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Posts from the ‘Pop music’ Category

Oct 4

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Finding Lulu

Lulu was on a breakfast TV show the other day, talking about overcoming a drink problem that had its roots in her family background. She was engaging enough to make me want to read her newly published autobiography, If Only You Knew. Compiled with the help of a ghostwriter, Megan Lloyd Davies, it’s quite a surprise. Its 76 short chapters, plus prologue and epilogue, are not just extremely readable but full of interesting observations from a long career.

I was never a fan of her singing, but I’m a considerable fan of two of her songwriting efforts. They come from the opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. The first is “I Don’t Wanna Fight”, a hit for Tina Turner in 1993, a great pre-breakup song full of complex grown-up feelings — resignation, defiance — to which Tina could bring a sense of her own history. The second is “My Angel Is Here”, a track from Wynonna Judd’s 1996 album Revelations, a luminous love song of perfect simplicity.

Lulu didn’t write those songs alone. Her brother Billy Lawrie worked with her on both, with contributions from Steve DuBerry in the first case and Mark Stephen Cawley in the second. My guess is that, since she doesn’t play an instrument, her main contribution was to the lyrics. Anyway, they’re two of the best tracks of the ’90s, if you ask me.

What’s good about her book? Its candid descriptions of her Glasgow childhood, for a start, as Marie Lawrie, the oldest of four children of an alcoholic father; of her audition at Decca in 1963, when the power of her voice blew a microphone; of the resulting decision to move down to London, aged 14, with her band; of her experiences in the ’60s scene, when there the absence of a real division between “rock” and “pop” meant that Jimi Hendrix was a very memorable guest on her Saturday-night BBC TV show; of her short-lived involvement, musical and personal, with David Bowie in 1973. And of her inability to say no to the schemes dreamed up by her devoted manager, Marian Massey, who steered her resolutely towards light entertainment and mostly away from the stuff she wanted to sing, resulting in pantomime seasons and the Eurovision-winning “Boom Bang-a-Bang”, which she clearly detested.

For me, the most interesting section deals with her experiences with Atlantic Records, to whom she was signed by Jerry Wexler in 1970 and with whom she recorded two albums, New Routes and Melody Fair, at Muscle Shoals and Miami’s Criteria Studios respectively. She leaves no doubt about how much this meant to her, in terms of moving closer to the music she loved. Wexler choosing the songs, Arif Mardin doing the arrangements, Tom Dowd at the mixing desk, the Swampers and the Dixie Flyers laying down the tracks: it seemed like the answer to her prayers, a guaranteed escape from the middle of the road.

But it didn’t work out, and I was curious enough to listen to tracks from both albums to try and understand why. The song choices aren’t great, which is weird when you consider that Wexler would have had access to material from the finest country-soul writers of the time, people like Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham. But it’s a mish-mash. The real problem, however, is that although Lulu had her first hit with a raucous cover of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout”, she isn’t a soul singer. She’s a pop singer. For all her ability to add a rasp to her voice, she skates across the surface of the songs. It’s not hard to imagine Wexler concluded quite early on that he’d made a mistake. She wasn’t an Evie Sands or a Merrilee Rush, and this wasn’t going to be a repeat of Dusty in Memphis.

The book’s later episodes include a success with Richard Eyre’s Guys and Dolls, touring with Take That, guest-starring in Absolutely Fabulous, and a grim experience on Strictly Come Dancing. And gradually, coming in like layers of cloud, the drinking that took a grip as she went through middle age, finally taking her into six weeks of rehab in an American clinic at the age of 65.

Yes, it’s a bit showbizzy in places, because that’s partly who she is, but she’s honest about things like her two marriages, for instance, which both ended in divorce, and her looks (“some Botox and filler around my jaw, plus some kind of eye lift”). She also at pains not to bore us: she never dwells too long on anything, which keeps the narrative rolling along.

It’s not normally the sort of book I’d choose to spend time with, but I’m quite glad I did. I suppose I was most genuinely moved by the description of how, while still in her teens, she horrified her family and their neighbours by her appearance in a TV soap ad, speaking in a voice from which, after four years in London, all traces of Glasgow had been smoothed away. “I sounded as if I’d grown up somewhere between Cheltenham and Chelsea,” she writes. “The erasure of Marie Lawrie, on the outside at least, was complete.” But, as we discover, that was very much not the whole story.

* Lulu’s If Only You Knew is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Aug 7

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Aces high in Camden Town

On the first floor at the Hawley Arms, a pub in Camden Town, Ted Carroll is spinning the discs. He’s started the session with the Bobbettes’ “Mr Lee”, a record that changed his life when he bought an original copy on the London label. He’ll go on to play Bo Diddley’s “Bo Diddley”, Inez and Charlie Foxx’s “Mockingbird” and other choice stuff before resuming his conversations with guests at last night’s 50th birthday celebration for Ace Records, which he and his co-founders, Roger Armstrong and Trevor Churchill, turned into the most prolific and consistently rewarding of reissue labels.

