Two Albums and Absent Friends

This month, I want to talk to you about two LPs, one of which I think was a high point of its epoch. The second was probably less influential but it means a lot to me because it loomed large in a specific period in my life.

The first record I want to drone on about is Sheet Music, released in 1974 by 10cc. The albums that people remember from that time tend to be the blockbusters, like Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and Band on the Run, by Wings. However, around that time, when I was a first year student, these didn’t do much for me. On the other hand, Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, by Little Feat, and Sheet Music knocked my socks off.

I might bang on about the Little Feat album another time, but for now, let’s get back to 10cc. The track from Sheet Music that everyone remembers is the big hit single, Wall Street Shuffle. It is a brilliant single, but the album contains other treasures, perhaps more mysterious, and certainly for me, more powerful. Also, it has the same audacity as the books of Muriel Spark, Berenice Rubens and Beryl Bainbridge: nothing is off limits. Bugger taste. Bugger convention.

The songs Hotel and Oh Effendi have lyrics which I won’t repeat as I might get cancelled for it. Instead, here are the YouTube links to them:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RV60eLOA2Y&list=RDfskOCTLwaCA&index=2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYmGqJ7ugbQ&list=RDfskOCTLwaCA&index=3

Although these songs contain wording which might be considered racist, they make points about economic and cultural imperialism which are if anything more relevant now than in the 1970’s. And actually, it seems to me that the impeccable style somehow neutralises any offence. It reminds me that when one thinks of TV comedy of the 1970’s, the material of The Two Ronnies was often just as smutty as that of Benny Hill, but because of their lightness of touch, The Two Ronnies got away with it. Also, have a listen to Hotel again. How beautifully crafted and multilayered it is.

The album also contains Clockwork Creep, a horribly prescient number about a bomb on an aircraft (again, nothing is off limits). Another track is the brilliant The Sacro-Iliac. I’m not entirely sure what this is about, but I feel it speaks to me as an anthem for the person who feels too self-conscious to dance. The only sort of dancing I can tolerate is at a Ceilidh where there is a caller telling you what to do. All that scampering about, making it up as you go along, just makes me look and feel like a prize pillock.

But in fact, I was then and still am now unsure about what the songs are about and I don’t care. The attraction of the album is its imagination and exuberance. The vitality jumps off the vinyl (or nowadays off the computer) and bites you in the backside.

                                                          ************************

The other LP I want to talk about is Foreign Affairs, by Tom Waits, the master of the musical equivalent of film noir. At the risk of repeating myself, I went out to work in Singapore in 1985. I think my pal Kevin Connelly had recently given me a copy of William Boyd’s book An Ice Cream War, set in the East Africa campaigns of the first world war, and it had given me the urge to travel. I don’t think Kevin realises how much influence he has inadvertently had on my life.

This was the epoch of the cassette tape and among other listening material I bought a pirate copy of Foreign Affairs. This album had a mixed reception, with some Waits fans finding it too filmic, perhaps too intricate. The songs are all exquisitely crafted, and with the melodramatic Potter’s Field and Burma Shave, the story of doomed low-life lovers killed in a car accident, it certainly demonstrated his supreme expertise at translating the film noir ethos to song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUPD5d9DuFM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGeIusN-avE

Burma Shave was a brand of shaving cream which advertised on boards by US highways in the mid-twentieth century. The adverts often had a sequential narrative, which the traveller would assimilate as he or she went along. Waits mythologises Burma Shave as a place, the destination of the lovers, which they never reach, accompanying the story with a beautiful, haunting melody.

The track list contains a number of curiosities, including a Hollywood-style duet with Bette Midler, I Never Talk to Strangers, the instrumental Cinny’s Waltz, and the song Foreign Affair, again very meticulously crafted, the lyric reminiscent of Cole Porter. Perhaps the wide variation in styles was what some afficionados found off-putting. But I should admit that another reason I went out to Singapore was to forget what just about amounted to a broken heart, like Laurel and Hardy joining the French Foreign Legion in The Flying Deuces. As a consequence, the numbers which resonated most with me were the poignant ballads Muriel and A Sight for Sore Eyes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JGvFo9UyI4

I would bawl along with them in sentimental fashion with tears of pure Anchor Beer tumbling down my cheeks.

It has been nice listening to these songs again after all those years, and remembering when I was a young fellow in a Singapore which no longer exists, when the Warehouse District still had warehouses rather than skyscraper hotels, and when there were still some wooden houses on stilts at Pasir Panjang.

                                                          ******************************

In the last few months, three friends have sadly departed this life. There was John Ettling, stalwart of the hash and great harmonica player, who died last month. Our neighbour Morag, mentioned in a previous blog, went at Christmas. And last summer, my old Pal Neil Emberson died up in Peterborough. The last reminds me of the year 2000. On New Year’s Day, Linda resolved to do the Great North Run that year, and I resolved to do the London to Cambridge bike ride. Linda, recently recovered from a serious illness and an inspiration to us all, fulfilled her resolution. I did the bike ride as promised, in the company of Neil Emberson, and Dave ‘Mad Dog’ Henderson.

There were several hundred cyclists, and we had to board buses to take us down to London at six on the Sunday morning. Our bicycles were loaded into trucks so that they were ready for us starting off in North-East London. Dave and I were dressed in our usual clothes. From the waist up, Neil was sporting his usual leather jacket, but below he was wearing these shorts that looked like those worn by Wee Jimmy Krankie.

There were a few minutes left before departure, so Neil got off the bus for a last health-giving cigarette. Peering out of the bus window at Neil lighting up, looking like Jimmy Clitheroe with a leather jacket on, Dog said to me, ‘Look at that. The picture of health and athleticism.’

 

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