Greetings pop pickers and please be welcome to tonight’s Fabulously Flamboyant Friday and another of our fortnightly mastications upon the marshmallowy pillows of musical magnificence.
Tonight, dear reader, Ivory Cutlery (currently numb of buttock, sore of foot and tired of limb) will once again be taking the night off.
I’m afraid the onerous real-world pressure of being consistently and reliably incompetent has, for the moment at least, somewhat limited my spare time and therefore my opportunities for the seemingly endless hours of rigorous, detailed, peer-reviewed and fact-checked research that goes into a typical Fabulously Flamboyant Friday missive*.
*a transparent tissue of lies
I have toiled long in Mordor (the east end of London) and now toil in the far more bucolic surroundings of The Shire (between the Chilterns and North Wessex Downs). However, my burdens and burdensome and my toiling is toilsome.
Because of this, tonight’s missive will be a shoddy and shambolic affair, a puerile stream of consciousness, entirely un-themed and hastily constructed; rapidly written in a succession of shabby hotel rooms, sweaty backstage areas and deeply insalubrious crew catering tents. Tonight’s missive is simply a random collection of artists wot I ‘ave recently been playing. Artists who make up my current daily playlist; artists I would not be without (until I get bored and move on to something else).
And so, without further ado, laydees and gentlebodies, Fabulously Flamboyant Fridays proudly presents… um… stuff wot ‘as recently been on my turntable.** Not arf!
**guaranteed to contain no Phil Collins
Let us start with Blackberry Smoke. If you’re a fan of southern rock (think Skynyrd, Allmans, etc.) listening to Blackberry Smoke is like sliding into your favourite slippers after an 18 hour day in your hot and sweaty steel toecap boots: a reliably comfortable and deeply satisfying experience. There’s nothing new or inventive here: they look like country rockers, they write like country rockers, they play like country rockers. The boys from Atlanta, Georgia (who formed in 2000) are stereotypical southern rockers – in fact almost a caricature of southern rock – but there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. They do what they do with style and heart – and they do it very well indeed. I have recently been spinning their most recent platter, Be Right Here (2024), and enjoying it very much indeed.
And now for someone with a far more jaundiced view of the land below the Mason-Dixon line – and to be absolutely fair, the lands above it as well – Randy Newman.
Randy Newman is of course best known for his hugely successful and lavishly lucrative film soundtracks (Toy Story, Cars, Monsters Inc., Meet The Fockers, Seabiscuit and many, many more). But he has a second career as America’s satirist-in-chief, the man with the jaundiced eye who biopsies the tumours embedded in the social constructs of the American dream. He is easily (IMHO) one of the finest living American songwriters and one of my favourite artists of all time.
Newman is the absolute master at simultaneously occupying two contradictory positions. He creates characters he dislikes and then gives them a powerful voice that evokes grudging sympathy, empathy and even respect. He is the master at taking the personal and the private and making it resonate universally – and he is very, very good at seriously upsetting people.
A perfect example of the latter is the song Rednecks (1974) from his truly wonderful Good Old Boys album of the same year. It’s a song with lyrics I will not be fully reproducing here and one that still has the power to shock, even after all these years.
Interestingly (and amusingly), just like the recent “Gammon” insult, the much-maligned titular rednecks who attended Mr. Newman’s gigs quickly adopted his insults and usually sang along with great gusto, cheerfully agreeing that “we don’t know our ass (sic) from a hole in the ground”, before continuing on to enthusiastically agree with the rest of Mr. Newman’s stanza, which of course I won’t repeat here. Poor ol’ Randy (being a typical metropolitan liberal sort of chap) was apparently much displeased by this outcome.
Good Old Boys is a tremendous album and one that I am happy to commend to the house. However, it is his 1988 album, Land of Dreams, that has been spinning under my stylus of late. Land of Dreams is an interesting work, well suited to the vinyl format on which it was originally released, largely because it is clearly a game of two halves. One side of the album is entirely typical Newman fare, with the land of dreams under scrutiny being the USA and its associated American dream; but the other side of the album is quite unique in Newman’s extensive back-catalogue, largely because it feels directly autobiographical.
