The Memorex Years

Jesus Jones - Perverse (Food/EMI, 1993)

2007-05-11T15:16:00.000+01:00

"This time, we'll split the world once more, there's those that have and those that don't in information wars"

Barring Aztec Camera, and the odd overture to the The Housemartins and The Smiths, Jesus Jones were really the first 'indie' band that a major label saw mass market sales potential in. The band had barely been together for a couple of months when a demo tape of their arresting futurist take on the genre, blending angular guitar sounds with elements of hip-hop, sampling and house music, caught the attention of EMI, who duly signed the band to their 'alternative' imprint Food, also home at various times to Blur, Shampoo, Dubstar, Octopus and Diesel Park West.

Fronted by the mouthy and ambitious Mike Edwards, Jesus Jones had no trouble attracting 'indie' and mainstream attention with their somewhat radical but chart-friendly sound, with their debut album Liquidiser and its attendant singles (some of which were drawn directly from that original demo tape) troubling the lower reaches of the top forty during 1989. The unashamed adoption of a slicker and more commercial (but still drenched in ear-worrying guitar effects) sound for second album Doubt saw them break the top ten singles and albums charts, while the band themselves jabbered enthusiastically in interviews about the future of music and how much they hated New Kids On The Block (leading to a flood of angry letters to Smash Hits, who to their credit seemed to enjoy writing about Mike Edwards and company far more than they did NKOTB) and for a time it looked almost certain that, against all odds, Jesus Jones would break through to megastardom.

Doubt was released early in 1991, but had been 'in the can' for some time already by then; indeed, the Big First Single Real Real Real had been released almost a year earlier. The band and their label had always intended holding off until they had another big hit to launch the album on the back of, which was exactly what they got with International Bright Young Thing, but what nobody had bargained for was the ensuing slow-burning international success of the album. Almost twelve months after it had fleetingly nudged into the UK top forty, the fantastic Right Here Right Now suddenly took off in America and slowly but surely climbed to the top of the charts, with EMF's Unbelieveable in hot pursuit. The Second British Invasion (Of Shouty Blokes With Techno Rhythms) was apparently on its way, and EMI's promotional campaign to take full advantage of this inevitably stretched out to the end of 1991 and beyond.

The band had in fact started work on their next album shortly after Doubt was released, and by the summer of 1992 had most of the tracks finished and ready for release (and even played a couple of them during the short-lived regular 'Works In Progress' feature on BBC Radio 1's The Evening Session), but such was the mechanics of ongoing record company hoo-hah that a convenient slot in the overbooked diary could not be found before January 1993.

Doubt had contained a song (well, some people would class it as that) called Stripped, a deliberately atonal blast of rage ("everyone is hungry, everyone needs to know") built entirely around electronically generated samples with no 'real' instruments featured on it whatsoever, and was quite possibly the reason why the album contained a warning that it could damage loudspeaker equipment if played at high volumes. Mike Edwards was clearly quite taken with this new way of working with music, as for Perverse he effectively dispensed with real instruments altogether. The album was indeed originally recorded in one quick session with the full band playing, but after this he spent several months tinkering with computerised approximations of the individual instruments to create angular artificial tones to suit his musical vision. Absolutely nothing of recognisable traditional guitar group sounds remained on the completed tracks, and when the album was finally released, the other members of the band were simply credited according to the sonic frequencies that their 'sounds' spanned.

At the time of release, the overall sound of Perverse took some adjusting to, even for loyal Jesus Jones fans with some peripheral knowledge of pop music's technologically avant-garde fringe. More than a few early plays of the album - in some cases, possibly the only play it ever got - were met with cries of "turn it off!" halfway through, with the harsh virtual tones serving to perplex rather than excite.

It is one of popular culture's cruel ironies, though, that nothing dates faster than something that was ahead of its time (and what's most amazing is that initial work on the album had started as early as 1991), and where Perverse once sounded, well, perverse in its futuristicness, it now resembles nothing more than it does the sort of pop sounds that the likes of Christina Aguilera were making almost eight years ago. Albeit with slightly more ambitious lyrical concepts.

For no readily obvious reason, the cover art of Perverse features repeated shot-within-shot images of a pair of identical masked American wrestlers; elsewhere are feature film-style credits for 'The Virtual Players', and, in lieu of anything useful like song lyrics or information about how the album was put together, a set of standard issue Jesus Jones song-by-song sleevenotes penned by Mike Edwards. These range from the really rather thought provoking ("Nothing. No, more malevolent than that... a vacuum" for Spiral), to a load of meaningless twaddle about how the modern political lanscape looks disconcertingly different when viewed through the wrapper off a bottle of Lucozade, or something.

Opening with a zappy intro that sounds somewhat akin to a robot wasp chewing a late 1980s Pet Shop Boys single, Zeroes And Ones sets out the album's agenda in no uncertain terms, proclaiming "this time the revolution will be computerised" and boasting that "zeroes and ones will take us there". Back in 1993 the average indie kid was inclined to view computers and everything associated with them with some degree of suspicion (as they were, after all, a tool of 'the man'), but there's a confidence and assurance in Mike Edwards' words that suggests that maybe they aren't so much of a cornerstone of Orwellian nightmares after all. Then again, it's quite possible that the leverage of new technology into 'alternative' culture provided by Zeroes And Ones ultimately indirectly led to the overwhelming flood of not-particularly-good would-be 'indie' bands with their own flickering and badly-designed MySpace page. Sometimes, you just can't win.

