Heartbreak Half-Hour

Following on from this post, and that post, I thought it might be nice to put together a little podcast showcasing some of the music being discussed. [EDIT] And for a while it was here, but now it’s not. Drop me a line if you really want to hear it.[/EDIT]

Heartbreakers part deux

I’m warming to my theme, now… I’ve been trying to think what separate those songs I mentioned before from common or garden heartbreak and misery songs, as to me they seem quite distinct. I think there are two factors. Firstly, the scenario is about a specific third person, and often gives specific details of events: they are really love triangle songs, sung from the perspective of the person who has come off worst. And thirdly, they have a directness and specificness: they do not adorn themselves with metaphor, allusion or innuendo; rather, they say what happened, and tell it straight.

Sam Holloway suggested a couple of excellent heartbreak songs to me on Facebook: Beck’s Lonesome Tears and It Started With A Kiss by Hot Chocolate. But now I have unfairly changed the rules, they don’t count. Also out of the running are more obvious contenders like I Know It’s Over by The Smiths, which doesn’t involve a particular love triangle – I think the bride and all that are pretty figurative, and certainly not the focus of the song, which is undoubtedly Morrissey’s own general misery. Also out is I Want You by Elvis Costello, which isn’t really any sort of narrative – we don’t know what happened, only the messy end result – and, while it has an undeniable emotional impact, is mainly hateful rather than heartbroken.

So, a challenge for you: what other songs fit into this slightly arbitrary category? I can think of only one that I missed yesterday, so far anyway: You Don’t Know by Ellie Greenwich. It’s a strikingly-arranged song, and while it has the simplicity and directness of a lot of her songs, it packs an emotional punch that a lot of her more fluffy offerings can’t match.

Any more?

Heartbreakers (EDITED)

I have been party to a couple of pub conversations regarding Belle and Sebastian recently, and I still can’t quite understand why their song Jonathan David gets such a kicking. I think it’s one of their best singles, and part of a run of good form in 2000 and 2001 (good form on singles, anyway – the albums weren’t any cop).

This is a deeply unfashionable view among “true” B&S fans, of which I evidently am not one: to me this later run of singles is better than the first three EPs they released. I suspect this is because I came to them (ie the first three) somewhat after the event: hearing them in the context of the death throes of Britpop in the mid to late nineties must have been revelatory, but hearing them in the context of music that came subsequently, and that they influenced, makes them seem a bit less special. See also the first album by Suede: by the time I finally got round to picking it up, Britpop was long since dead and buried, and that record seemed like old hat, even though I can see the impact it must have had when it was released.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. Why do I have so much time for Jonathan David when everyone else thinks it’s rubbish? Perhaps because it’s a riff on one of my favourite themes: being a miserable sod, I’m a sucker for songs about unrequited love (as I mentioned in relation to a single by Cure-a-like Black Kids earlier in the year). For some reason, it seems to produce extremely satisfying songs.

Jonathan David does it really well: the protagonist sacrifices his own romantic happiness for the sake of that of the object of his desire, as well as that of his friend. It did take me quite a long time to twig that’s what the song’s about – maybe that’s why it doesn’t get the credit it deserves. On an identical theme is I’m Throwing Rice by Eddy Arnold, although I’m familiar with the Half Man Half Biscuit cover version: the protagonist not only lets his beloved slip away into the arms of his friend (though unlike the B&S song, it sounds like he at least managed to get it on with her at some point), but he is on-hand to congratulate them at the wedding. Ouch.

That Black Kids single and Joe Jackson’s Is She Really Going Out With Him both articulate the punch in the guts of seeing someone you love arm-in-arm with someone else, as does Percy Sledge’s seminal It Tears Me Up; but even more cruelly, John Hiatt’s She Loves The Jerk zooms into the future, as he laments that his beloved is stuck in a loveless marriage, knows she would be better off with him, but still won’t leave her husband. Again, I encountered this via a cover – this time by Elvis Costello, on the bonus disc to the reissue of Goodbye Cruel World; it’s a rendition that hints at the black tone he was striving for on that album, believe it or not. (He also covered It Tears Me Up at around the same time, though rather less successfully.)

