Glad To See Y'Back Again?

Or, as the back of the BBC Radio Sessions case has it, "Glod To See Y'Back Again?", reflecting all of the care and attention going into ex-label Mercury's Bluetones repackaging.

To be fair, that question mark is there for a reason, and this is a song that doesn't sound at all glad of anything. Frustration is the dominant emotion, with a side order of depressed resignation, and so in one of the Tones' cleverer early breaks with traditional structure they chase their own tail round a series of progressively small and disaffected circles. They stick to the same basic groove all the way through, but just flexibily and ponderously enough that when they pause on the verge of another return, you feel like this time they might just escape. The lyrics flag up the same dissatisfied inertia, wryly commenting 'hello again' and 'here we go again' at new turns.

Then about two thirds of the way through the escape finally does happen, when the loosely circular structure is broken with barely a teasing pause to herald it, in favour of a mini, Talking To Clarry style psychadelic guitar blowout. It's a bit of an awkward conclusion to a song whose contained nature is its main strength.

Move Closer

Thanks largely to their prolific way with B-sides and recent lack of associated quality control, there are a few songs in The Bluetones' discography that are painful on repeat listens. Only their Phyllis Nelson cover "Move Closer" is painful the first time. There's not much wrong with such a cover in theory - it could easily have turned out at least as well as "Woman In Love", with for my money much better starting material. The final results, though, are as despicable as they are inexplicable.

The basic crimes are threefold:

• Inferior, watery rendition of original backing track.
• Copius fake crowd noises. Yikes.
• Artificially slowed down, Barry White impression vocals.

Actually, you might as well just take the last one. They're that mind-bogglingly, skin-crawlingly horrible. I don't even want to make it through the whole song for the purposes of this entry. If it's meant to be funny, it fails hugely on that level too. It fails on any level ever.



YouTube: Original

Woman In Love

The opening two seconds of this cover from the "After Hours" single seems to say a lot. The descending tinkling chimes introduction is a trick much beloved of overblown ballads and a sound that has surely rarely appeared on any record with pretence of credibility. It also isn't present in the Barbra Streisand original.
And indeed this isn't the common thing of an indie band taking a pop record, stripping it down and drawing out the inherant serious emotion that surely no one would have realised was there all along (suuure). But improbably, nor does it exactly turn out to be a larger than life pisstake, exaggerated to silliness. No, for good or bad it's just like the original, but a smidgeon more camp.

YouTube: Original

Be Careful What You Dream

'I played poker with my health, earned and spent enormous wealth,
It only served to stunt my growth and keep me further from myself.
Some wounds don't heal, they remain to let you know
That you must be careful what you dream.'

Sounding crushed under the weight of years, this "Keep The Home Fires Burning" B-side has a lot more in common with that A-side than the 'comedy' likes of "Please Stop Talking" that it sits alongside. While "Home Fires" is betrayed by others and stinging with that pain, though, all of the damage in "Be Careful What You Dream" is self-inflicted, be it that of the narrator himself or of the girl that he watches from a distance for the first two verses.

It's pretty negative stuff lyrically from the title on down, especially the delightfully misanthropic 'So what if she made some friends? It counts for little in the end' of the second verse. It never gets depressing though, thanks to the blow being softened by both the lightness of touch in the simple, graceful music and the way that Mark approaches those lyrics. He's not exactly cold or dispassionate, but there's a certain detached distance he brings to the words of concern that's actually really reassuring. The sense given is that the friends are unimportant not because everyone sucks, but because her big city move is a minor learning process in a grand scheme that's going to turn out for the better. Even though the title's a piece of advice, the song is ultimately for letting people get on with life and find out for themselves. Which might be better advice still.