Anyway, rightly or wrongly, there's no denying that the tie-dyed megalomaniac's vision of the future was absolutely spot on, and in fact it's not the only time he manages to pull that off on this album. Unfortunately, though, the message is somewhat undermined by some of the supporting rhetoric, most notably a Think Of A Number-standard explanation of how computers communicate with each other, and far too much cheerleading for so-called 'virtual reality'. In fact, the lyrics to Zeroes And Ones are the most dated thing about the whole album; while the sense of optimism and enthusiasm still strikes a chord, most of the terminology now seems embarrassingly primitive and more than a little redolent of Channel 4's attempts to 'explain' the internet with the aid of none-more-1990s 'glamour model' Jo Guest.

When you're presented with a song as fantastic - not to mention hard-rocking, without featuring a single recognisable guitar sound - as Zeroes And Ones, such technological naivety is easy to forgive. An obvious first single that was released second, it stalled undeservedly low in the charts but still sounds great now.

The Devil You Know, the not even slightly obvious first single that was released first, takes an entirely different approach to the techno assault of the opening track, slowly sauntering in with a moebius strip-like jangly pattern that slowly builds up to the intense and hammering song proper. Nothing to do with Kylie Minogue's original hotpant-accompanied pop anthem, and less still to do with Sonia's jaw-droppingly irritating Eurovision entry of around the same time, the lyrics bemoan popular culture's insistence on recycling its own past instead of striving for new and innovative ideas, summing it up beautifully with the line "look at you now, look at you then, see how you will be".

Nobody in their right mind could ever accuse Jesus Jones of not having tried to do anything 'new', especially with this particular album, but while the sentiments are easy to sympathise with, the precise targets of the lyrical ire are more obscure. If anything, they're more than a little offbeam for coming in the immediate aftermath of a number of bands (Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets etc, all of whom Mike Edwards was keen to stress his enthusiasm for in interviews), comedians (well, Vic Reeves, at any rate) and assorted other artistic types achieving so much by mining the ideas of the past and combining them with modern and forward-looking approaches. And yet, as a cruel quirk of fate would have it, when Jesus Jones disappeared for the best part of four years post-Perverse, they were comprehensively sidelined by the steamrollering runaway success of a band who actually seemed to take some warped sense of pride in the mindless and artless revivalism of the sounds of yesteryear.

Anyway, irrespective of all that, the lyrics to The Devil You Know are top notch and deal with a difficult and abstract subject highly effectively, and the moody and powerful backing still sounds great too. In this track and Zeroes And Ones, Perverse has a brace of barnstorming openers that go a long way towards proving that Mike Edwards' vision of the 'Virtual Players' had something in it after all. The unfortunately titled Get A Good Thing, however, undermines this by proving that such an approach is best used sparingly. Not that there's anything wrong with the song itself, just that it's not exactly well served by its somewhat tinny and abrasive backing where the Jesus Jones of a couple of years earlier would have had neat synth sounds and a hefty bassline. Actually, just a discernible bassline would have been nice.

Seeing as its lyrics refer obliquely but heavily to the Gulf War of early 1991, From Love To War somewhat gives away how long the album took to make it to release. Sung in a croaky whisper over an ominous burbling backing melody, the song starts off as a straightfoward admonishment of unspecified but easily guessed world leaders, and turns in the middle eight into a quite remarkable rant on the impotent fury associated with making such statements in an apathetic and unheeding world, delivered with such venom that you can almost hear him "throw myself at the walls" in frustration. Although that might just be one of those swanky new electronically generated sound thingys.

From Love To War seuges virtually seamlessly into Yellow Brown, which replaces Week-Ending-swallows-a-dictionary style satire with something far more musically and lyrically ominous. Over a suitably smoggy and choked backing, Edwards sings with evident disquiet of how "a colour now spells our end", charting the global progress of a massed pollutant ("in the city air, in all our seas, you can see every other colour bleed into Yellow Brown"). Free of pretentiousness, self-righteousness and hand-wringing, and all the more direct and alarming for it, Yellow Brown simply states that pollution is here and increasing, that public and politicians alike are not doing anything about it ("and I won't do, and you won't do, cause we know there's nothing they will do about Yellow Brown"), and that they haven't got forever in which to stand around not doing anything about it ("there is no time to spend, concerned that this is just a trend"). Although the song was scoffed at by some reviewers on the album's release, in this age of the stable door being closed after the global warming has bolted, it's hard not to picture Mike Edwards wryly noting that he told everyone so. And what's more, told them so in straight language without any hyperbole.

Magazine ("all of life in fun size!") on the other hand, is a rather patronising swipe at those stupid, stupid fools who spend their time leafing through loosely bound collections of pages. The lyrics make no distinction between different types of magazines or different types of readers, and therefore appears to be focusing its ire as much on Private Eye, New Scientist and The Listener as it is on What's On TV. This is something of a hypocritical stance for someone who at the time was regularly to be seen on the front of various music magazines talking up their band with headline-friendly soundbites, not to mention a rather daft attitude to have if you're also hailing the burgeoning information revolution of the internet in the same breath. On top of all that, it's not even a particularly good song.