The land of dreams being examined here is one of childhood and the pains of growing up – in the deep south, as it happens – and it seems to be about the only time Newman has addressed his own thoughts and feelings so directly in his published compositions. I don’t know if songs like Dixie Flyer, New Orleans Wins the War or Four Eyes are directly autobiographical and I’m not sure if Newman has ever addressed this, but they have become some of my favourite pieces by this tremendously gifted songwriter.
As for the album as a whole, it has some serious missteps: Newman’s attempted examination of 1980’s rap culture really doesn’t work and the lead single from the album, It’s Money That Matters, (with Mark Knopfler delivering some spankingly splendid guitar work) is a cheap and shoddy rehash of Newman’s It’s Money That I love and Knopfler’s Money For Nothing. It smacks of a nervous record company saying “er… I’m sure it’s a very nice album, Mr. Newman, what with all that Jewish childhood, bigotry and racism stuff, but could we, um… perhaps have a single, please?”. Anyway, to once again prove I would have been the world’s worst A&R man, It’s Money That Matters went on to deliver one of the biggest U.S. hits of Newman’s entire career.
Time now for a little trance ‘n’ dance and the latest release from the latest version of the hugely influential German band, Tangerine Dream. The band’s current line-up of course bears absolutely no relation to the original 70s Kraut Rockers who so massively influenced artists such as Bowie, Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder, Sparks, Eno, OMD, The Normal and so many, many more. However, since the 2015 death of the band’s founding member and guiding light, Edgar Froese, Tangerine Dream have been fronted by the very talented Thorsten Quaeschning, who has seen fit to steer the band into some interesting areas of electronic dance music.
I recently attended one of their live gigs, with, it has to be said (given my advancing years and general decrepitude), a certain uneasiness. It was probably the first time I’d seen them live since the late 1970s and I was was very pleasantly surprised to be very pleasantly surprised by just how much I enjoyed their performance. It was a tremendous gig and rugs, it has to be said, were cut.
The audience were a very odd mix of wrinklies like me (dancing around our Zimmer frames), ageing hippies, ragged remnants of the UK’s rave culture and teenage EDM enthusiasts with far too much energy for my liking. Nevertheless, it was a thoroughly splendid night out and, as a result, I decided to pick up a copy of their latest album, Raum (2022), and it has since been spending quite a lot of time on my turntable.
Next up, Tool – possibly my favourite rock band of the 90s and early noughties. I didn’t become aware of the band until the mid-to-late 90s, by which time they already had a couple of tremendous albums under their belt. They were on the support card for a festival headliner I can honestly no longer remember. However, there would be no forgetting Tool. They delivered a staggeringly powerful performance on that night and I’m afraid I became a hopeless fanboi on the spot.
Tool’s musical style is difficult to pin down. They have, at various times, been described as heavy metal, alt-rock, alt-metal, post metal, progressive rock, prog metal, psych rock and pronk. In truth, they are quite simply Tool – and they were quite unique in the 90s. However, their influence has been telling and they now have a considerable number of sincere and eager imitators trailing in their wake.
Recently, I’ve been playing their rather splendid 2001 album, Lateralus. a great deal. But I’m not sure it’s really suitable Friday night fare. So, as we don’t want to startle the Going Postal horses (particularly the fine fillies), I think we should instead opt for a rather splendid Tool cover of Led Zeppelin’s No Quarter – with no less an authority than Jimmy Page describing it as the best Led Zep cover he has ever heard.
And now for a shameful and somewhat guilty pleasure: Gilbert O’Sullivan… Oh dear, I can’t quite believe I said that out loud. Nevertheless, I shall try to defend this somewhat uncomfortable position.
