I stumbled across the cover version below recently. It was released late last year - I'm guessing it was an outtake from the More sessions and in days gone by would probably have been a B-side. Not that such things still exist.
I'm sure Jarvis would be the first to tell you that his version can't really compete with the original, one of the last songs Johnny Cash wrote before his death in 2003. Johnny's version is suitably apocalyptic, but Pulp make it their own, particularly towards the end when it starts to sound like a twisted cousin of Running The World.
Both versions take on a new resonance during these, the last days of the American empire...
Welcome back to this week's Snapshots –
songs about underwear! Ms. Klum is famous for walking about in her skivvies,
though she did agree to keep her kit on for propriety’s sake. It was either her
or Biggie Smalls…
15. Crazy, Hippy Lit.
Crazy Chick was a song by Charlotte Church. Hippychick by Soho. And Chick Lit by We Are Scientists.
I thank you for your patience during this difficult time... year end countdowns can be such a drag, can't they?
6. Manic Street Preachers – Critical Thinking
The best Manics album in some time is a strange beast, because with one notable exception, the best song are sung by Nicky Wire, not James Dean Bradfield, and to quote Ben...
Not really a fan of [Nicky's] voice. I mean, when you've got JDB, why ever would you let anyone else sing?
I've been trying to work out why Nicky would choose to croak so many of these songs himself, rather than letting James be his proxy voice as his usually the case. Maybe James is finding a full concert of belting them out is starting to put a strain on his vocal chords, so the band want a few Nicky tracks in their catalogue to give him the occasional break?
Or maybe these were a particularly personal batch of Wire lyrics, and he felt the only way the band could do them justice was if he stepped up to the mic?
Whatever the reason, the songs that Nicky gives to James (still the majority of the album) don't feel as personal or as raw... they feel more like standard Manics songs... with that one notable exception...
I've written about Dear Stephen previously, and I probably said everything I had to say about it in that post, but it's still one of my songs of the year. And it's not the only time the band steer into Smiths territory on this record. You'll hear a very Johnny Marr guitar sound on this track too...
5. Pulp – More
I've also written before about the perils of impossibly high expectations... but here's a prime example.
The first Pulp album in 24 years was a record I'd only ever dreamed of. A little context here - every Pulp album from the1993 compilation Intro to their final, Scott Walker-produced, unappreciated epic, We Love Life in 2001 - every one of them was my album of the year.
'93, '94, '95, '98, '01 - five years, five albums, nothing to touch any of them. The penultimate disc, This Is Hardcore, is also my favourite record of the 90s. So you see what an impossible task Jarvis, Nick, Candida and Mark had set themself by making a new Pulp record? Was it always doomed to be an ever-so-slight disappointment?
The crazy thing is, More gives you everything you could ever want from a Pulp record, starting with a wonderfully Jarvisian confession about why they went away, and why they chose now to come back.
Something stopped me dead in my tracks
I was heading for disaster and then I turned back
I was wrestling with a coat hanger, can you guess who won?
The universe shrugged, shrugged then moved on
Not a shaman, or a showman, ashamed I was selling the rights
I took a breather and decided not to ruin my life
I was conforming to a cosmic design, I was playing to type
Until I walked back to the garden of earthly delight
I was born to perform
It's a calling
I exist to do this
Shouting and pointing
No one can ever understand it
And no one will ever have the last word
Because it's not something you could ever say
So swivel
Far more of the wit and wisdom of Mr. Cocker is to follow, including the usual meditations on sex, death, growing old, grubby backstreets and old girlfriends who might have been the one...
They even threw in a genuine pop hit... or it would have been a hit, if they'd released it three decades ago, when they originally wrote it...
More then, is a truly great comeback record. It's everything you could want from a Pulp record, and only a Pulp fan who was a complete idiot wouldn't make it his album of the year... but clearly I was expecting More.