I used to visit Ted’s stall at the back of 93 Golborne Road, up at the then-untrendy north end of Portobello Road, soon after he opened it in 1971 with a stock built around 1,800 London 45s from the ’50s and ’60s. The equivalent of New York’s Village Oldies and House of Oldies, it attracted a clientele of people — some of them famous — looking for rare old R&B, rock and roll and doo-wop vinyl. He added a stall in Soho later in the decade before opening the Rock On shop on Kentish Town Road, next door to Camden Town tube station, from where he also ran the Chiswick label.

Ace began with the acquisition of Johnny Vincent’s label of the same name, out of Jackson, Mississippi. That was the first of many such deals made with some of the great American post-war record men, including Art Rupe of Specialty, Hy Weiss of Old Town and the Bihari brothers of Modern, a species now extinct. Carroll, Armstrong and Churchill had set off on their mission of creating high-class reissues of neglected music, assembled with love, care, and thousands of hours spent in tape vaults across the US. Among later additions would be the Fantasy group of labels, which included Stax/Volt, thus enabling Armstrong, as he told me last night, to stumble open-mouthed upon the session tapes of “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay”.

Personally, I’m profoundly grateful to such compilers as Mick Patrick, Ady Croasdell, Tony Rounce, John Broven, Dean Rudland and Alec Palao for the enthusiasm and scholarship behind dozens of wonderful CDs devoted to stuff I care about. There’s the imaginatively programmed songwriters’ and producers’ series, covering the works of Goffin & King, Leiber & Stoller, Greenwich & Barry, Mann & Weil, Jackie DeShannon, Randy Newman, Laura Nyro, P. F. Sloan & Steve Barri, Bob Gaudio, Dan Penn & Spooner Oldham, Bert Berns, Jerry Ragovoy, and others. There’s the four-volume Sue story, put together by Rob Finnis, and the epic five discs of the late Dave Godin’s Deep Soul Treasures. There’s Ady Croasdell’s beautiful Lou Johnson anthology, his two-volume This Is Lowrider Soul, and his compilation of Doré label tracks called L. A. Soul Sides, including Rita and the Tiaras’ magical “Gone With the Wind Is My Love”. There’s Mick Patrick’s collection of Teddy Randazzo’s great productions and, going back to 1984, Where the Girls Are, his first compilation and one of many devoted to the beloved girl-group genre.

That’s just scratching the surface. And whether pop, blues, R&B, Northern Soul, funk, gospel or jazz, the packaging of Ace’s releases has always been exemplary, thanks to the informative and enjoyable annotations and picture research by the compilers, and to intelligent artwork by designers including Neil Dell, who worked on many of the CDs I’ve mentioned.

The label was sold a couple of years ago. Its new owners, a Swedish company called Cosmos Music, seem committed to continuing on the same path, with the same managers and contributors. A lot of them were at last night’s very convivial party, which started well for me when I walked in to the sound of Dean Rudland playing Oscar Brown Jr’s “Work Song” off a French EP, followed by Ray Charles giving the Raelettes’ Margie Hendrix her finest hour — well, 16 bars — on “You Are My Sunshine”.

Ted, who followed Dean on the decks, now runs a new incarnation of Rock On in the lovely market town of Stamford in Lincolnshire, just off the A1; a bit different from Camden Town — where, as I walked back to the tube, a trio called Thistle were trying to convince their audience that the ground-floor room of the Elephants Head pub was CBGB, this was 1975, and the next band on the bill would be the Patti Smith Group.

Fifty years ago Ted, Roger, Trevor and their helpers did a great thing by starting Ace. When a label introduces you to such gems as Margaret Mandolph’s ” I Wanna Make You Happy” (on Croasdell’s Tears in My Eyes compilation from 1985) and the Vogues’ “Magic Town” (on Glitter and Gold, the first of Patrick’s two Mann & Weil CDs), you can only raise a glass to the work they’ve done and thank them for the happiness it continues to bring.

Jun 29

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Brian Wilson meets his fans (1988)

On September 24, 1988, at the parish hall of Our Lady of the Visitation in Greenford, a West London suburb, Brian Wilson paid an unannounced visit to the annual convention of Beach Boys Stomp, a UK fanzine founded a decade earlier. This is a photograph I took that afternoon, unearthed while I was looking through some boxes of old stuff recently.

Brian was in London to promote his first solo album, with his notorious shrink, Eugene Landy, by his side. Somehow the convention’s organisers, Mike Grant and Roy Gudge, persuaded him to attend their event, overriding Landy’s objections, while managing to keep it a secret from the 325 attendees until the curtains parted on the small stage to reveal him seated at a Yamaha DX7 keyboard.