Costello himself has provided one of the best examples of a slightly different take on the issue: in Still Too Soon To Know, his loved one has hooked up with another man and he is left asking whether their relationship can be saved. The criminally under-rated Paul Burch explored a similar theme in his song Tonight, Tonight – only this time, even crueller still, he sees the moment at which his beloved meets the gaze of “the one I’ll lose you to.” Frustratingly, the lyrics to that one don’t appear to be online anywhere.

So if you’re ever hoping to be given Now That’s What I Call A Depressing Compilation Tape 64, I’m your man. Alternatively, all of those songs are well worth tracking down as MP3s… just make sure you’re not in a good mood when you do so – you’ll spoil it, I guarantee.

EDIT: since I can’t find the lyrics to Tonight, Tonight online anywhere, I thought I might as well type them up from the inlay. It’s an interesting experience, actually: it has underlined what a bleak song it is, when the words are separated from the music (which is nonetheless excellent – if anything, it has such a pleasant tune it makes the words sound melancholy rather than devastating). So here they are: Tonight, Tonight by Paul Burch.

Tonight, tonight
I saw the one I’m gonna lose you to
You and him [sic] were talking
And somehow I knew
Tonight, tonight I heard the bells ringing in the news
And it may not be tomorrow but
There’s nothing I can do
After tonight
Tonight

Tonight, tonight
You tell me of your happiness
You hold your body to mine
And on my neck I feel your kiss
Tonight, tonight
You tell me all you want is this
But I have seen tomorrow and
I know that you will too
After tonight
Tonight

It came in a look that only I would know
Like the first one from me to you
Tonight I saw the one I’m gonna lose you to.

Tonight, tonight
I saw something I don’t want to see again
I have seen the future
What will be from what has been
Tonight, tonight
I wish for a reason I should know
That I have to let you go
At the time I fall for you
Tonight

Yes all my days are numbered
That I have left with you
After tonight
Tonight

Lyrics copyright Paul Burch 2000. Taken from the album Blue Notes – go and buy some Paul Burch records, he’s great.

Thunderbird is go!

I got a new laptop recently, and quickly set up all the software I wanted for it – all free and mostly open source. So: Firefox, not Internet Explorer; Open Office, not Microsoft Office; and Thunderbird, not Outlook Express.

Online help for Thunderbird suggested that in order to get my UK Yahoo webmail accounts pointing into Thunderbird would require an extension to Thunderbird and an add-on to the extension. This is RUBBISH: I downloaded all the gubbins, plugged it in, set it up and IT DIDN’T WORK.

To use Thunderbird with Yahoo webmail, you instead need to turn on POP access in your Yahoo Mail Options, then set up the account in Thunderbird using the server names Yahoo gives you. It’s a piece of piss, but I had to wait numerous days before a helpful poster on the Mozilla forums told me this. So: ignore the extensions, add-ons and plugins to use Yahoo with Thunderbird: YOU DON’T NEED THEM, even though there are plenty of webpages telling you that you do.

Small thing: I found if I copied and pasted the server name from the Yahoo website into Mozilla, it added an extraneous space in, which wasn’t at all obvious to see. If in doubt, type it in manually.

Tight

The Japanese grand prix underlined how enjoyable Formula One has been recently: the racing was close, there was a lot of incident and the winner of the race was not at all clear before the start, or for many laps into the race. Unlike last year, this has been a genuinely excellent season: in 2007 the championship was exciting, but a lot of the races, the vast bulk, were really very dull. This year, we have had memorable races at probably most of the grands prix.

