Category Archives: Pop

Hue And Cry: Remote

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hue and cryJust for a few years at the end of the ‘80s, Hue and Cry bothered the charts with a classy fusion of pop, jazz and Latin.

Singer/co-composer Pat Kane said at the time that they wanted to create a musical mix of Scritti and Sinatra; they almost pulled it off with the excellent Remote, released in December 1988.

They also pulled off the Steely Dan-ish trick of singing about subjects which might seem unsuitable in a pop context (domestic violence on ‘Looking For Linda’, corporate sexism on ‘Dollar William’, Latin-American poverty on ‘Three Foot Blasts Of Fire’, the dawning of the Web on ‘The Only Thing More Powerful Than The Boss’).

hue and cry

And yet something about Hue and Cry seriously wound people up. When they emerged on the scene in 1987, they rode a wave of goodwill thanks to their clean-cut looks, anti-Thatcher politics and dynamic ‘Labour of Love’ single.

But by the time of Remote, the tide was turning. Hue and Cry’s relatively soft, ‘aspirational’ sound was anathema in the bombastic late-’80s. It was too jazz for the yuppies and too pop for the jazz revivalists.

Maybe the fact that they’re brothers never helped too – The Proclaimers were the more acceptable face of Celtic brotherhood, more meat-and-potatoes, more reliably blue-collar.

In 1995, Q Magazine wrote a cruel but witty hatchet piece about them entitled Britain’s Most Hated Band, offering them ‘a crisp tenner’ to split up (it didn’t do the trick…). Whatever. I love this album. Recording Remote in New York gave the Kanes access to some amazing guest musicians – Ron Carter and Michael Brecker play beautifully on the very pretty ‘Where We Wish To Remain’, and Pat’s excellent vocals demonstrate a big Mel Torme influence.

The prime NYC rhythm section of Wayne Braithwate and Dennis Chambers supplies a 24-carat groove on ‘Three Foot Blasts’. ‘Sweet Invisibility’ puts a fantastically exciting Latin horn arrangement right upfront in the mix, beating David Byrne at his own game.

‘Guy On The Wall’ is a witty portrait of a perpetual party wallflower set against a ‘Word Up’ groove and brilliant Salsa horn arrangement. Bassist Will Lee delivers beautifully measured performances on ‘Ordinary Angel’, ‘Dollar William’ and ‘Looking For Linda’, offering a subtle commentary on the songs back in the days when a musical performance was supposed to have some narrative development and couldn’t just be ‘cut and pasted’ together.

It’s quite funny to hear legendary jazz trumpeter Jon Faddis play a stratospheric solo on the otherwise very soppy ‘Violently’ (though Michael Brecker very controversially ‘fixed’ his solo – see below…) Pat Kane sings well throughout the album, with great phrasing, inventive ad-libs and excellent melodies.

But YouTube live footage from the Remote era hasn’t aged well and demonstrates why they were such a Marmite band, all cheap suits and wacky horn sections. I saw them at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1989 and struggle to remember anything about the gig.

Even they seemed to sense which way the wind was blowing; they disappeared for far too long after Remote, issuing the stripped-down Bitter Suite live EP and disappointingly brittle Stars Crash Down in 1991. The momentum and recording budget had gone.

But because in the main they lent towards jazz and Latin rather than funk and soul, they avoided the all-too-audible mistakes of contemporaries like The Blow Monkeys, Style Council, Climie Fisher and Johnny Hates Jazz. A great video has emerged of the boys discussing the making of the album:

Level 40-Who? True Confessions Of A Tribute Band Drummer

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level 42

Boon Gould, Phil Gould, Mark King, Mike Lindup, London 1982

I first became aware of the legendary jazz/funk/pop band Level 42 in January 1983 when I saw them on ‘Top Of The Pops’ miming to their hit single ‘The Chinese Way’.

I was just another young music fan and burgeoning drummer enjoying the Second Golden Age of British Pop, but this was different: the band was tight, soulful, and yet somehow otherworldly.

And their musicianship was superior to other chart acts of the day. For a few years, they were my band.

Cut to 2000. I was embarking on a career as a session drummer. However, all the gigs I’d been offered had been with sub-Stone Roses indie bands or smooth jazz acts. Then I saw an ad in Loot magazine: ‘Drummer Wanted for Level 42 tribute band. Call Nick on…’ My mind started racing. This was the dream gig.

I rang Nick – playing the ‘role’ of famous bassist/vocalist Mark King – immediately. I managed to impress him by mentioning that it would be fun to play ‘The Return Of The Handsome Rugged Man’, an obscure B-side that sounded like Jeff Beck jamming with Weather Report.

Nick had also recruited Peter, a keyboard player, and the three of us met for a drink, sharing Level 42 stories and trivia. These were the halcyon days. We were all buoyed by a shared love of the band’s music.

Nick was an amiable, meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. He did have a passing resemblance to Mark King, but also had the rather distressing habit of calling all the drummers he had ever worked with ‘w*nkers’…

The first few rehearsals went well. Nick was a capable bass player and, vocally, a passable Mark King impersonator. Peter did a good job of aping the band’s trademark keyboard sounds. I was trying to replicate Phil Gould’s drum parts to the letter and doing a reasonable job. We named ourselves Level It Up, a pun on the band’s 1983 hit ‘The Sun Goes Down (Living It Up)’.

After only a few rehearsals, Peter got us a gig at a Level 42 convention in a huge hotel off the A303. We were nowhere near ready to be playing live, but felt we might recruit a much-needed guitarist and backing vocalist at the venue.

The initial omens were not good – I had contracted laryngitis the day before the gig. By the time we arrived at the hotel, I was almost incapable of speech.

