moment, bar none.

Side two opener Sunshine Playroom resonates with me on a deeply personal  level. Only a partition wall divided me and my mother, but in my deeply troubled state of guilt, she might as well have been on foreign soil. The song gave me hope in reconciliation. Head Hang Low showcases Kate St John's haunting oboe to great effect and again the lyrics speak to me on a deeply personal level. Elevating the healthier aspects of my own conflicted self allowed me to maintain a bit of a split personality.   

Saving the best until last Copey revisits the observational brilliance of Tiny Children in an astonishing burst of poetics. Lunatic Fire-Pistol is evidence his invention was bearing fruit. Fortunately, it also signposts the musical direction of travel for Fried. 

PART 2

NOT CONSTRAINED by the sense of unfinished business of its predecessor, Fried has a distinct air of freedom about it. Channelling the spirit of Brian Wilson long before every introspective indie band by living under the studio mixing desk means this period is not without its share of anecdotes. Again, refer to Copey's important autobiography. 

He declared that 'If it hadn’t been done before, then I wasn’t interested.' This rejection of novelty meant he could formulate his ideas far more coherently and swifter than the indecisive Brian Wilson. Opener Reynard the Fox takes elements from medieval folklore, Thomas Grey poetry, a Black Sabbath number, a Them riff, and Copey's own brand of theatre art, to create the most self-important song of the eighties. No mean feat. By the decades end, had he actually spilled his guts out live on stage, as, after hanging off his massive mike-stand for an eternity when playing it, you were almost willing him to do, he might've stole a few more column inches.  

Miraculously, things pick up astonishingly. Jaunty backward guitars cushion his wide mouthed wonder of a delivery on Bill Drummond Said. Capturing his first effortless pop moment since going solo. Laughing Boy is all oceanic stoner plucks with equally atmospheric dark wordplay. It's utterly delightful. An imaginary conversation with his wife and an acoustic masterclass propel Me Singing from ditty to album highlight. These three songs sound as fresh today as the day they were released.

After such an exhaustively brilliant side of music, side two is a little underwhelming. That said, Search Party would've sounded great on his debut. Holy Love is whimsical and also demonstrates that the pastoral psychedelia he was immersed in was effortlessly dripping out of his players. Closer Torpedo is Cope laid bare with just a church organ singing his most honest lyrics, Syd style. It's a skeletal masterpiece that predates the semi-bootlegs he'd drop in Probe by half a decade.  

The tragedy is that his label dropped him before he could even get the twelve inch of sole single Sunspots out. It's both epic and magical, with the strangest use of a tuba in the history of music. A bizarre choice for a seven inch single coz the best bit is the drawn out and omitted coda. Fortunately, it closes the first side of what we've now established to be his masterpiece.  

When he should've been further stripping back his pastoral psychedelia, he instead became immersed in the fame game and adding lots of unnecessary layers to his subsequent records and building that aforementioned bloody massive mike-stand. Thankfully, we got a couple of semi-bootlegs a few years later, created in stolen moments, and some lovely b-side cuts, but we got nothing as enigmatically beautiful as these first solo efforts. 

When I went to Wembley to witness Prince, I felt disappointed that I was simply one of many, many people. However, when I went to the Apollo to witness Copey that same year, I felt equally disappointed that I was one of so few. 

BEATS OF LOVE

88. Over You by Gold In The Shade

GOT TO thank Heels & Souls for this fourth release in their slow building canon of musical excellence. 

A long time want. I wasn't sure I was ever going to own a copy after it suddenly shot off my thirty quid radar. To now have it booming out of my speakers on another hot, sunny day feels really special. Credit to the label whose perseverance finally paid off after a lengthy wait with Sean P ripping and restoring it brilliantly.  

Arletta Davis joined North West London's TSR stable with her friend Sonia Johnson and sang backing vocals on their debut. However, producer and writer Robert Charles Roper told Test Pressing of his intention to swap the singers around for this sparser follow up single, before informing us that Sonia couldn't make the session. 

What we're left with is both a sensuous and highly convincing expression of strength. Love the spoken word. It soars above the more sugary deliveries that often define the genre, which explains its enduring popularity with long time acolytes of the scene and fresher ears alike.  

Sometimes records insist on staying on the left turntable for days on end. (Yes, I finally have my turntables up and running.) This is definitely one of them.