Thanks to the fine people of the official Bluetones forum (hi to any of you still reading this self-indulgent toss), I just found out that the Dylanesque tune is all but taken straight from, well, Bob Dylan's "Simple Twist Of Fate". Harmonica in particular. Which perhaps goes some way to explaining why such a pretty song was considered B-side material only.

mp3: Be Careful What You Dream
YouTube: Simple Twist Of Fate

Castle Rock

First of all to explain the tags I've given this, I would consider "Castle Rock" as a B-side but it was also technically a double A-side with "Cut Some Rug", the third single from Expecting To Fly, probably explaining its fetching sandcastle cover. Although, pleasing The Enemy, it's not literally a song about a castle. Duh.

Working out the reason behind its naming is tricky as with many early songs (A beer? A Stephen King newsletter? Lord Of The Flies?) so I think I'll go for the castle standing in for Mark's emotional defenses. The first verse's 'you're rushing through my head, you're seeping through my skin' certainly has an air of being under siege, and he's already said that he's got a place to hide. What and who he's defenfing himself from is a little mysterious even before a 'she' is added to the main 'you' but he's got betrayal nagging at his mind, both his own (the play on words pun 'lying in your arms/lying to your face' put to great use) and that of whoever has 'turned and walked away'. The scratchy, hesitantly stop-start guitar/drum riff that opens the song and underpins the rest of it is like an itch that won't go away, just like his unwanted feelings for whichever of the sort-of-implied two girls it is. Maybe both. It's also the first step along the way to the harder sound of their second album, a lot more so than later stopgap single "Marblehead Johnson". For now, they still kept the ultra-sweet harmonies and emphasis on looser, flowing song structure that was later to fall away somewhat too, though.

"Castle Rock" is really intriguing both in complicating their sound and complicating the narrative compared to Expecting To Fly's songs (I remember reading someone saying that every single one was about being dumped, and thinking ever since that they had quite a point - we'll get back to that one later) but a little too slight and unclear to be one of their very best. Still, the fact that songs as good as or better than this were very common as B-sides at the time says a lot about the

mp3: Castle Rock and Castle Rock (Peel Session Version)

Beat On The Brat

It's only looking through The Bluetones' songs trying to decide what to right about next that I realise just how many covers they've done as B-sides throughout their career. Mainly in the Science & Nature/The Singles/Luxembourg eras, which says something about the demands of releasing two CD versions of each single with B-sides for each, I suppose.

It's quite hard not to read this Ramones cover from the "Fast Boy"/"Liquid Lips" single as a 'look, we can rock too!' statement, although it was probably born out of genuine appreciation too. It's a much less minimalist interpretation than the original, that hypnotically sparse bass buried beneath lots of guitar fuzz and drums pushed forward. What Mark lacks in cool he just about makes up for in enthusiasm, and the overall impression is now more 'beat' and a lot less 'brat'. Then there's the one inspired affectation which makes it stand out from those many B-side covers that I mentioned. It's a little lyric change - 'beat on the brat with a baseball bat' to 'beat on the brat with a cricket bat' that pokes fun at themselves but sounds no less appropriate at the same time.

mp3: Beat On The Brat the Bluetones version.
YouTube: Beat On The Brat the original.Visuals irrelevant.

Armageddon (Outta Here)

From title on downwards, this comedy sketch (we're using 'comedy' pretty broadly here) B-side to "Keep The Home Fires Burning" makes for painful repeated listening. A couple of jokes about "Slight Return"'s status as their best known song raise a smirk initially, but for the most part it's all horribly sixth form, consisting of jokes about students getting 'totally caned' and talking about Bagpuss. Argh.

I won't inflict the track on you or deal with it much more, but it's a useful jumping off point to note some interesting connections to British comedy at this time. First of all, it's listed as 'Armageddon (Outta Here) featuring Matt Lucas'. He's probably doing all of the 'funny' voices on it I guess, although the uptight visitor is the only one I'm completely sure of. Him and David Walliams also appear in the video to "Mudslide" from later in 2000. This was the time of Rock Profile rather than Little Britain so the two weren't exactly household names yet but since then, of course, they've moved on up to success and doing videos with Pet Shop Boys.