This has been partly down to a lot of wet races, plus the track breaking up in Canada which had much the same effect; but the closeness has also been down to the stability of the regulations putting the cars within each other’s pace: the whole grid can regularly be covered by less than two seconds at the end of qualifying – in F1 terms this is extremely close. The result has been a lot of different race winners: in my experience, this is generally an indicator of a good season; only four winners or so suggests the season has been dominated by only one or two teams; considerably more and the season has probably been exciting. Have a look at the ITV-covered years:

1997: 6 (Villeneuve, Frentzen, Schumacher M, Hakkinen, Coulthard, Berger)
1998:4 (Hakkinen, Coulthard, Schumacher M, Hill)
1999: 6 (Hakkinen, Coulthard, Schumacher M, Irvine, Frentzen, Herbert)
2000: 4 (Schumacher M, Barrichello, Hakkinen, Coulthard)
2001: 5 (Schumacher M, Hakkinen, Coulthard, Schumacher R, Montoya)
2002: 4 (Schumacher M, Barrichello, Schumacher R, Coulthard)
2003: 8 (Schumacher M, Barrichello, Coulthard, Raikkonen, Montoya, Schumacher R, Fisichella, Alonso)
2004: 5 (Schumacher M, Barrichello, Montoya, Raikkonen, Trulli)
2005: 5 (Alonso, Fisichella, Raikkonen, Montoya, Schumacher M)
2006: 5 (Alonso, Fisichella, Schumacher M, Massa, Button)
2007: 4 (Raikkonen, Massa, Hamilton, Alonso)
2008: 7 (Hamilton, Kovaleinen, Massa, Raikkonen, Alonso, Kubica, Vettel… so far)

In compiling this list, I find generally it’s the seasons with more than six winners that I remember best: 1997, 1999, 2003 and 2008 makes for a credible list of the best four F1 seasons in that period. A lot of the “unusual names” above came in unusual races: rain, odd safety cars or strange first corner incidents: but even so, in an odd race it requires any driver who lucks into the win to have the pace to take advantage of the situation, and in less competitive seasons the lesser teams often are unable to do this. It’s worth noting none came in the year of major regulation changes: all came when regulations had been stable for at least a couple of years.  This doesn’t bode well for next year: the changes are intended to make the cars more suited to overtaking, but any major change tends to spread the field – so enjoy the remaining two races of this year while the field remains close!

The “Ten Years Later” affair

I love nostalgia, especially for the past… I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to put in this post, but the former fanzine editor and borderline anorak in me feels I simply must write… something.

Ten years ago today, on October 9th 1998, I went to me first ever proper gig: Kenickie at the MDH in Manchester. It was an interesting journey getting to that monumental point, and an even more interesting journey afterwards: it’s an evening whose effects still have a bearing on aspects of my life, and all for the better.

I had started in the lower sixth form five or six weeks earlier – sixteen is a bit on the late side for a first gig I suppose, unless you turn into a one-gig-a-year sort of person. I say first “proper” gig as there had been bands playing in school lunchtimes, yearning poring over the gig listings for the Apollo as Britpop came and went, and an interesting quasi-gig outside the Town Hall in Manchester as it took over as host city for the Commonwealth Games, with a satellite link-up to Kuala Lumpur, if I remember rightly. But that was in the open air, daytime, had two-song sets and was mimed bar vocals I think – though it still counts as the only time I’ve ever seen James, and the first of two times for New Order and first of three for Gold Blade. Tony Wilson was co-compering, thinking about it… I was in the Town Hall for the first time in ten years recently as well.

But this was a proper gig, no doubt about it: the first of many I attended over the next two years or so with my mate Jim. Indeed, Jim and I hung around together principally because of music: we’d been in the same class for a few years (but no longer were by this time), but not been pals particularly – I made a point of tracking him down and seeing if he wanted to go to see Kenickie, as I didn’t know anyone else likely to agree but knew full well Jim was ahead of the game in his musical taste. He still is – take a look at his blog, and compare it to this, and you’ll see we haven’t got much in the way of music in common any more. But for a while – the span of our sixth-form careers, in fact – we did a fanzine, went to gigs and all that malarkey. If he ever reads this post I’m pretty sure he’ll think it’s a load of wank.