Thankfully, obvious first single that was released third The Right Decision is on hand to lift proceedings slightly. Underpinned by some neat wooshing/thudding guitar-esque noises and zingy high-pitched synth melodies, as well as what appears to be some cunningly disguised sampled Arabic singing, on face value it would appear to be little more than a string of Rory Bremner-esque observations of Life's Great Ironies, somewhat akin to Leonard Nimoy's Highly Illogical, or Alanis Morrissette's Ironic if she actually had some semblance of an understanding of what the word might have meant. The recurrence of those wry observations on the Gulf War don't exactly help matters much either.

However, this is not the work of someone who thinks that rain on your wedding day constitutes irony, nor indeed a Vulcan perplexed by our primitive human notions of parking spaces. Instead it's a collection of wry musings on the legality of tobacco and marijuana, police brutality, and the worry that "the problem with success is you become what you detest". So which new Kid On The Block did Mike Edwards become, then?

It may have wildly underperformed as a single but The Right Decision is in all other respects probably the most successful track on Perverse. It achieves a perfect balance between the familiar Jesus Jones sound and the scary new world of virtual music, and has a catchy hook to boot, and if this had been released as the first single (and if the various record companies had got their act together and got it released straight away while the band was still at its peak of popularity), things could have turned out very different indeed.

Your Crusade starts out with a rattle of Adam Ant-liked drumming, then diverts straight into what sounds like a backing track of an unreleased Doubt track being played through one of those massive alert loudspeakers from a 1960s spy film, full of wooshing buzzsaw guitar (well, virtual guitar) sounds and dramatic synth sweeps with a bit more of that sampled World Music vocalisation thrown in for good measure. Despite the awful opening line "include me out", this is one of the most lyrically arresting songs on the album, a pointed rejoinder to those who would seek to hijack the Jesus Jones 'cause' to further their own personal political agendas ("don't need your approval, your safety in numbers, you stay in your team, I don't care enough to share your dream").

Your Crusade is easily one of the best songs that Jesus Jones ever recorded, and it can only be hoped that it succeeded in shaking loose whoever it was that was trying to use avant-garde indie-techno as some sort of sample-friendly stepping stone to something or other. Its only weak point is the inclusion of a sort of 'character jumping in ZX Spectrum game' sound at seemingly random moments, which sounds not only of out place but also plain daft.

Although the release of Perverse tied in very neatly with the transmission of the brilliant fourth series of One Foot In The Grave, Don't Believe It doesn't appear to be any form of tribute to Richard Wilson, rather a vague continuation of the theme of Your Crusade. This time, over a slightly more jaunty backing, the lyrical bile is confined to someone who "came at the right time, filled the right space" and seemingly then spent most of their time putting down the Jones boys in public. There's some nice turns of phrase ("you're evil personified come to avenge, our perfect enemy out for revenge"), particularly the cunningly self-referential "you'll get no excuse in this song", and it's a decent enough tune too, but the song overall seems a little too subdued for its purposes and doesn't really quite have the impact that it perhaps ought to. And anyway, it's impossible to listen to without thinking of Victor Meldrew.

A similar Coincidental Comedy Conundrum surrounds Tongue Tied, which most would surely identify as a fantastic pastiche Motown number originally heard in a second series episode of Red Dwarf, which proved so enduringly popular that it was released as a single (in a noticeably inferior arrangement) early in 1993, rather than a humble Jesus Jones album track. Starting off promisingly as a weird Eastern drone created from wholly unnatural sounds, with Mike Edwards doing his own non-sampled World Music-style singing over the top for once. Then it gets a bit more uptempo and rock-ish, albeit still with a pleasingly wailing atonal edge to the melody. The lyrics aren't really much worth dwelling on, although given that their theme is inarticulacy perhaps this was entirely intentional.

Your Crusade, Don't Believe It and Tongue Tied all seem to occupy common thematic ground, presenting a bullish and self-assured defiance towards detractors and doubts. This is hardly surprising given that in interviews around the time of the album's release, Mike Edwards suggested that most of the album was written in the throes of an attack of depression that followed the band's commercial breakthrough. Despite this, they're also all on the musically pleasant side of the virtual fence.

Spiral, however, kicks off with a harsh and abrasive zapping sound, giving way to a subdued cacophony of buzzing, humming, and ominously rumbling basslines. This is the darker side to the preceding tracks both musically and lyrically, charting the breakdown of order, method and indeed 'right time' and 'right place', phrases that crop up numerous times elsewhere on the album. "Catch the light a different way and all the bullshit falls away and I stare into a heart of darkness, there is no good no evil, only me", runs the oh-so-cheerful chorus, and while it makes for entertaining listening it's probably best not to ruminate on which dark corners of the mind this might have been dredged up from.

Idiot Stare doesn't exactly serve to lighten the mood, referring as it does to "a shadow that hugs me", "the corruption between us" and being "caught in an idiot stare". It is, however, the point where everything about this album falls into place, where the disorientating new sounds stop being treated as a Perrey & Kingsley-Go-Digital style gimmick and are shaped into a cohesive and thrilling rock sound with a seamless segue into an orchestral breakdown, and where a solid melody is finally called into service. It's one of the album's highpoints, and fittingly was the only non-single Perverse-era track to be included on the band's greatest hits collection Never Enough. The problem is that as this is the last track on an album that even at a mere twelve tracks already seems too long, it's come along a bit too late.