I looked at the live stage and immediately noticed something: no drums. Suddenly two assistants appeared and an Ikea-like structure was erected next to the keyboard rig: the dreaded, electronic V-Drums, with all of their naff connotations to the ‘boooo!’ sounds heard on terrible disco records. I had never played them before in my life, and the chances of Phil Gould ever playing them were miniscule.

We were told we would be playing at 9pm. I peered at the clock. It was 4pm. Somehow we got through the afternoon with regular toilet breaks and watching bass players trying to play exactly like Mark King in a soundalike competition.

Suddenly the raffle was over and we were on. I sat behind the V-drums tentatively and peered out into the crowd. There was silent expectation. Opening number ‘Almost There’ went by without any big hitches. There was even an enthusiastic reception at the end. They knew we were trying our best.

‘Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind’, conversely, was an unmitigated disaster. My V-drums started faltering halfway through the track and suddenly cut out completely. Had someone pulled the plug?

The stage manager rushed on to fiddle with the wiring while I tried to hide behind the keyboards. ‘It’s never happened before,’ he growled, throwing me an angry glance as the small crowd chatted amongst themselves. My throat tightened painfully as I tried to respond.

A dilapidated acoustic kit was summoned from an anteroom and hastily set up. We resumed playing but the thrill had gone and we couldn’t recover. This was the first real omen that our little tribute band was heading for the skids but I still didn’t heed the warnings.

Nick’s sister sang with us for a rare gig at his local and we got someone in to play guitar – he papered over the cracks for a while, but wasn’t the main problem.

The problem was that my relationship with Nick was starting to echo the real, troubled relationship between the people we were ‘impersonating’ in the tribute band – Phil Gould and Mark King – whose falling out precipitated the breakup of the original Level 42 lineup.

Was life imitating art? Maybe all tribute bands eventually start to ape their heroes in ways other than musical. Maybe it’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. If you spend many hours in a rehearsal room trying to copy another band’s music with all the management skills and forced intimacy that entails, do you naturally take on the roles that characterised the original band?

All I knew was that whereas I once looked forward to rehearsals, now I dreaded them. That’s when reality finally kicked in. It was time to leave the cut-throat world of the tribute band.

Sure, we’d ridden on the crest of a wave for a while, but let’s face it, the odds were stacked against us. Yes, we might have played The Railway Tavern in Andover once a month, The Green Man in Guildford now and again, The Old Red Lion in Carshalton if there was a last-minute opening.

But the phone wasn’t ringing, and, anyway, as I found out later, there was already a Level 40-Who doing that circuit.

‘Level 42: Every Album, Every Song’ by Matt Phillips is out now.

Portrait Of Paddy As A Young Man: Prefab Sprout’s Swoon

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prefab swoonPerhaps like a lot of Prefab fans, I came to Swoon some time after I’d bought and fallen in love with the later albums Steve McQueen, Protest Songs, From Langley Park to Memphis and Jordan The Comeback.

The dry, Thomas Dolby-less production came as a bit of a shock at the time but Swoon stands up pretty well today. Though some critics have compared it to Steely Dan, my contemporary reference points would be Lloyd Cole, The Smiths, Aztec Camera and Songs To Remember-era Scritti, though it’s basically impossible to locate Prefab’s influences.

It’s tempting to say that Swoon – released in March 1984 – sounds like the epitome of an ‘indie’ record, 1980s style, with its stripped-back production values and jagged edges. Prefab singer/songwriter Paddy McAloon recently told The Guardian that he thinks of it as more akin to Captain Beefheart, nicknaming the album ‘Sprout Mask Replica’!

Swoon definitely still sounds very much like a debut album; it’s perky, eager to please, naive, studenty. McAloon’s vocals occasionally resemble the ramblings of a slightly squiffy, randy teenager. But the album’s adolescent in a really good way with its literary flights of fancy, indulgent ruminations on romantic love and lots of audacious melodic flourishes.

paddy prefabIt sounds almost like rock, with solid 4/4 drums, always-inventive bass from Paddy’s brother Martin and ‘girlie’ backing vocals from Wendy Smith, and yet it resolutely refuses to ‘rock out’ with not a single power chord or jangly electric guitar in the mix.

Instead, the intrepid layering of synths and acoustic guitars (utilised to far greater effect on Steve McQueen and Jordan) probes the songs’ pressure points. And Smith’s pristine vocals give the music an enigmatic, otherworldly flavour.

Lyrically, Swoon reminds me of Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’; a survey of a young man’s hopes, dreams and romantic/professional disappointments. From a songwriting perspective, the words presumably came before the music, resembling stream-of-consciousness prose rather than traditional verse/chorus songcraft. Novelist/essayist Dave Eggers wrote a great piece about how much he was influenced by this golden generation of literate British songwriters.

As befitting a band from the North East, work (and the lack of it) is a recurring theme, particularly on ‘I Never Play Basketball Now’ and the extraordinary ‘Technique’. ‘Couldn’t Bear To Be Special’ is a classic Prefab ballad (though surely never the right choice for second single) and seems to offer a truly original take on the doomed love affair – the narrator simply doesn’t feel worthy to deserve the attentions of another. Very Nick Hornby-esque.

Future producer Thomas Dolby has talked about the shock of hearing ‘Don’t Sing’ when he was a guest reviewer on the Radio 1 ‘Round Table’ show.

‘Cruel’ is still a delicious piece of pop/bossa nova, more than a decade before the likes of Belle and Sebastian mined similar ground. Some of Paddy’s chords are gorgeous on this. Lyrically it’s original too, an expression of lust and affection from someone who is desperately afraid of offending his ‘enlightened’ paramour. A very modern love song. It was once covered by Elvis Costello.

Oh – and don’t forget to read the funny mock liner notes penned by McAloon in the guise of an over-exuberant music scribe.