Second Hand Record Dip Part 19 - The Stampeders - Carry Me

Who: The Stampeders
What: Carry Me (b/w"I Didn't Love You Anyhow")
Label: Polydor
Where: Music and Video Exchange, Camden High Street
Year of Release: 1971
Cost: One pound

Following the US Election I was desperately trying to think of a themed blog entry to put up. With a typical lack of foresight I'd wasted Mason Profitt's "Vote" months ago, so the best I could really do was this. It's a Canadian country rock band attempting their first serious shot at the American market, and failing completely due to that old devil called politics (and no, not record company politics on this occasion).

Whilst "Carry Me" was a massive hit in its native Canada, its failure to translate to success across the border has long been attributed to its subject matter, and most especially the weary line "Carry me away from this old war/ I don't wanna fight no more" which was apparently seen as being critical of the efforts in Vietnam by many radio station programmers. A shame they had to be so picky, because the song isn't necessarily a finger-wagging, fight-pickin' piece of political pop, but a very gentle, despairing track which probably encapsulated the mood of many people at the time, even those who honestly thought that the battle was one worth fighting. And lo and behold, it's equally applicable to another well-known situation today.

The band managed to notch up a couple of bona-fide US hits a bit later in their career with "Sweet City Woman" and "Hit The Road Jack", but this was one of their biggest smashes at home, and to my mind one of their most interesting (if simple) pieces of work.

On the subject of why so many cheap American singles suddenly seem to be cropping up in second hand stores around London, your guess is as good as mine.

http://sharebee.com/66e03628

Lieutenant Pigeon - I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen

Label: Decca
Year of Release: 1974

I've already written about Lietenant Pigeon in some depth on this blog, and once you've written a band who had a member's mother on piano and specialised in Joe Meek-styled honky tonk recordings, you've said all there really is to say. What more do you want? In-depth analysis of their concept? I've tried, believe me, but it's all rather unfathomable.

There are people out there - Jarvis Cocker, for example - who maintain that the band were a work of genius, but I'm much more tempted to downgrade my rating to "eccentric good fun". There's an argument to be made that they broke some production barriers with their home recording techniques, but those who argue that they advanced on what Meek had already achieved are probably deluding themselves, as even under their serious "Stavely Makepeace" guise there are no noticeable leaps and bounds in technique, just a lot of likeable material which happened to be recorded in an ordinary house rather than a plush studio.

Whilst their career stopped dead in Britain after their second hit "Desperate Dan", they went on to have another chart entry in Australia with this particular disc which, as you can probably tell by the label, is Aussie in origin. It's yet more chirpy whistles and party piano pops, as you'd expect, but the flip "Big Butch Baby" is rather unusually a vocal effort with glam rock leanings. Sorry for the fact that this record isn't exactly in mint condition, but the scratches do start to clear up a little bit after the first 30 seconds or so.

http://sharebee.com/79f43865

Marnie - "Bell Jar" (b/w "Be")

Label: Progression
Year of Release: 1995

If you're the kind of person who gets advance copies of singles for review - which, for a brief time, I was - there are certain sleeves that just guarantee the waxing will be shoved to the bottom of the listening pile. It's not that you don't intend to listen to them at all, of course, it's just you sometimes get the sense that any indie band who is prepared to allow certain designs to dominate their work are simply sending out messages that this is "not for you". And so it went with this particular 45, whose Plath referencing sleeve with Plath referencing song title immediately made me suspect the people behind it were the sorts of folk who wrote very angst-ridden teenage poetry and had decided to set it to music. "Play later," I thought, filing it behind a whole bunch of stuff I was genuinely excited about.

When I finally did get around to spinning the A-side "Bell Jar", I was pleasantly surprised by the contents. It does indeed sound like a tremendously moody piece of work, but the interesting thing I find about many bands who attempted this stuff in the mid-nineties is that they glossed the bleakness over with plenty of production sparkles. Had this been issued in '92 or '93, there's little doubt it would have been a Courtney Love referencing slab of angry, clattering gloom, but the mid nineties model introduces more fragile harmonies and melodic guitars to the mix. It starts off like Hole with clunking bass noises and despairing vocals, then somehow loosens up to take you by surprise. It's the music of a parallel universe where grunge didn't so much die, but was given a thorough sheen, and allowed to become slightly more fragile and snuggle up to its poppy side.

Far, far better than the A-side, however, is the flip, the lengthy, 33rpm spinning "Be", which features Roman Jugg out of the Damned on keyboards and just builds and builds upon a very simple idea, ending on a riot of moaning synth noises and soaring guitars - it's a tried and tested rock formula, and if it's one you don't care for much, this isn't going to change your mind one iota, but it's deftly done and leaves me wondering what Marnie might have been like live.

As for who Marnie were, I'm afraid to say I've lost the press release and can't remember, but seem to recall that they were from Essex, had at least two women in the line-up ("Michelle" gets the credit for the A side of this single, and "Olga" the B-side) and released a string of singles through the nineties which failed to sell in sufficient quantities to register in the upper regions of the indie charts. I never did manage to get to any of their gigs, which always seemed to be advertised as taking place in tiny pubs around the UK, and whilst it would seem that they managed to keep on plugging away until the end of the decade, there certainly appears to be no evidence of a Marnie album out there.

Rave reviews from Melody Maker and NME and plays by Peel and Lamacq were also apparently forthcoming, but one suspects that the band suffered from being associated with a tiny indie, and just didn't have the publicity money to turn those fleeting mentions and snatches of airplay into greater things. But this, of course, is all just speculation again...