The pandemonium and applause lasted several minutes. Brian absorbed it all with equanimity before giving us solo performances of three songs. Two of them, “Love and Mercy” and “Night Time”, were from the new album. The first, though, was “Surfer Girl”. Yes, really. “Surfer Girl”. The song he’d written and recorded in 1963. Later he claimed it was actually his first attempt at songwriting. The Beach Boys’ first hit ballad, it reached the top 10 in the US and became the title track of their third album. Its doowop-influenced coda gave a clue to the riches of harmony singing to come, with a repeated question — “Do you love me, do you, surfer girl?” — that could much later be read as a hint of insecurities beneath the sunkissed surface.

His voice was a little unsteady to start with, but the falsetto was still in working order. “Thought we’d give you a little surprise today,” he said after that opening song. The other two were performed with increasing confidence and, in the case of “Night Time”, the encouragement of a steady 4/4 handclap from the audience.

The photo tells the rest of the story. Physically in decent shape, far removed from the heavily bearded 300lb creature he had been, Brian shook many hands before making his departure. In a troubled life, in that humble setting, it seemed like an unexpected but real moment of grace.

May 24

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Songs for summer days and nights

I first got to know Philippe Auclair, a Frenchman living in London since 1986, as someone who wrote about football in both French and English with rigour, authority and elegance. His biographies of two celebrated fellow exiles, Eric Cantona and Thierry Henry, are unlikely to be bettered. The elegance I mentioned is the quality he brings to his other career as a musician, using the alias Louis Philippe.

The latest album by Louis Philippe & the Night Mail, The Road to the Sea, is a beauty. I’ve always known of his love for Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, and that his past collaborators have included Sean O’Hagan of the High Lamas and Stuart Moxham of Young Marble Giants, which gives some idea of his orientation. So we have sunshine pop, chanson, a hint of the baroque (maybe with a nod to the Left Banke), and open ears in general, perhaps with a bit of Francis Lai and Paddy McAloon thrown in, but also with a strong enough personality to ensure freshness.

The strain of Beach Boys influence I get here is the period taking in Smiley Smile, Wild Honey and Friends, post-surf and mingling hippie serenity with a barely perceptible hint of unease. This isn’t retro music in any way — there are modern trimmings throughout, used sparingly — but Auclair’s carefully wrought arrangements sometimes throw in an unexpected tone or texture, like the sudden appearance of a Hammond organ on “Watching Your Sun Go Down”, a theremin effect on “All at Sea” and a melodica on “Always”.

Unfashionably, he writes chromatic melodies, like the shapely “Song for Paddy (Wings of Desire)”. Overall there’s a lightness of spirit that might represent the influence of Brazil, although perhaps I’m thinking that because I’m listening to “Where Did We Go Wrong”, which races along to a rapid samba rhythm.

His singing voice is calm and unaffected, sometimes rising effectively to the falsetto register; he could be the late Carl Wilson’s French penfriend. There are three songs in his native language, of which “Le Baiser” might well be the loveliest new song I’ll hear this year, with delicious, heartlifting background harmonies and an insouciant jazz piano playout. For sheer beauty, it’s almost matched by one of the English songs, “A Friend”.

The sun and the sea feature prominently in the lyrics, along with a feeling of life drifting along, as it can tend to do. As the days lengthen and June approaches, this is my album for summer days and summer nights.

* The Road to the Sea by Louis Philippe & the Night Train is released on the Tapete Records label: http://www.tapeterecords.com

Apr 24

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Everybody Loves a Train

About twenty years ago, my friend Charlie Gillett was compiling a series of themed CDs for a Polygram label called Debutante, under the aegis of the former Island A&R head Nick Stewart. Charlie asked me if I’d like to put one together, and if so, what the theme might be. “Trains,” I said, after about ten seconds’ thought, and then I went away to assemble a running order. It took a while, because I enjoyed the process so much.

Sadly, the series came to a sudden end before my contribution could see the light of day. But I’d edited together a disc of how I wanted it to go. I called it Everybody Loves a Train, after the song by Los Lobos. It has all sorts of songs, some of which speak to each other in ways that are obvious and not. I avoided the most obvious candidates, even when they perfectly expressed the feeling I was after (James Brown’s “Night Train” and Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia”) and instrumentals, too (see the footnote).

Every now and then I take it out and play it, as I did this week, with a sense of regret that it never reached fulfilment. Here it is, with a gentle warning: not all these trains are bound for glory. Remember, as Paul Simon observes, “Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance / Everybody thinks it’s true.”