Gilbert O’Sullivan (born in Waterford, but grew up in Swindon) is a for many a cheese-meister par excellence and I would not dream of trying to defend most of his work. However, on the release of his first album, Himself (1971), it was very clear that this guy could really write. In fact (as ludicrous as it seems now) comparisons at the time were made with songwriters such as Paul McCartney, Elton John, Paul Simon and Randy Newman. In fact, he scooped the very prestigious Ivor Novello award for Songwriter Of The Year in 1973 and nobody batted an eyelid.
Beautifully constructed early songs like Alone Again (Naturally) and Nothing Rhymed, really made people sit up and take notice – this guy (despite the ridiculous bowl haircut and stupid urchin clobber) was a seriously talented song writer. And it was compositional talent of this nature that filled his first album in 1971. Himself really is a very fine debut, but sadly, for me at least, it would prove to be a career highlight, with much of his subsequent work failing to live up to the original promise of his early work.
Nevertheless, I recently acquired an original 1971 pressing of this splendid album in absolutely mint condition (waddaya mean, they’re all in mint condition cos no bugger is dumb enough to play them?) to replace my thoroughly worn out original copy, and it has been getting a great deal of needle time in chez Cutlery of late.
OK – time for a Taffy: the late, great, Karl Wallinger. Sadly, Karl recently popped his clogs at the tender age of 66, which prompted me to dig out some of his finest works. He is of course best known for being a member of The Waterboys during their Whole Of The Moon period. Sadly, there was not enough room in The Waterboys for two towering Celtic talents such as Mike Scott and Karl Wallinger. The pair bickered and wrestled for artistic control and, sadly but inevitably, they eventually agreed to disagree and decided to go their separate ways.
Karl left the Waterboys to form World Party. This was pretty much a studio project rather than a real band. In many ways World Party were much like Roy Wood’s Wizzard – a studio creation by a single multi-instrumental talent that only became a real band (with hired guns) when actual live performances were required.
World Party (i.e. Karl Wallinger) produced just five studio albums between 1987 and 2000 and never really achieved the commercial profile or success of The Waterboys. Nevertheless, all of the World Party albums are firm favourites of mine, but two in particular, Goodbye Jumbo and Bang!, are IMHO complete and utter poptastic masterpieces that belong in any self-respecting album collection. It is these two albums that I’ve been playing, with great regularity, since March of this year, to mark the sad passing of this tremendous and sadly underappreciated Taffy talent.
And I think we’ll wrap things up with Book (2021), the latest album from the Grammy Award winning US art rock duo, They Might Be Giants. These two (John Flansburgh and John Linnell) have been writing and performing since 1982 and they became one of my favourite bands of that decade. Their output can be playful, witty, surreal, childish, bizarre – and you simply have to have at least some respect for a band who nabbed a Tony nomination for their contribution to the Broadway musical version of SpongeBob SquarePants and who still release their stuff on 8-track cartridge!
In truth, antiquated 8-tracks aren’t the only quirky distribution method in their arsenal. The duo would often use the classified ads section of local newspapers to list phone numbers that would greet callers with their latest songs, complete with fake ads for unusual goods and services that did not actually exist.
In many ways, They Might Be Giants remind me of another American duo, Sparks. Not in any musical sense (there is very little musical crossover between the two acts), but because they are both pretty much unique and therefore in a genre of one. There really is no one quite like them.
They are on tour in the UK this autumn and I was very much hoping to see at least one of their shows. Sadly it looks as though work commitments will prevent this from happening, so I’ve been playing Book quite a lot lately (on vinyl rather than 8-track) as some kind of aural compensation. Additionally, although I might not be in attendance, I’ve been very pleased to note their UK tour has almost completely sold out, with tickets being about as available as hen’s teeth. This cheers me immensely.
And I think that’s probably quite enough of my self indulgence for one evening. So that’s yer lot for this week’s Fabulously Flamboyant Friday. May all your pillows be tasty, your gardens inclined and your puddles well jumped.
Goodnight, and may your frog go with you – Not ‘arf!
Featured Image: http://www.cgpgrey.com, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
© Ivory Cutlery 2024