Secondly, the one saving grace of the track was the first appearance of Science & Nature's excellent instrumental "Blood Bubble" in the background. As I've discovered after watching the whole of both series of Spaced in the past week, "Blood Bubble" is also used as the backdrop to the intro and final gunfight scene (go to 03:00) in an episode in which the main characters mistakenly give some teenagers oregano instead of marijuana and everything is much, much funnier than in "Armageddon (Outta Here)". A number of different Bluetones songs are used throughout the second series and the band themselves make an appearance in the crowd for the Robot Wars/Fight Club episode (go to about 00:25)
Since then, of course, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have moved on up to making movies and hanging out with Coldplay. Such is life.

Colorado Beetle

Yesterday's YouTube link for "Carn't Be Trusted" featured the 'tones using the first half of "Colorado Beetle" as its intro, so it makes sense to cover this song next. They presumably did so as the two have an awful lot in common thematically if not musically, both touching on betrayal and intially disguising their true cruel sentiments, although "Colorado Beetle" takes things that bit further.

It's a cute acoustic ditty with a lovestruck opening croon - 'I shan't close my eyes tonight, I'm gonna look at you instead...', except that, ah, of course, '...and when at last you sleep my love, I'm gonna smash your lying head'. That this line is sung more sweetly than anything else in the song makes it all the more disconcerting on first listen, although the fact that the track's title compares his love to a potato destroying pest serves as a bit of a clue to anyone who knows their chrysomelidae. The violence is saved from unpalatability by clearly being an emtpy threat - the regretful, heartfelt chorus of 'Colorado Beetle, I fell for you' is more genuine than anything else around it and all of the angry, twisted words of the rest of the song are just futile attempts to reverse that one immutable feeling.

Ok, it makes sense that this is the B-side rather than "Carn't Be Trusted" since despite the usual excellent guitar trickery it palls a little by the end of its four minutes, but it still packs quite a punch.

mp3: Colorado Beetle

Nae Hair On't

Well, however it turns out in the end, this project has already taught me a few things. More on that shortly.

First, "Nae Hair On't" is one of The Bluetones' most popular B-sides thanks to both being on the other side of "Slight Return" and being the most simply gorgeous song they've ever recorded. It's by their standards unusually full of space and light, with a soft rhythym backing a progression picked out by a charmingly squeaking acoustic guitar. Adam Devlin's electric is as fanatstic as it always was at this time of their career but a lot more economic, teasing out peals that echo around the song here and there but never really taking the forefront. At one point it rumbles and threatens to take things to a dramatic conclusion but that never quite arrives, everything staying low key and gently reassuring right to the end.

It's reassuring and uplifting despite the phrase repeated most througout being 'it doesn't get any better, alone'. How does that work? Well, it reads to me like advice to someone who is down but isn't really willing to take it (they won't admit to it but 'your eyes will always give you away'), and that is the best way of encouraging them to reach out, adding just a hint of warning about the consequences of not taking the advice of the (beautiful) second verse:

Hang on to your sense of wonder,
Hang on to your gentle grace,
Hold out for a great blue yonder,
You'll find your resting place.

As for what I learned? Well, the typically cryptic song title clearly isn't in any modern English and I vaguely remembered reading about it being Robert Burns related. I decided to look it up to confirm that and see if there were "Keep The Home Fires Burning" style references to an original work in the song. A bit of searching led to finding that, aye, it's the name of one of his poems, and to indications that it was a bit rude.

After finding the whole thing thanks to Aberdeen Music forum, it turns out to have no particularly plausible links to the song, but definitely doesn't disappoint on the rudeness front. Note: I would advise against reading this if you like the song in question and are worried about resultant associations. For me, alas, it is too late.

Yesterday I wed a lady fair,
and you would believe me,
on her cunt there grows no hair,
that's the thing that grieves me,
it vexed me sir, it plagued me sir,
it put me in a passion,
to think that I had wed a wife,
whose cunt was out of fashion.