  1. Unknown: “Calling Trains” (From Railroad Songs and Ballads, Rounder 1997) Forty-odd seconds of an unidentified former New Orleans station announcer, recorded at Parchman Farm, the Mississippi state penitentiary, in 1936, calling from memory the itinerary of the Illinois Central’s “Panama Limited” from New Orleans to Chicago: “…Ponchatoula, Hammond, Amite, Independence… Sardis, Memphis, Dyersburg, Fulton, Cairo, Carbondale…” American poetry.
  2. Rufus Thomas: “The Memphis Train” (Stax single, 1968) Co-written by Rufus with Mack Rice and Willie Sparks. Produced by Steve Cropper. Firebox stoked by Al Jackson Jr.
  3. Los Lobos: “Everybody Loves a Train” (from Colossal Head, 1996) “Steel whistle blowin’ a crazy sound / Jump on a car when she comes around.” Steve Berlin on baritone saxophone.
  4. Bob Dylan: “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” (from Highway 61 Revisited, 1965) “Don’t the brakeman look good, mama, flaggin’ down the Double E?”
  5. Joe Ely: “Boxcars” (from Honky Tonk Masquerade, 1978) A Butch Hancock song. Ponty Bone on accordion, Lloyd Maines on steel guitar.
  6. Counting Crows: “Ghost Train” (from August and Everything After, 1993) “She buys a ticket ’cause it’s cold where she comes from / She climbs aboard because she’s scared of getting older in the snow…”
  7. Rickie Lee Jones: “Night Train” (from Rickie Lee Jones, 1979) It was a plane she took from Chicago to LA to begin her new life in 1969, and an old yellow Chevy Vega she was driving before she cashed the 50K advance from Warner Bros ten years later. But, you know, trains.
  8. The Count Bishops: “Train, Train” (Chiswick 45, 1976) London rockabilly/pub rock/proto-punk. Written by guitarist/singer Xenon De Fleur, who died a couple of years later in a car crash, aged 28, on his way home from a gig at the Nashville Rooms. Note that comma. I like a punctuated title.
  9. Julien Clerc: “Le prochain train” (from Julien, 1997) My favourite modern chansonnier. Lyric by Laurent Chalumeau.
  10. Blind Willie McTell: “Broke Down Engine Blues” (Vocalion 78, 1931) Born blind in one eye, lost the sight in the other in childhood. Maybe he saw trains in time to carry their image with him as he travelled around Georgia with his 12-string guitar.
  11. Laura Nyro: “Been on a Train” (from Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, 1970) One song she didn’t do live, as far as I can tell. Too raw, probably.
  12. Chuck Berry: “The Downbound Train” (Chess B-side, 1956) When George Thorogood covered this song, he renamed it “Hellbound Train”. He didn’t need to do that. Chuck had already got there.
  13. Bruce Springsteen: “Downbound Train” (from Born in the USA, 1984) “The room was dark, the bed was empty / Then I heard that long whistle whine…”
  14. Dillard & Clark: “Train Leaves Here This Morning” (from The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark, 1968) Written by Gene Clark and Bernie Leadon: “1320 North Columbus was the address that I’d written on my sleeve / I don’t know just what she wanted, might have been that it was getting time to leave…”
  15. Little Feat: “Two Trains” (from Dixie Chicken, 1973) In which Lowell George extends the metaphor of Muddy Waters’ “Still a Fool (Two Trains Running)”: “Two trains runnin’ on that line / One train’s for me and the other’s a friend of mine…”
  16. B. B. King: “Hold That Train” (45, 1961) “Oh don’t stop this train, conductor, ’til Mississippi is out of sight / Well, I’m going to California, where I know my baby will treat me right”
  17. Paul Simon: “Train in the Distance” (from Hearts and Bones, 1983) Richard Tee on Fender Rhodes. “What is the point of this story? / What information pertains? / The thought that life could be better / Is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains.”
  18. Vince Gill: “Jenny Dreams of Trains” (from High Lonesome Sound, 1996) Written by Gill with Guy Clark. Fiddle solo by Jeff Guernsey. Find me something more beautiful than this, if you can.
  19. Muddy Waters: “All Aboard” (Chess B-side, 1956) Duelling harmonicas: James Cotton on train whistle effects, Little Walter on chromatic.
  20. Darden Smith: “Midnight Train” (from Trouble No More, 1990) “And the years go by like the smoke and cinders, disappear from where they came…”
  21. The Blue Nile: “From a Late Night Train” (from Hats, 1989) For Paul Buchanan, the compartment becomes a confessional.
  22. Tom Waits: “Downtown Train” (from Rain Dogs, 1985) “All my dreams, they fall like rain / Oh baby, on a downtown train.” A New York song.

Closing music: Pat Metheny’s “Last Train Home” (from Still Life (Talking), 1987) to accompany the photo of the Birmingham Special crossing Bridge No 201 near Radford, Virginia in 1957 — taken, of course, by the great O. Winston Link. Other appropriate instrumentals: Booker T & the MGs’ “Big Train” (from Soul Dressing, 1962, a barely rewritten “My Babe”) and Big John Patton’s “The Silver Meter Pts 1 & 2” (Blue Note 45, 1963, a tune by the drummer Ben Dixon whose title is a misspelling of the Silver Meteor, a sleeper service running from New York to Miami).