As for the gig itself, what do I remember? Well, nearly everything (but I’m not going to try and write it all down here). The support acts were Spraydog and Velocette – we held the door for the lead singer of Velocette and briefly saw them soundcheck, as, having arrived ridiculously early, we were mistakenly let into the hall. The venue itself is now the Academy 2, but hasn’t changed much, or at least hadn’t when I was last there in 2006; back then it was the Main Debating Hall, although I didn’t find out what the letters stood for until much later.

Kenickie themselves were hurtling rapidly towards a split, but I didn’t know that – not being one of the elite who were on the internet and privy to its giddy rumour mill at the time – and frankly didn’t spot it at all. Comparing that show to others I have since heard bootleged, from earlier in their careers, it’s actually fairly obvious: to me on that evening, Lauren came across as unequivocally the lead singer, but it hadn’t always been like that. She and the other girls remained extremely witty on-stage and it was, I think, still a bloody excellent gig, but I can see why contemporary reviewers had taken to saying the band were “subdued by their usual standards” or similar.

It seems a bit odd in hindsight that I was so obsessed with Kenickie, but I undoubtedly was: I had listened to both their albums to the exclusion of most other things for the previous couple of months. I am still so familiar with them I can’t really get anything from listening to them these days, but their underrated second album Get In remains a criminally overlooked treasure in my view, peddling an unusual line in mournful pop. At the time I was impressed at the bravery of the band intaking such a radically different direction, and while this apparently Costello-like drive always to find something new to do on record can be a great strength, in this instance it was almost certainly a product of the band not having a very clear idea where it wanted to go.

It was all part of a journey, for me: when Britpop collapsed and all the decent music – as far as I was concerned at the time, anyway – vanished from the mainstream, I went looking for it. I had bought the NME for the first time that summer, and was listening to John Peel avidly by the end of the year. Kenickie I latched on to on the back of a few tracks from their Glastonbury set broadcast on Radio 1 – it was during the World Cup that year, and my tapes of festival highlights included the Lightning Seeds and Catatonia as well…

Frustratingly I have never found any photos or bootlegs of this particular show, and didn’t take a camera myself. Maybe it’s better to leave it in memory alone, but it’s a bit exasperating that one photographer on Kenickie.com went to their previous three Manchester gigs but not that one! I probably took it all a bit for granted at the time: seeing Emmy-Kate and Pete’s dad (he looks exactly like him) hanging around near the stairs afterwards seemed totally natural – of course, the stairs next to the dressing room are shut off to the public on gig nights now.

Of course, the gig had a scarcely believable epilogue, at least to me at the time: the following Thursday, only six days later, Kenickie split up. I didn’t find out for another week, in fact, until the next edition of Melody Maker came out and my friend Joel – who really bloody hated Kenickie – gleefully told me. I genuinely thought he was winding me up for a good five minutes. Amazingly, the Kenickie Fried Chicken message board, where Pete X famously left a message the morning after the split, kept going until 2005 and is still available to view. There’s still quite an interesting thread there about the final gig.

I think I’ve already broadly covered where the gig took me: more gigs, basically. Or maybe you could even say it marked the start of my years as an Indie Kid; certainly from fanzines to student radio, it sparked off a lot of important stuff, fairly directly – I wonder if I would have had the same enthusiasm for it all if I hadn’t gone along that evening. I’ve had great musical passions since, but none has proved to be a turning-point in my life in the way this did. Granted, it didn’t quite carry me into a career associated with music, and it’s not as big a deal to me as it once was, but its impact is still evident. To give just some of the most direct examples, quite apart from the numerous friendships that still endure but were initially sparked by a common musical interest, there’s a link on this blog to MJ Hibbett: I know him because I bought a fanzine billed as featuring some stuff about Kenickie and he featured on the cassette that came with the fanzine. I’m still in touch with its editor, and that of another of the zines I bought at the same time – though I tend to talk Doctor Who with the latter these days. But that’s a totally different strand of my autobiography…

Confessional mode: off.