To quote the first reply on the forum, crikey.

mp3: Nae Hair On't and Nae Hair On't (live)

Suffer In Silence

"Suffer In Silence" doesn't stand out straight away from The Bluetones' very large collection of B-sides. The none more taut rhythym section keeps up a brisk pace with just a hint of tension and verses detail struggles with uncomfortable shoes and friends who won't pay their share at lunch. So far, so...nice. But on top of the humour being handled a good deal more cleverly than normally on their more comedic songs, there is just a hint of a biting undertone to the song. Mark Morriss does repressed anger just as well as he does repressed anything, lingering every few words for just long enough.

Then, a minute in, everything is laid bare. The hinted at big chorus never emerges, musical spikiness is replaced by a gentle shuffle and Morriss sings in detached fashion some of the most curiously affecting words of their recent career.

Every night I return to the same chair,
By a phone that's attached to the wall,
And I hope that no one will call.
I'm not waiting for an invitation,
I'm not waiting for horrible news,
But the other shoe to fall.

It feels like something really bad is happening, a big shadow hanging over half the song (or you realise next time, the whole song) that he hopes if it is ignored might somehow magically disappear. That's why he fixates instead on the little things of the first verses, I guess but the dread is still there, creeping in. This is followed by Adam Devlin kicking up the kind of wandering, aggressive solo that he can probably knock out in his sleep (but which is short enough to work regardless), and then we're round to the same thing again, just as unsettling as the first time. That the song finishes with no real resolution at all makes it all the more quietly unsettling.

A great song, and a very pleasant surprise when Luxembourg's other B-sides suggested that they had all but given up on that front, too.


mp3: Suffer In Silence

Driftwood

A lot of these songs I already have a good idea in my head what I'm going to write about them and just have to listen again once or twice for confirmation or to see if anything new strikes me. When "Driftwood" came up, though, I could only really remember a couple of lines emerging: "The road to paradiso must pass through the inferno/Came seeking purgatario..."

Like many of their early songs, this B-side to their debut single proper is built around Adam Devlin's layered, wandering guitar lines. "Driftwood" is much lighter on hooks and heavier on atmosphere than anything else of the time though, subdued all round til one great swell at the halfway point brings it those weirdly triumphant sounding lines. After that it's essentially one very long, graceful fadeout. No surprise that I didn't remember it any better or more fondly as it's all a bit wispy, but for a song where limbo of the religious kind stands in for the personal ('I've lost count of all the times that I've listened to you leaving' is as close as we get to a chorus) that's not too bad a thing.

mp3: Driftwood

Fock Da Brain-Hole

When I decided to embark on this project, it was really some of the more esoteric corners of The Bluetones' catalogue ouvre that I was most looking forward to writing about. And they don't come much more esoteric than "Fock Da Brain-Hole".

In case the title doesn't give it away, it's a nu-metal parody. Although, coming from October 2000, it actually predates that genre's height of popularity by a little way. "Rollin'" wasn't number one til January 2001, and "In The End" was almost a year away. Things hadn't yet reached the point where I could go to a shool battle of the bands and see 4 out of 6 cover the same Papa Roach song. Perhaps this is part of why "Fock Da Brain-Hole" features so little in the way of venom directed towards anyone specific. It's no "Rockin' The Suburbs", and its barely decipherable, heavily distorted lyrics appear to consist mainly of a drawn out attack on cuban heels.

Only come the eventual punchline (a cheerful, undistorted 'oh, I feel much better now!' at its close) do they really give the game away. While funny on first listen, that puncturing of the song is really detrimental thereafter. Because never mind funny, the rest of it is just great fun. The huge rolling barrage of drums, the pummelling bass, some awe inspiring guitar grinding, even the suprisingly fitting harmonica violence... they actually do a great job at taking the best bits of the visceral nu-metal sound and giving them a little spin of their own. Sure, it's a throwaway. But it's also a semi-logical extension of the genre stretching of Science & Nature, and it's a shame that they never tried anything remotely like it within their more serious work.

mp3: Fock Da Brain-Hole