Mar 7

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The Pauline Boty film

The restoration of the painter Pauline Boty to her rightful place in the pantheon of British pop art took a further step this week with the screening of an hour-long biographical documentary on BBC4. I enjoyed Pauline Boty: I Am the Sixties, despite its rather silly title, which it didn’t really attempt to justify, although the programme was certainly suffused with aspects of the spirit of that decade.

It justified the increased attention Boty been receiving in recent years, and the producer, Vinny Rawding, and the director, Lee Cogswell, deserve credit for their persistence in getting it made. If the inclusion of so many talking heads sometimes makes it feel rather old-fashioned, they do take a chance on inserting, between the clips of Boty from various sources and the testimony from talking heads, a handful of sequences of an actress (Hannah Morrish) resembling Boty, overlaid by passages from an imagined memoir written by Rawding. Perhaps devised as a solution to cost and copyright problems, it just about comes off.

Some of the talking heads are not worth their space. Among the exceptions is the artist Derek Boshier, who appeared with Boty, his fellow student at the Royal Academy, in Pop Goes the Easel, the film made by Ken Russell for the BBC’s Monitor series in 1962. Boshier, who died last year, says something interesting about the culture from which they sprang: “The ideal art college should be one where all departments integrate.” That was certainly the case at the English art college where some of my friends went in the early ’60s: Students of fine art, photography and fashion all took part in each other’s projects.

It was to Boshier that I turned, a few months before his death, when I found myself wondering about Boty’s taste in music. Apparently she listened to music while she painted. What could it have been?

In Pop Goes the Easel, she and Boshier are seen doing the Twist at a party to the record of “Twist Around the Clock” by Clay Cole and the Capris. In another scene the pair, with their fellow students Peter Blake and Peter Phillips, are seen walking through a street market to the Chicago doo-wop of Gene Chandler’s “Duke of Earl”. I got a mutual friend to ask Boshier what Boty might have been playing on the Dansette while she worked. Sadly, he couldn’t remember.

Boty died in 1966, aged 28, so maybe she’d have liked the Beatles and the Stones and the Yardbirds. She’d danced at the very first edition of Ready Steady Go! in 1963 — presumably not, by then, still doing the Twist — and made a painting called 5-4-3-2-1, after the Manfred Mann signature tune.

She also met Bob Dylan, thanks to her relationship with the film-maker Peter Saville. In 1962 Saville directed Evan Jones’s play Madhouse on Castle Street for the BBC, casting the unknown Dylan as “Bobby”. This was Dylan’s first trip abroad, and according to Marc Kristal’s very good Boty biography, the couple picked him up at London Airport.

I imagine her liking Dusty Springfield and the Walker Brothers. But the pop references in her paintings generally came from a different vector: Marilyn Monroe, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Monica Vitti and — in her portrait of her friend Celia Birtwell — Elvis and the Everlys. Other figures were drawn from outside the world of the arts, such as Christine Keeler and Fidel Castro.

In 1964-65 Boty painted a diptych titled “It’s a Man’s World I and II”. Where the first panel has images of masculinity (Muhammad Ali, El Cordobes, a B52 bomber, the dying JFK, Elvis, Ringo and Lennon, Einstein, Proust), the second depicts what Boty sees as going on inside men’s heads: images of naked young women in sexualised poses. At the centre is the dominant image of a full frontal nude, cut off above the shoulders and below the knee.

Caroline Coon, one of the film’s talking heads, hints at a greater significance behind this woman’s lack of a face, and therefore of an individual identity. But later on the film also includes a brief clip from a film called The Day of Ragnarok, a nuclear-scare drama written and directed by John McGrath for BBC2 in 1965, in which Boty made one of her appearances as an actress. It shows her in her studio, working on “It’s a Man’s World II”. At that stage, as can be seen in the screen-grab above, the figure originally had a head, which must later have been painted over. Nobody comments on this in the film, but it’s an interesting decision for the artist to have made.

Inevitably Boty’s career was affected by the attitudes of the time, particularly the assumption that, as a woman, her work couldn’t possess a significance equal to that of her male contemporaries. Perhaps that prejudice lay behind her decision to diversify into modelling and acting (there’s a brief scene in Alfie with Michael Caine). If her looks and her exuberance were attracting more attention than her art, then why not exploit the opportunities?

We’ll never know what might have happened had her progress to a full career in painting not been affected by passive (and perhaps active) obstruction. Nor what she might have done had she not, while pregnant and in what seems to have been a good marriage to the literary agent Clive Goodwin, been told that she had cancer. She declined treatment rather than risk damage to the unborn baby. Four and a half months after giving birth to a daughter, she died. Her renaissance continues.