Incredible as it may seem, Perverse was very nearly even longer (and not just in Japan, where so-so b-sides Phoenix and Caricature were slotted in as extra tracks). Another song named Hang On Every Word was seemingly removed at literally the very last minute, having been talked up by Mike Edwards in pre-album interviews and even making it as far as the first batch of promo copies. This was something of a shame, as it featured both an impressive Zeroes & Ones-like arrangement built around a vocal sample and lyrics that tackled the slightly less culturally ephemeral subject of jargon designed to confuse and alienate. If this had been included and one or two other tracks taken out, and the whole tracklisting shuffled around a bit, the result could well have been an album that was sifnificantly easier to listen to in one sitting.

Mike Edwards was a rarity among indie musicians in that instead of drawing influence from the past he looked almost exclusively to the future. Unfortunately, it was a future that didn't necessarily view his band with mutual enthusiasm. The by now standard record company jitters saw the following Jesus Jones album - ironically titled Already - repeatedly pushed back in the schedules until it ended up coming out early in 1997. By that time Britpop and its ensuing descent into tedious Noel Gallagher-endorsed post-Britpop had put paid to any chances of a Jesus Jones revival, even EMF having long since thrown in the towel, and the band became the constant target of sneering music press jokes at their expense from writers determined to prove how 'down' they were with the latest new bands. The album's inevitable failure to generate any interest in this atmosphere pretty much put paid Jesus Jones' future career prospects. A sad and wholly undeserved fanfareless fade-out for one of the most promising bands of recent times, if we're being honest about it.

Along with the rest of Jesus Jones' albums, Perverse is still available to buy on CD, and perhaps more appropriately as a digital download. Although it might not quite have been in line with what he was thinking of at the time he wrote the lyrics, in a sense Zeroes & Ones really have taken Mike Edwards and his oft-overlooked music 'there'.

35 Summers - Really Down (RCA, 1991)

2006-11-30T16:57:00.000Z

"Inflicting boredom, just to try and pass the time"

1991 was not a good time to be in a British indie band. With the music press turning on the 'indie-dance' sound as Last Year's Thing and realigning their attentions towards the more unwashed and less interesting sounds drifting over from across the Atlantic, it was hard enough for the likes of Happy Mondays and The Charlatans to get by, let alone such second division acts as Airhead, The Dylans, The Milltown Brothers and Paris Angels, who generally found themselves either ridiculed or ignored by the NME and Melody Maker and ultimately by the general indie-orientated record-buying public. Candyland, Candy Flip, The Candyskins and any other bands with 'candy' in their name were not going to be ascending to megastardom, no matter how hard their record companies may have pushed them. Needless to say it was the snobby and elitist fashion-conscious music 'fans' who were missing out on this occasion, something that is reflected by the dizzying second-hand prices such bands command nowadays.

35 Summers were even more unfortunate than most, as they were one of a small group of bands who had the misfortune to be saddled with the ungainly monicker 'Scallydelic'. All of the bands that found this label slapped upon them - which included the The Real People, Rain, Top, The Tambourines, Pele, The Stairs and River City People - had only three vague factors in common; a closer geographical proximity to Liverpool than to Manchester, a mild passing interest in a certain sport involving two teams of eleven players, and a tendency towards dance-tinged jangly guitar pop that fell somewhere between the brilliance of The La's and the uneven-ness of The Farm.

Judging from their meagre recorded output, 35 Summers - vocalist Dave Pichilingi, guitarists Ian Greenwood and Duncan Lomax, bassist Robby Fay, keyboard player Jamie Southern and drummer Alan Curry - were definitely leaning towards the La's end of the scale, and although nobody deserves to be bundled in with such a shabby, ill-concieved and non-existent (not to mention ridiculously named) pretend genre as 'Scallydelic', at the end of the day they really only had themselves to blame by making their footballing craziness explicit with a top-selling t-shirt bearing the image of famed Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly. In an age when many indie bands were reputed to be shifting more t-shirts than actual records, this highly popular item of long-sleeved fashionwear did much to build 35 Summers' profile, but also ended up slightly obscuring the fact that they also made rather good music. All the same, this particular t-shirt had the unsual distinction of being inadvertently captured for posterity on film on two seperate occasions - Peter Hooton is seen wearing one in the Harry Cross Out Of Brookside-equipped video for The Farm's Groovy Train, while from a slightly more enduringly watchable perspective, John Peel also sports the accidentally iconic garment while lurking backstage at the 1991 Reading Festival during Blur's fascinating tour film Starshaped.

35 Summers' first release, on a small independent label, was a suitably spaced-out reworking of The Beatles' Come Together (think along the same lines as The Soupdragons' I'm Free, The Farm's (I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone and Candy Flip's Strawberry Fields Forever, along with any of the several hundred other sixties covers done by any of several hundred other indie-dance bands, and you're probably halfway there already), bolstered by spoken word samples from the bizarre but self-explanatory long-player Shankly Speaks. On the strength of this they managed to secure a deal with RCA, for whom they would record and release two singles in 1991 - I Won't Try and Really Down.

Unveiled as part of a Peel session in August 1991, Really Down begins with the singer stating that "self-indulgence, it's a favourite past-time of mine". If it really honestly genuinely was, then you wouldn't know it from this song as the lyrics are an economical, heartfelt and utterly non-self-indulgent evocation of, well, feeling a little bit down in the dumps for no obvious reason, with the chorus complaining - with a possible hint of exaggeration - that "I must be the most unhappy man in the world". There's also a spot of rumination on inarticulacy, or to be more accurate the inarticulacy of others, complaining of how "no-one else seems to take the time to write the lines to express how I really feel". It's a bit of a puzzling complaint given that the lyrics seem to achieve this aim perfectly well by themselves, but not as puzzling as the fact that this lyrical theme seemed to be so common to so many indie-dance bands, and to The Mock Turtles in particular. Did they all think that someone else should be writing their lyrics for them?!?