By contrast, it's much easier to write about the new Craig Finn album. The main man from The Hold Steady always places towards the top of my countdown for his superior storytelling skills, creating heartfelt vignettes of the people who fall through the cracks. Always Been is no different.
What does make this one different though is that this time Craig enlisted Adam Granduciel and The War On Drugs to be his producer / backing band with the clearly intent of making a big 80s-sounding L.A. record. And they succeed on every level, crafting an album that shimmers in the heat haze like The Boys of Summer... with that unmistakable Craig Finn voice shining through the smog.
I've always found The War On Drugs to be a very frustrating band - being a child of 80s American rock, I love the sound they make... but they never seem to have anything to say lyrically, so their records rarely catch with me. Here though, they're working with one of the premier lyricists of their generation, and the result is pure magic.
For most of my life, I've dreamed of working professionally in comics... but after reading Tomine's autobiographical account of all the snubs, slights, humiliations and disappointments that have made up his own "successful" career in that industry, I think I probably had a lucky escape.
Do you feel like a normal, competent adult? Or do you still feel like a kid making the best of pretending to be a grown up?
Two recent songs immediately came to mind. First, this...
Summer's over and the time is right to bring back some of the ongoing series I abandoned just prior to my holiday from teaching (aka the Exhaustion Weeks). It's a cliché that I go back to work for a rest, but...
As usual, I'm stealing another query from Richard Herring's book EMERGENCY QUESTIONS and trying to answer it with added songs. Here's today's question...
What age would you like to be when you get to heaven, presuming there is a heaven and you get to choose what age you'll be when you're up there?
Putting aside whether or not we believe in any kind of afterlife, this is a thought-provoking question. If we're lucky enough to live to an old age, we wouldn't want to be stuck at that age, for eternity, with all the frailties, disabilities and marble loss that might come with it. We'd want to be young and strong and ready to take best advantage of our nirvana...
No thank you very much. I wouldn't mind going back and reliving a good day of my adolescence, safe in the knowledge that I could return to where I am right now before the bad days kick in. Because I did have a good many bad days as a teenager, days of self-doubt, embarrassment, humiliation days and crushing loneliness.
In answer to Rich's question then, I'd probably choose to be mid-30s. Some time just before I fell down the stairs and broke my arm, also causing a slipped disc in my back which still bothers me today. Some time before the aches and pains set in...
A quick google search for "Geography teacher 80s UK" brought up a picture of Jarvis, wearing an outfit I'm sure many of you will remember your teachers wearing back in the day. Clearly though, if Jarvis was a teacher, he'd have been up on a disciplinary years ago, if this is anything to go by...
My Geography teacher was Mr. Green. He was a very scary individual, but I liked him. He had a wooden leg, so you could hear him coming down the corridor... clump, clump, clump... and knew to scarper if you were up to no good. His wife taught Biology. I was less fond of her, and she of me. I dropped Biology at the end of the third year as a result.
In our very first Geography lesson, Mr. Green told us all a story. I'm sure it was one he told to new classes at the start of every year. During teacher training, someone advised me to go hard in the first class - set your stall and show them that you'd take none of their nonsense, from the beginning. I'm not sure I've ever managed to do that, since it's not really my style. But you find what works for you.
It's worth pointing out here that Mr. Green was one of those teachers who would queue up for school dinners with everyone else. No jumping the queue or asking for priority treatment. That wasn't how he clumped.
"And in front of me were two boys, chatting. Neither of them had seen me, so when one asked the other a question, his response was honest and direct. 'Who do you have for Geography?' the first boy asked. 'Mr. Green,' replied the second... 'he's a right sod, but you learn something.'"
Mr. Green took a pause gave us all a hard stare. "I let that go," he said. "It seemed fair."
You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Goddamn you all to hell!
Last week, I put forward an early contender for my album of the year, thinking it might be looking like a bit of a quiet one. Then all hell broke lose, firstly with the announcement of a new Pulp album, their first in 24 years...
And hot on their heels, Neil Hannon decided to get out of bed again...