Whiteout - Detroit

Label: Silvertone
Year of Release: 1994

I predict I'm going to get an almighty slagging from some random readers for daring to speak positively about this single. There is, you see, a particular mindset which dictates that 99% of all British guitar pop singles released between the years 1994 - 97 were awful. Actually, we'll just call the whole thing "Britpop" and save time.

Whilst I hold Britpop responsible for a vast number of ills (the invasion of dumb, posh, high fashion kids into a movement that was supposed to be an 'alternative' safe haven from that stuff and The Kaiser Chiefs to name but two things) it's something of a fallacy to say that the era which spawned it was blighted with low quality product. For one thing, I refuse to accept that Kurt Cobain was somehow more intelligent or lyrically astute than Jarvis Cocker, and nor do I think that Slowdive (good though they actually were) played with as broad a sonic palette as the Super Furry Animals. You can hate the era for how it turned "indie" into a middle of the road fashion statement, for how it killed the music press's marginally leftfield sensibility, or for how at its worst it gave us dullards like Echobelly, but to say it was "all shit" is a sweeping lazy statement. Not only was a lot of the output at the time breathtaking or even exhilirating, it also saw bands as diverse as Gorky's Zygotic Mynci and Leftfield getting Radio One playlisted amidst the confusion. For about a year, the music scene was actually huge fun, and there was a sense that bands who should exist only on the margins were creeping into the mainstream - until the inevitable comedown when 600 awful Oasis clones parachuted into Camden. Defining the entire era by that horrific moment, however, is as unfair as defining Punk by the cascade of Oi! bands that emerged by the time the party was over. Pick the fag end of any movement and you'll observe similar nonsense. Perhaps some of the better material just needs to be rediscovered by a generation who can't quite remember how bad things got towards the end of the era.

Which brings us, two paragraphs late(r), on to the single in question. Whiteout didn't actually start out as also-rans in the whole race, actually being considered as serious contenders for a time. The four scruffy teens from Scotland weren't necessarily playing with new ideas, seemingly copping riffs from the Faces and numerous sixties bands, but they did so in a way that, for a time, actually made them seem as if they might be as good as the debut album-era Oasis. If that sounds laughable, one listen of "Detroit" should make things slightly clearer - it fizzes with an energy that a lot of bands at the same time couldn't have topped, has one of the better choruses of the year, and actually sounds completely in love with itself, even risking the kind of key change at the end which other bands would be too knowing to bother with. It's the sort of thing that could only have been created by a gaggle of arrogant teens with tremendously low self-doubt - which may be repugnant to some, but in my opinion the best simple rock ideas should be done precisely this way. It's the vinyl equivalent of a firework display which pulls out thousands of pounds worth of pyrotechnics right near the end when you thought it couldn't top itself. At no point across its four minutes does it ever trough out.

Whiteout didn't hit the big time, of course, and a number of factors have been blamed for this - their label (Silvertone were supposedly never the most organised cookies), the fact they based themselves in Scotland rather than moving to London to be on the media's doorstep, or the fact that certain journalists in the press never quite took to them. Personally, I have to wonder if leaving most of the singles off their album "Bite It" and filling it with lots of slow tempo ballads was the best move in the world - after all, Dadrock styled epics were never really what the majority of us rated them for in the first place. Despite that, though, "Detroit" is one of my favourite singles of 1994, whether you like it or not. And let's face it, this blog shouldn't really be about going for the easy options all the time.

The B-side "Dee Troyt" is a slightly unusual slow version which was produced by Brian O'Shaugnessy, who created The Firm's "Star Trekkin'", then went on to produce Primal Scream, Saint Etienne, Denim and Misty's Big Adventure. What a peculiar career the man has had.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=C3DUHCR1

Kevin Rowland - Young Man

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=G7fO8BHPvrU

Label: Mercury
Year of Release: 1988

Since it now seems to be considered "modern" and clever to refuse to allow YouTube clips to be embedded into blogs, you're going to have to make do with a link for this one, I'm afraid... as if that makes a shred of difference to the situation apart from inconveniencing you, the reader, by making you browse away, and therefore making you less likely to listen to the song or view the vid.

A rant against controlling YouTube users (or in this case controlling record companies) aside, I've always felt this is one of Rowland's finer moments which went totally unnoticed at the time. The album from which it stems, "The Wanderer", is far from being up there with his best, a fact I'm sure he would even acknowledge himself, but if this your worst then perhaps there's not much point in making an issue out of it. "Young Man" is a very simple and direct message to angry adolescents, self-hating teenagers and youthful misfits everywhere, which is uniquely touching in a way Brian Wilson would kill to be in his old age. There is none of Kev's bitter, world-to-rights ranting here (spectacular though that is) and instead it's replaced with gentle reflection and a very affectionate lyric. "You'll be fine", he reassures the listener, making this the only song I can think of (apart from perhaps Mike Reid's novelty disc "The Ugly Duckling", which we'll overlook) which takes a gentle, reassuring look at mixed-up kids everywhere.

It takes a particular kind of genius to be this direct and simplistic and make it seem insightful, although when he sings lines like "There's no need to be the best at everything you do" you are left wondering just how much of this is biographical. I wish I'd heard this at a difficult age, though - I didn't manage to stumble across this track until I was in my late twenties. Ah well.

And where is that new Dexy's Midnight Runners album, eh?