* Pauline Boty: I Am the Sixties is on BBC iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0028nyw

Feb 2

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Laura Nyro: a woman in full

If you don’t own much of Laura Nyro’s music and have a couple of hundred quid to spare, a newly released 19-CD set of her complete studio and almost complete live recordings titled Hear My Song would be a good investment. All the 10 studio albums are there, from 1967’s More Than a New Discovery to the posthumously released Angel in the Dark, plus the official live albums — Spread Your Wings and Fly (1971), Season of Lights (1977) and The Loom’s Desire (1993-94) — and two live performances from a San Francisco hotel in 1994.

For me, though, there’s one thing missing: a double album called Laura, subtitled Laura Nyro Live at the Bottom Line. Recorded during a tour in 1988, her first in 10 years, it was released the following year on the independent Cypress label after the A&R department at Columbia Records, her home since 1968, indicated that they didn’t want her next album to be a live recording and gave her permission to make a one-off deal with another company.

For the tour she put together a small band with Jimmy Vivino on guitar, David Wofford on bass guitar, Frank Pagano on drums, Nydia Mata on percussion and Diane Wilson on harmony vocals. It’s not the kind of virtuoso-level team with which she toured in 1976 and whose work with her was preserved on Season of Lights — guitarist John Tropea, double-bassist Richard Davis, Mike Mainieri on vibes, Andy Newmark on drums — but it’s a much better fit with her music and recorded with much greater warmth, richer textures and sense of space. Laura’s own performance is much more mature and confident.

The whole lengthy set is very fine, but the one thing I wouldn’t be without is a song called “Companion”, of which this seems to be the only recording. It begins with the drummer ticking off the time and a heart-melting guitar-and-bass lick that leads into a slow 12/8 blues ballad. It’s the fourth song in, and Laura addresses the crowd in the Greenwich Village club: “Well, now that you’re finally my captive audience, I’m going to force these new songs on you…”

Then she sings. “I don’t want to marry / I don’t want your money / But love’s come our way / Just a warm companion is what I want, honey…” The melody as simple and gorgeous as the lyric: “Life is complicated / Funny, love can be that way / When just a warm companion is what I want, honey / A very special trust / A very special lust…” There’s a short bridge passage (“Walk inside the rain / Laughter in the dark…”) that goes out of tempo, then the guitar-and-bass lick returns and the band riffs quietly as she introduces them, one by one, before three part harmony (Nyro/Wilson/Pagano) gently takes it out.

There nothing here of the wild originality she brought to Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and New York Tendaberry when she was in her very early twenties. She’s a different person, no longer sitting on a fire escape above a New York street. Her life has changed. She’s been through a marriage. She’s living in Amherst, Massachusetts with a female partner, the painter Maria Desiderio. She’s a radical feminist campaigning for women’s rights, Native American rights, animal rights. She’s a mother, bringing up a son, Gil. But as different as the songs may be, the voice is still hers, with all the poetry it contains.

Some people criticised her later studio albums — Smile, Nested, Mother’s Spiritual, Walk the Dog & Light the Light — for lacking the fire of her early music. That’s like accusing her of growing up. We’re lucky to have all of it. And for me, alongside “Wedding Bell Blues” and “Emmie” and “Been on a Train” and “When I was a Freeport and You Were the Main Drag”, there’s “Companion”, the expression of a woman no less powerfully connected with her deepest feelings but now finding peace.

Maria Desiderio was with Laura when she died in April 1997 of ovarian cancer, the disease that had killed her mother, her maternal grandmother, and her maternal great-aunt. She was 49 years old. It’s a great thing to know that, around the world, people are still listening to her voice and her songs with admiration and love.

* The Hear My Song box is released on the Madfish label. Live at the Bottom Line is out of print in both vinyl and single-CD formats. The photograph is by David Bianchini, to whom Laura Nyro was married in the early ’70s, and is taken from the booklet accompanying The Loom’s Desire.

Nov 28

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Andy Paley 1951-2024

The first time I heard Andy Paley’s name was when my New York friends Richard and Lisa Robinson gave me a copy of the first album by a group called the Sidewinders in 1972. It had been produced by their friend — soon to be mine, too — Lenny Kaye. It was on RCA, where Richard had taken a job as an A&R man.

“Listen to the song called ‘Rendezvous’,” Lisa and Richard told me. I did. I loved it. A sweet slice of early power-pop, inspired by the girl groups of the ’60s. Easy to imagine with a full Wall of Sound production and a Darlene Love vocal. It sounded like a hit, but it wasn’t. Anyway, it’s still in my head today.

A year or so later, Andy came to see me at Island Records in Hammersmith, where I was in A&R. It was just a social call, but he left me with two things: an impression of the charming, very handsome young man he was, and a C60 cassette on which he’d put some of his favourite stuff, as a gift.