Musically, Really Down is anything but down in the dumps. Dominated by a bright chord progression, ringing guitars, sparkling harmonies and what sounds like an accordian hiding away in the background somewhere, it's a catchy and upbeat pop song and its only flaw is that the sturdy rhythm section isn't really pushed to the fore, only really coming into its own in a section where the arrangement momentarily strips down to vocals and drums. The standard single edit of the song was joined on its various formats by an 'Extended Version', surely one of the last relics of the days when a 12" Mix simply meant doubling the length of the instrumental bits, and a 'Club Remix' by long-forgotten DJ team The Sound Foundation. The latter should theoretically have put right the minor problems of the original mix, but unfortunately it ends up suffering from exactly the opposite problems - while the remixers make the most of the rhythm section, they also jettison much of the structure and charm of the song itself.

Really Down had all the makings of a summery pop hit, particularly in the indie-friendly summer of 1991, but like all of 35 Summers' releases it didn't make much of an impression on the charts. Not even a reasonable amount of radio support and tours with the fairly highly profiled Northside and the extremely highly profiled EMF seemed to be enough to propel their releases into the lower reaches of the top forty, although the failure of Really Down is perhaps slightly more comprehensible than that of I Won't Try; the song's title is hardly prominent in the lyrics, which almost always seems to impede chart progress for some reason, and whereas the earlier singles had boasted a vaguely pyschedelic pastel-stroke-citrus hued design, the sleeve bears a semi-religious, semi-militaristic and wholly pretentious 'weeping statue' image that hardly suggests that catchy upbeat pop music might be lurking inside.

Sadly, both the lyrics and the off-puttingly maudlin sleeve of Really Down proved to be depressingly propetic for 35 Summers. To accompany the release of the single, they had attempted to replicate the success of the earlier Shankly t-shirts by producing a similar one featuring Leonard Rossiter in full-on Rigsby from Rising Damp mode. Yorkshire Television objected to what was essentially unauthorised use of their copyrighted image for commercial purposes, and the usual legal sabre-rattling resulted in a settlement that, perhaps predictably, was hardly exactly in the band's favour. Following this, their relationship with RCA worsened, and after their lone album Sketch was shelved, 35 Summers called it a day. Needless to say, the original single is now worth a relative absolute fortune, but unless you're particularly desperate to own the Club Mix and Extended Version, Really Down can be easily obtained on a belated Japanese issue of Sketch, and on the fourth volume of Twee.Net's (cough) 'semi-official' compilation series The Sound Of Leamington Spa.

And now, for the Edit News fanatics of this world, here's the original introductory paragraph for this article...

Actually, this particular jangle-pop overview won't be appearing on The Memorex Years just yet, as it's currently forming part of the November-long 'Songs To Learn And Sing' project at the ace Sweeping The Nation, from where an MP3 of the track can also be downloaded. And read (and listen to) the other twenty nine 'Songs To Learn And Sing' entries while you're there because they're great.

The Cardigans - Life (Trampolene, 1995)

2006-08-24T12:04:00.000+01:00

"She will not get bothered at all, she's just watching the water at fall"

It's perhaps an indication of how much the media's attitude to what constitutes 'pop' music has changed in recent times that, in the mid-1990s, a sudden deluge of really rather good Scandinavian bands that were perfectly suited to mainstream audiences found themselves shunted to the sidelines and made to stand in the corner marked 'indie'. Despite sounding not unlike A-ha had done ten years previously, none of them were to enjoy quite the same sort of radio and press support that Morten 'Horten Forten' Harket and his semi-animated bandmates had benefitted from, and as a result never quite managed to make the same kind of chart breakthrough.

The Wannadies and Whale both had their moments (well, to be strictly accurate, Whale had their moment), but it was clear from the outset that The Cardigans were the leaders of this particular pack. Somewhere between girlie bedsit indie, loungey jazz and stereotypical Scandinavian pop music, they also had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of very good songs and by a stroke of good fortune their UK launch couldn't have been better timed. The Cardigans' music sat perfectly alongside both so-called 'Britpop' (which, although the 'history books' seem keen to forget this, had a far wider pan-European slant before Oasis came along and started messing everything up) and its curious offshoot, the easy listening-fixated 'Loungecore' movement. Having a sensitive, bookish, extremely easy-on-the-eye lead singer didn't exactly hinder their cause either.

Life, the 1995 album that brought them to the attention of the UK's record-buying public, was promoted as their first offering but that wasn't strictly true. Life was in fact an amalgamation of the best tracks from the two albums they had already released in their native Sweden, Life and the previous year's curiously-titled Emmerdale. Even though the resultant 'new' album was somewhat overmanned, some tracks had to be lost along the way and were consigned to back catalogue oblivion. A lot of this was slighter fare including In The Afternoon, Cloudy Sky, Our Space, Seems Hard, Last Song, Pikebubbles, Sunday Circus Song, Closing Time and the endearingly silly Over The Water (although some of these did feature as bonus tracks in other territories); a more surprising omission was Black Letter Day, a strong and catchy number that had previously been released as a single in Sweden. Meanwhile, if anyone can shed any light on what the elusive Happy Meal (presumably an earlier version of Happy Meal II, as featured on their 'second' - ie third - album First Band On The Moon) was exactly, then please do.