Meanwhile, as he eases slowly into his retirement, some old geezer from New Jersey found SEVEN albums lying around in his attic that have never been released before and decided to put them together as a new box set, Tracks II...
While my tolerance for many other movie genres has waned over the years, I've never grown out of the thrill of watching horror films. And I hope I never do.
For Halloween week, I figured I'd share as many songs connected to horror films as I could find...
Barbarian is the best horror film I've seen in the last few years. It's one of those flicks where you think you know where it's going, and then... woah, wait a minute, WHAT just happened?
Another strong contender for best horror movie of the past decade is the Aussie movie Talk To Me. Terrific supporting role for Miranda Otto in this too...
One of the best British horror films of the last 20 years (actually, it's almost 20 years old... which just seems wrong) was The Descent. Great ending, though that was slightly undone by the unnecessary sequel...
I like films where the baddies wear creepy masks and you can't see their faces. The original Strangers movie was a pretty scary movie back in 2008, but like a lot of horror films, its impact has been diluted by too many unnecessary sequels...
I'll have more of these later in the week, but we'll close today with a movie that already featured in this week's Snapshots, when I included a song by The Mock Turtles... largely because they were harder to identify than Jarvis & Pulp would have been.
And while I think the original version of The Wicker Man is untouchable, I also have a soft spot for the gonzo 2006 remake starring Nicolas Cage. NOT THE BEES!
I refer you back to my opening comment: I also like a bad horror film.
Pulp's Wickerman is from their final, unjustly overlooked, album, We Love Life. Produced by Scott Walker, it's Jarvis at his best...
Leeds was the first city I knew. My dad worked in Leeds when I was a kid, back in the days when getting there from Huddersfield was a much shorter journey. As I grew older, Mum used to take me to Leeds Comic Marts every other month, and when I started work, I'd often catch the train from Bradford to Leeds to spend my wage in the city's many record shops. It was later that I discovered Manchester (too big and scary for a little Yorkshire lad) and later still, Sheffield (Leeds without the pretentions). Nowadays I work in Leeds myself, or close enough, but the only reason I have to visit the city centre is the occasional gig. I don't feel as welcome there as I once did... it's all too new and shiny and ever-expanding... but then, I've never been a city boy.
Still, I was encouraged to breath life into this old blog series after listening to the wonderful Cherry Red compilation, Where Were You: Independent Music From Leeds (1978-1989). Not only does that collection feature some of the best bands to ever call Leeds home, including The Wedding Present, The Sisters of Mercy, Cud, The Mekons and The Sinister Cleaners... but it also features quite a few songs about Leeds. Like this one!
Named after an Eddie Cochran song, Pink Peg Slax were a Leeds rockabilly band who scored quite a few sessions with John Peel and Andy Kershaw in the 80s, though they never broke through to the big time. They were also responsible for this little beauty...
Mandi and Debi Laek are two sisters from Leeds whose quirky tales of life in Leeds have drawn comparisons to The Kinks, The Jam, Brian Wilson and Syd Barrett.
Mark Knopfler wrote the following tune about Harry Phillips, a Leeds sculptor who never got the respect he deserved... because he wasn't from a trendy town.
Here's a contemporary American band that 30-something hipsters like Ben are into, despite the fact that they're named after that old sitcom about growing up in the 60s. The song is all about being on tour, mostly in Leeds, but far away from home...
Last night in Leeds
Ad and I found ourselves wandering the city
Looking for pizza
All we found was complacency and somewhere to sleep
I'm still waiting for the map to say home's a week away
Back in the UK, Geordie folkster Richard Dawson is someone I've been listening to quite a bit lately since Michel Faber sang his praises in Listen. Here, Richard talks about missing his daughter after driving her away to University...
But my favourite song about Leeds is still this one, from Californian songwriter John Darnielle. It's a song dedicated to Goth God and "Leeds lad" Andrew Eldritch... although he was actually born in Cambridgeshire. Nevertheless, it always makes me smile...
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