I’ve still got it somewhere, but the track that I had to get on vinyl became one of my all-time three favourite girl-group records: the Inspirations’ “What Am I Gonna Do With You (Hey Baby)”, written by Russ Titelman and Gerry Goffin. (And don’t tell me that the Chiffons’ version was better, or the Fleetwoods’, or Skeeter Davis’s, or Lesley Gore’s, or even Carole King’s lovely demo, because you’re wrong.)

The Sidewinders didn’t happen, and Andy just missed being a teenbopper sensation with his brother Jonathan in the Paley Brothers, but he went on to do lots of things in the music business, including working with Jonathan Richman and writing songs for Jerry Lee Lewis and Madonna. But probably the most important contribution he made was to Brian Wilson’s return to action in 1988. Andy and Brian became close, and together they wrote and co-produced some of the songs on the comeback album (Brian Wilson, Sire Records). You can hear the pop sensibility they shared on “Meet Me in My Dreams Tonight” and “Night Time”.

Andy died of cancer last week at his home in Vermont. He was 73. Lenny went up to see him in the last hours. Andy wasn’t conscious, but Lenny sang to him. Among the songs he sang was “Rendezvous”.

* The photo of Andy Paley was taken at CBGB in 1977. I’m afraid I’m unable to credit the photographer.

Jun 25

A Soho creative

Tot Taylor has an interesting history. Back in the mid-’80s, from an office near Oxford Circus, his Compact Organisation threatened to become to the London pop scene what Brooklyn’s Daptone outfit would be to R&B in the next century: a clever, occasionally brilliant re-imagining of past euphoria, creating music that could sometimes rival the sounds from which it took its inspiration. Compact’s founders, Tot Taylor and Paul Kinder, released records by Mari Wilson, Virna Lindt and Cynthia Scott that recalled the great days of the ’60s girl groups, while “The Beautiful Americans”, the sole 45 released by a non-existent group called the Beautiful Americans, evoked the early Walker Brothers in their semi-operatic prime.

Then Taylor and Kinder went their separate ways, the former diversifying his career. He composed music for film, TV and theatre (including the eight-hour Picasso’s Women for the National Theatre). From 2004-19 he co-ran a cutting-edge Soho art gallery called Riflemaker (after the business that had once occupied the premises on Beak Street). And in 2017 he published a 900-page novel titled The Story of John Nightly, a kind of Carnaby Street War and Peace, set amid the Swinging London music scene, its protagonist a pop star called “the most beautiful man in England” by the Sunday Times. And then he started making records again.

A confession: although I was sent an early proof copy of The Story of John Nightly, I haven’t read it properly. But I extracted it from the unread pile the other day. The reason is that I’ve been listening to his last two albums, Frisbee (2021) and Studio Sounds (2023), and falling for them to the extent that I’ve started thinking that if a bloke capable of this music has written a novel, it’s probably going to be worth reading.

Taylor makes records with a (sometimes deceptive) air of light-hearted whimsy and a deft, flexible craftsmanship that seem to have disappeared from contemporary pop music, overwhelmed by the prevailing modes of communal ecstasy and personal trauma. Crudely, you could place what he does somewhere between the Beatles of 1965-66 and the Beach Boys of Sunflower, maybe the last evolutionary step in songwriting terms before the art-rock of Kevin Ayers and Syd Barrett, but nothing he does sounds dated.

Every song has to have its own subject, shape and mood, just like a Beatles album. The humour is wry, never far away in things like “This Boy’s Hair” and “Vanity Flares”, both from the new album, on which he sings in his light, pleasant voice while playing pretty much everything except for drums (Shawn Lee), some of the guitars (Paul Cuddeford and Lewis Durham) and harp (Alina Brhezhinska).

Studio Sounds is a very good album, but the earlier Frisbee is, I think, the classic. The opener came about when the Guardian asked him to write a song for National Music Day, which is what the song is called. “Fortune’s Child” is a great slice of power pop. “Do It the Hard Way” opens with the sort of quatrain you don’t find much in a pop lyric any more (except maybe from Taylor Swift): “I drive my car up a one-way street / Dirty looks from everyone I meet / I ask the Lord my soul to keep / No reply — must be asleep.” Then there’s something called “Yoko, Oh”: a homage to John Lennon in the form of a gentle, loving pastiche of the ex-Beatles at his most blissed-out. Titles like “The Action-Painting Blues”, “Baby, I Miss the Internet” and “Sunset Sound” suggest the breadth of the topics that get him writing. A song called “This New Abba Record” lives up to its title.

The eight-minute “American Baby (Two-Part Invention in C)” is the one to which I keep returning, hooked by a minor-key electric piano riff that finds the ground between the Zombies’ “She’s Not There” and the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm”, achieving a momentum almost as subtly relentless as Steely Dan’s “Do It Again”. As a song, there’s not much to it. But you could say that about many of the greatest pop records. And the potency of the groove somehow turns the blankness of its lyric into something mysterious and compelling.