A bit of a myth has grown up in recent years, particularly after The Cardigans' brief dalliance with heavy rotation on MTV, that Life was largely twee and cloying and generally unlistenable to anyone bar particularly fey indie kids who were scared of loud guitars. This, it can be safely said, is nonsense; the album does admittedly have one foot in a studied form of what might be termed tweeness, but this is tempered by mellow jazzy tones and touches of mock-abrasiveness, and by the fact that the songwriting is garnished with the sort of frost-dusted ambience that might reasonably be expected of a band who had grown up amid excessive quantities of snow. This was - perhaps unintentionally - mirrored by the sleeve design, where subdued light blues and turquoises rubbed shoulders with a photo of vocalist Nina Persson dressed up as a cutesy fluffy-jacketed ice skater. This was in fact part of an 'interchangeable cover design' conceit that also featured the floppy fringed Boy Cardigans dressed up as acrobats, submarine commanders and the like, but it's a fair bet that the pretty girl in skates remained steadfastly rooted to the front of most copies.

Life opens with a swirling organ flitting from speaker to speaker, and the sound of Nina fumbling with some matches, clearing her throat and lighting a firework, which explodes in a hilariously muted fashion just as the music kicks in. This is the intro to Carnival, the first track to be released as a single from this reshuffled version of the album. It also manages to put paid to all this 'twee' nonsense straight away; not just with the funky colourful-lights-on-a-dark-wintry-night backing that shuffles around like a barrel organ caught between two bumper cars (and also has some weird stretchy guitar sounds hidden away in the mix), but with the lyrics as well. Carnival is an everyday story of boy-meets-girl on the way to see the "bright lights from giant wheels", but they're both too shy to do anything about it and just end up going on the bumpy slide for a bit. For obvious reasons it's presented from the female protagonist's point of view, bemoaning the fact that she'd intended to "take you down there just to make you mine in a Merry-Go-Round" but has resigned herself to the fact that "I will never know 'cause you will never show". Her frustration - both at the non-move making indie boy and at herself - is cleverly signposted through occasional repetitions of the chorus line "come on and love me now" being growled with an impatience that suggests she wishes one or the other of them would just get on with it and make said 'move' before they have to go home and watch Den Olaf Prott Utställning (Inlemmande Moose Omväxling Timme) on Sveriges TV.

Carnival is a fine way to start any album, which is why it's strange to find Gordon's Gardenparty straight after it. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with this prettified laid-back piano and flute-driven bossanova about being told you have a cute dress while drinking "bubbly pink champagne on ice" at a party also attended by, erm, Inspector Clouseau, just that it's a lot closer to the wrong end of the Twee-o-meter than the opening track and sounds a little out of place next to it. That said, it does boast a rather impressive non-twee instrumental break featuring an Isley-Brothers-meet-Edwyn-Collins guitar solo and handclaps.

Daddy's Car, on the other hand, is much more like it. A world away from the boneheaded, risibly 'debauchery'-fuelled road trips depicted in the average (in both senses of the word) Hollywood movie, this is a chronicle of some polite and civilised European youngsters borrowing the titular parental vehicle for a jaunt "from Luxembourg to Rome, from Berlin to the sun, from Paris to Lausanne, from Athens to the sun", burning the candle at both ends in a whirl of hotel bars and finding a card to send from wherever they went. It's by far the best composition on here - no mean feat in this impressive showcase of songwriting skills - and serves up yet another challenge to the lazy critical assumption by throwing in a lot of jerky distorted guitar work over the expected mannered jangling.

Sick & Tired was the second single to be lifted from the album, and possibly the only chart-troubler in history to make prominent use of a bassoon. Although the band were far from being 'Sixties Revivalists' or any such nonsense, there were certainly some retro tinges to Life and this minor key jangler was heavily rooted in them, containing as it does an anachronistic woodwind arrangement, 'Beat Boom'-era strumming and a Hank Marvin-esque guitar solo. However, the 1960s they were harking back to was a very different one (or should that be 'were very different ones'???) to that which their unimaginative UK-based post-Oasis 'Noelrock' dullards believed themselves to be mining. This was an altogether different vision of that over-eulogised decade, and probably a much colder one too, refracted through a land where chilly Moomin-fixated winds blew as The Hootenanny Singers were held up as the last word in far-out psychedelia. Perhaps betraying Cultural Imperialism in full effect, the idea that 'The Sixties' might have been subject to slight cultural variations is generally a mystery to those who are force-fed the legacy of Swinging London, only ever vaguely and tantalisingly hinted at by European films, literature and indeed pop records. Its influence is all over Life, though, and not just in the music itself; the promo videos for Rise & Shine and Black Letter Day leaned heavily on the grainy European art film semi-genre (particularly the latter, which was built around black and white footage of Nina miming to the song on a couch in a threadbare studenty 'pad'), while Carnival saw them decked out as a sixties cabaret band.

