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As Groovy As You Can Get
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It seems like a lifetime
ago already, but just the other week I was in Brighton, walking the shingle
in a warming morning sun. I’d been in town to see Brakes and Chris T-T
play a storming home-coming show that left me short of breath and full
of a re-kindled faith in the power of music to uplift and inspire. And
whilst Brakes were brilliantly ebullient, feisty and made me unashamed
to whisper to myself that they are the best damn rock’n’roll band in
the world (and they ARE, oh you better believe they ARE), it was Chris
T-T with his songs of love and hate that really hit me squarely in the
chest and left my heart pounding with a blood as red as the songs he
was singing from his new album. Now I’ve mentioned
already what a fine record 9
Red Songs is, so let me here tell you how imperative it is that you track
down his other offerings and acquaint yourself with one of the finest songwriters
of our current generation. Now for anyone, like me, expecting more of the same
intelligent and witty acoustic folk protestation, the London
Is Sinking and The 253 sets might come as something of a surprise,
for they are filled with naturally strange twists and turns. There are quirky
atmospheric electronics, full blown horny Pop masterpieces and stripped pure
moments of tenderness. There are songs about Tony Robinson and about London Bridge
falling down; songs about heartbreaks and headaches, beer and sellotape. Haircuts
and hedgehogs, The English Earth and Dawson’s
Creek. And if occasionally Chris can sound a tad too close to Damon Alburn
for comfort, at least the similarity is to the Blur of Modern
Life Is Rubbish (to my mind their one glorious, unsurpassed moment), and
more often he recalls no less than the great Hank Starr of the sublime Animals
That Swim. So perhaps it’s no great surprise that these records are on the same
Snowstorm label that resurrected Hank’s
group with their wonderful Happiness
From A Distant Star set and that then gave us their peerless Faded Glamour retrospective.
And like Hank Starr, Chris T-T is a wonderfully perceptive and observant documentarian
of life’s little details. His songs are kitchen sink vignettes of suburban culture
and of country boy in the city ennui. They are also more often than not very,
very funny. Do yourself a favour and check him out. |
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This week, on the other
hand has been considerably cooler. The winds have howled around the eaves
of the Geek Lair, and the rain has pummelled the windows. We’ve been
forced to
switch on the heating in the evenings, and we’ve been hunching and huddling in
our sweaters. ‘Winter’, one of us will say, prompting a reply of ‘it’s all in
the mind’. To which the other cuts back with ‘I wish…’ We’ve been playing this
game for as long as we have known each other, which is a long time. Almost as
long in fact as the song we’re referencing is old.
Now I always loved The Loft. I thought their scratchy melodious dynamic was refreshingly
and intensely infectious. I used to stick those early Creation singles on the
record player and play them endlessly. They made me smile in days and nights
of darkness. Not that I really knew about them when they were at their prime,
or even still in existence. No, the first I knew about The Loft was hearing the
afore-referenced ‘Winter’ on the Wild
Summer Wow! collection that I picked up from the old Argyle Street Virgin
store. And I bought that because I couldn’t get the Different
For Domeheads album, which I read about in a copy of (I think) ZigZag which
I bought the day after seeing The Weather Prophets play ‘I Almost Prayed’ on
what was I think their first TV appearance on Whistle
Test. Looking back now I can pinpoint that as one of the key moments that
really turned my life on its head and pointed me in fabulous new directions.
So strange as it seems now, I owe Pete Astor a lot.
In the space of a week I had got my hands on the Domeheads set and had
found a copy of Alive
In The Living Room. I was scratched and startled. So many great sounds,
so many inspirational moments. It was truly one of the most cathartic periods
in my life, when I felt the scales of childhood and a largely (literally) wasted
adolescence fall away from my eyes and my mind became opened to all kinds of
strange new possibilities. And those precious few songs by The Loft were crucial. |
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After twenty years it
can often be painful and embarrassing to listen again to the things that
once inspired you. Often you wonder just what it was that you thought
so special. Not so with The Loft. In fact listening to their Magpie
Eyes retrospective just makes them seem even more valuable. These
recordings remain every bit as sparkling and seductive, as poetically
pugilistic as they ever did. For the Loft were capable of juggling those
elemental joys of energy, melody and sparse finesse like so few others
before or since. The evidence is of course there in those classic singles,
and for sure the whirling dervishes
of ‘Up The Hill And Down The Slope’ take some beating. But for me the real delights
are in the brittle McCarthy-esque shimmer of the session recordings of ‘On A
Tuesday’ and the Felt-ist ‘The Canal And The Big Red Town’, or in the live cuts
like ‘Wide Open Arms’ which show just what a fascinatingly scratchy and rhythmic
band The Loft could be. And of course that gorgeous cover of Richard Hell’s beautiful ‘Time’ was
as perfect a nod of reference as anyone could ask for; evidence that really The
Loft were as much a continuation of a lineage leading from the Blank
Generation and The Feelies as they were from the Postcard Sound of Young
Scotland. For at their best, The Loft had crazy rhythms and were as groovy as
you could get. |
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The June Brides were groovy too, and the proof is
there for all hear on the comprehensive
double CD Every
Conversation set. Now Cherry Red in one way or another really are making
some sterling salvage efforts, and this really is as good as it gets. John
Carney is right of course when he says that you have to applaud the way those
guitars clang, and the way those horns pierce and parp is both gloriously atonal
and textural and strangely harmonious and soothing all at once. Listening to
these records again some twenty years after the fact, this is what strikes me
most: they are so much more quietly complex and strikingly, stridently clamorous
than ever I suspected at the time.
John Carney is right too when he says that The June Brides were a great soul
group, and that a generation missed a trick when they failed to project their
most precious and creative souls into the Pop market place. Somehow an opportunity
was missed, and sadly the eventual crossovers between what had been the underground
and the mass market became those which were so much more obviously Rock orientated.
If only they could have put into practice the tricks of the 60’s LA groups that William Crain has written about, things might have been so different. But as people keep saying, Context Is Everything, and Camden is not in So Cal and the UK of the ‘80s
was a place of absolutes and everyone had a side to take; a side of a line to
stand. And that context, as much as anything else, is the reason that these June
Brides songs are so vibrant and barbed, so joyously celebratory and so viciously
damning all at once. ©
2005 Alistair Fitchett
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