* Tot Taylor’s Frisbee and Studio Sounds are on the Campus label. The photograph of Taylor is from the sleeve of Studio Sounds. The Story of John Nightly is published by Unbound.

Jun 11

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Mod dreams

Q: Were there ways of walking?

A: Yeh. You walked speed-wise which is you put your hands in your mod jacket, in your Tonik jacket, which had three-inch lapels and a seven-inch centre vent, and breast pleats to give it enough tuck. It was a very solid cloth, a very heavy cloth, so you’d tuck your hands in there and you’d have flaps on the pockets. You’d have your jeans turned up and you’d have Hush Puppies with a pair of white socks. You’d be walking with three other friends up Great Windmill Street or Wardour Street at five or six in the morning just as light is coming up. Your head is bent against the wind, you’ve got your head down…

That’s Peter Meaden talking, interviewed by the writer Steve Turner in 1975, three years before he died at the age of 36, felled by barbiturates and vodka in his parents’ house in North London, where he had dreamed his mod dreams many years earlier, finding the Who and turning them from the Detours into the High Numbers — turned them into mods, getting them the French crop haircuts and the correct clothes, and writing the words for their first single — before accepting £500 to hand over their management to Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp.

Meaden was one of those people, like Guy Stevens, Andrew Oldham and Tony Hall, who shaped the London music scene in those vital years between 1963 and 1965. He deserves a book of his own, and now he has it. Steve Turner’s King Mod is his story, in all its slender, obsessive, doomed glory.

Once asked to define modism, Meaden came up with a much repeated phrase: “Clean living in difficult circumstances.” He provides another version here: “Mod is another aphorism for precision in life.” Romantic nonsense, of course. But part of the legend.

“Modism was my dream,” Meaden says in the unedited transcript of the interview that constitutes the second half of the book, after Turner has taken us through a relatively conventional narrative. Meaden’s words are rambling, repetitive, sometimes inaccurately recalled, the strange and touching testimony of a man who had a dream and saw it come more or less true but lacked, as Turner says, the business acumen and ruthlessness to profit from his vision as others did.

Stevens, who played records from his collection of red-hot R&B obscurities at the Scene Club in Ham Yard, just off Great Windmill Street, and had the 45s from which Meaden borrowed the music for his High Numbers songs, went on to involvement with Island Records, Spooky Tooth, Mott the Hoople, Free and the Clash. Oldham, who had partnered Meaden in a short-lived PR company, managed the Stones until they were taken from him, and created the Immediate label. Hall was one of the great promotion men of the British music business, a cool cat who moved smooth from the bebop ’50s to whatever came next, and who once threw Meaden out of a reception for Ben E. King with the words, “You’re a pilled-up mod!”

Which Meaden certainly was, as he goes to some lengths to explain in his descriptions of the virtues of Drinamyl — “good old Purple Hearts” — particularly when mixed, as was his preference, with cider. “It was bliss. Cocaine they say is bliss these days but it’s not bliss like a bit of speed in you, a couple of pints of cider maybe, down there bopping round from Friday night through until Sunday morning. Say no more!” One of the things he liked about Drinamyl was that it suppressed the libido. “You no longer have to worry about pulling a chick and making it because that’s what you feel the world made you for.” With girls out of the picture, there would be more time for the purer pursuits of choosing the right shirt at Austin’s on Shaftesbury Avenue or the right boots from Anello and Davide on Charing Cross Road.

Then acid arrived on the scene, and the picture — once so sharp and precise — started to go fuzzy. Some, like Townshend, who gave Meaden his first trip, could cope. Meaden was one who couldn’t, spending chunks of the years before his death in psychiatric care, as much of a casualty as Nick Drake or Syd Barrett.

It’s a curious book. More meticulous editing would have removed a plethora of irritating misspellings and inconsistencies: Kingley Street, vocal chords, Petula Clarke, Roger Daltry and Rick Gunnell are just a few of them, while a Miracles song that the High Numbers covered appears on the same page as “You Gotta Dance to Keep from Crying” (in the text) and “I Gotta Dance to Keep from Crying” (in a caption). And there is the increasingly common habit, infuriating to me, habit of capitalising the definite article in references to The Who, The Beach Boys, The Goldhawk Social Club, and so on.

But it’s clearly a labour of love by an author whose previous works have dealt with the Beatles, U2, Marvin Gaye, Johnny Cash, Van Morrison and religion in rock, and it’s very well illustrated. For anyone to whom the all too short era of modism — to use Meaden’s term — was something precious, its historical value in unquestionable.

* Steve Turner’s King Mod: The Story of Peter Meaden, the Who, and the Birth of a British Subculture is published by Red Planet Books (£25).

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