Despite containing the lone English-as-a-second-language slipup of the entire album ("tired of being weightless, for all these looking-good boys", and it's still not clear whether the narrator was trying to get attention by starving herself or simply ejecting herself into space), the downbeat lyrics of Sick & Tired are a real highlight and point towards the band's obsession with darker themes of emotional anguish, which were also lurking just below the surface of a couple of other tracks on Life and would be given an alarming full-blown exploration on First Band On The Moon. It's basically the sound of a moping attic-flat-dwelling girl putting on a brave face after rejection and/or humiliation, feigning contempt for transparent excuses ("you can always say you did no major harm, oh spare me if you please"), but at the same time admitting to being "sick, tired and sleepless, with no-one else to shine for, sick of all my distress, but I won't show I'm still poor"). Just in case there was any doubt, the coda spells it out in no uncertain terms: "symptoms are so deep, something here's so wrong, nothing is complete, nowhere to belong, I think I'd better stay here on my own". Turned out nice again, eh?

Just as the listener is starting to get a bit worried about the narrator of Sick & Tired, and wondering how to make sure that all sharp objects and Sylvia Plath novels are put out of her way on a high shelf, along comes the altogether brighter Tomorrow. An Obvious Third Single That Never Actually Was, this cod-Motown number with a cheerful brass accompaniment is one of the slighter offerings but not really for musical reasons; rather that the third person lyrics about someone missing a girl who's a full "fifteen hour trip away" don't have the same impact as the more confessional overtones of other numbers. Still, it's well worth it for the great guitar breakdown section towards the end.

Rise & Shine, The Obvious Third Single That Actually Was, is generally considered to be Exhibit 'A' in the case of Sweeping Rock Generalisms vs. The Cardigans Being A Bit Twee. It has to be admitted that, on face value, this criticism holds a certain amount of weight, but Rise & Shine is a good deal more sophisticated than the average annoyingly chirpily-chorused pop song. The rising and shining suggested by the title is not some Rod, Jane & Freddy-esque celebration of the fact that when the sun comes up it's morning, but a futile exhortation by the presumably now slightly less distraught narrator of Sick & Tired to herself to cheer up a bit. Although she claims that "I want to be alone for a while, I want the Earth to breathe to me, I want the waves to grow loud, and I want the sun to bleed down", she's also getting a bit tired of her own miserablism and so has taken to raising her head and whispering "rise and shine". Whether or not this did ultimately put paid to her desire to see the wounded moon is sadly unrecorded. Meanwhile, as far as gradations on the scale of tweeness are concerned, it's worth noting that the ringing one-note guitar line is a remnant from the decidedly un-chirpy original Sweden-only recording, which was somewhat angular and jagged in its minimalist arrangement and barely recognisable as the same song.

The delicate, arpeggiated Beautiful One happily sees a further upturn in mood, sung from the perspective of a girl watching her "beautiful wonderboy" dozing as the daybreak pokes through the curtains, casting "soft beams from an early sun on my truly beautiful one". More descriptive than much of the rest of the album, the lyrics take a poetic slant and speak warmly of "an envelope filled up with words for you", being "lost in the blankets", and "tasting like roses and candy bars, coffee and old cigars". Which doesn't sound very flattering, although some early promo photos of The Cardigans suggested that they were rather taken with unlit Cuban air-pollutants. Travelling With Charley veers off at an altogether different tangent, opting for a surprisingly convincing pastiche of Cold War thriller soundtrack jazz to accompany a song about being the glamorous sidekick of some sort of psychic secret agent. By the sound of it ("my agent hasn't solved a case, my agent never finds a trace"), he's certainly no John Steed and she's the brains of the outfit; when things are left to the hapless Charley, who once had his memory wiped and walked straight into a tree, they invariably find that "once we're getting to the place, someone else has solved the case". Even going as far as to end on a 'mystery' chord, Travelling With Charley could have made a great theme for an off-the-wall detective series about the two mismatched characters. Instead, Nina Persson later ended up singing on the theme tune for a miserable remake of an off-the-wall detective series that didn't need remaking in the first place, but that's another story.

Though still far from sounding like Black Flag, Fine is a lot heavier than the rest of the album, featuring a comparatively hard sound with thumping drums and squealing guitars. Harking back to the obsessions and indeed obsession of Carnival, the protagonist here is irked that her boyfriend won't ask her to marry him, despite the fact that she already wears his "golden ring inside" ("suits me very fine"). It seems it doesn't matter whether they're upon a roof below the moon, nearby a park bench in the sun or upon the stairway to your room, she's always left pleading "why won't you wrap your life around those certain words I just found?". Despite its relative rocking-ness, Fine ends with some pretty harmonies and a fadeout flourish on the organ (not to mention Nina adding an off-mic "ooh"), and segues neatly into the jazzy waltz-time Celia Inside.

The lush arrangements of the rest of the album give way to a stripped-down sound here, with most of the song built around some improv-friendly acoustic guitar jamming and soft drumming, the odd electric piano tinkle and burst of loungey trumpet adding that bright-sunshine-on-an-icy-day feel that mirrors the mood of the lyrics. Yet another tale of moping around in a bedroom, albeit a third-person one ("you don't want the sun to shine in, so you turn the curtains down... and you don't feel it's sunny outside"), it turns out that the titular Celia is the cause of all this misery as "she won't care one way or the other" about the feelings of her jilted suitor. That jilted suitor - and it's (presumably deliberately) ambiguous over whether they are male or female - certainly does care both one way and the other, utterly crushed by her heartlessness ("you don't want no joy for a while, but you stay up late at night, it hurts you that she's still alive") and immersing themselves in poetry for comfort, but still in awe of her beauty and her purity (erm, considering the apparent situation, what 'purity' would that be exactly?).

Hey! Get Out Of My Way is another sort-of rocker, 'sort of' in the sense that the band's sturdy arrangement is counterpointed by a stereotypical Nordic flute and the reappearance of that celebrated bassoon. It appears to find the overemotional young lady sketched out in previous songs finally discovering a bit of self-confidence and telling a useless boyfriend to sling his hook in no uncertain terms ("I'm sick and tired of your dramatic ways, and when I think of all those wasted days, I shake loose of your laces"). As the song progresses this self-confidence only builds, with her first becoming blunt ("I'm not in love with you") and finally threatening "I'll be good to you if you stay gone, far out of my view".

Self-confidence is not, however, in much evidence during After All.... A piano and husky voice duet recorded in such intimacy that you can almost see Nina leaning against a grand piano in a nightclub scene in a film, it's an unremittingly bleak offering and even the brief guitar solo sounds as though it's being played by someone so haunted by the song that they give up after a couple of seconds. The opening line states "after all you were perfectly right, but I'm scaring close to insanity, though our relation just split me in two", and that 'scaring close' becomes just plain scaring when it degenerates into a long list of how on a night like this nothing stays the same, nothing looks the same, pieces fall apart, visions fall apart and finally nothing could be worse. Like The Smiths' Asleep, this is so frighteningly close to a suicide note in song that it almost makes you want to reach for an international phone directory and try and convince the young lady that life isn't so bad after all. There's something of an attempt at lightening the mood by closing with a 'nice' piano chord, but that chord really is fighting a battle that's already been lost.

Fortunately, there's a little bit of humour on hand to lift proceedings in time for the end of the album. Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is, as the title rather obviously suggests, the old Black Sabbath number transposed into Cardiganland to fantastic effect, with the monster riffs of Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler replaced by jangly guitars and electric pianos, and Ozzy Osborne's bizarre Peter-Cetera-With-A-Peg-On-His-Nose singing replaced by girly whisperings. Some critics expressed bafflement at the choice of cover version and decided it must have been deliberately 'ironic', but it's worth remembering that the band were after all Euroteens and therefore no doubt not averse to punching the air to Van Halen's Jump just before chucking-out time at Club Rok Diner; indeed, they would later go on to cover Sabbath's Mr Crowley and Iron Man and Thin Lizzy's The Boys Are Back In Town, with barely a knowing smirk on their faces. Meanwhile, 'proper' heavy metal fans just got a bit shirty and humourless about it all, ignoring the fact that hearing the apocalyptic lyrics delivered in the manner of sweet nothings actually makes them even more sinister in a way.

Life is not, as so many would have us believe, the sound of overgrown toddlers resenting the fact that they advanced past the age where they could legitimately have jelly and ice cream at their birthday parties, and whose one aim in life is to metamorphose into a huge pile of that crystallised sugar from inside flying saucer sweets. Instead, it's pretty much what Nick Drake would have sounded like if he'd been Swedish, a girl, and noticeably less haunted by indefinable inner demons. For an album that actively pursues the path of the lightweight pop melody it's surprisingly deep and moody, and not for nothing did Chris Morris repeatedly plunder its contents when looking for music to back the disturbing sketches in his radio show Blue Jam.

No doubt to the annoyance of those who spent several frustrating weeks in 1995 searching for a surprisingly elusive copy after hearing Mark Radcliffe and Lard playing Sick & Tired on their in-studio Bontempi organ, Life is still widely available. No doubt with the 'Nina' cover still firmly in place.

The Greatest Hits Of Nancy Sinatra (Nancy’s, 1996)

2006-07-31T10:33:00.000+01:00

"But thee may take me by the hand, hold me and I'll call thee Sand..."

In the great pantheon of showbiz offspring, Nancy Sinatra is surely unique; attempts to ride to fame on her father's coat-tails got her virtually nowhere, and it wasn't until she carved out her own decidedly Vegas-unfriendly musical niche that the world took any real notice of her. She started off in the early 1960s, signed to daddy's own record label Reprise, and churning out uninspired production-line twee pop music typical of America in the pre-Beatles era (and let's face it, it has to be really uninspired to stand out as such in that particular field) to only sporadic and minor chart success. Presumably the public were either unimpressed with the music or suspicious of yet another example of celebrity progeny being given a leg-up, as for a while she was far better known as an actress, guesting in television shows like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and The Virginian and showing up in such 'hip' beach-fixated teen films as Get Yourself A College Girl and the brilliantly titled The Ghost In The Invisible Bikini.

Then in 1966, fed up of her image and on the verge of being dropped by her label, Nancy fell in with the composer of her one big hit to date, These Boots Are Made For Walkin'. Lee Hazlewood, a country & western singer and songwriter who by the sound of it had recently stumbled across a bucketload of 'certain substances', was experimenting with ambitious new compositions, and collaboratively they set about transforming her from a swimsuit-clad also-ran into some sort of spooky psychedelic cowgirl. All of a sudden the hit singles started clocking up, despite the relative uncommerciality of her new material; even an album made up entirely of heavily dippy duets between Nancy and Lee became an international best-seller and a favourite with US radio. Her acting career went off at a similar tangent, her next big-screen project being Roger Corman's notorious and heavily-banned (and heavily sampled by Primal Scream) biker movie The Wild Angels. Quite what Ol' Blue Eyes made of these strange new sounds is anyone's guess - although the recent mind-boggling revelation that around that time he had expressed an interest in covering some songs by Andrew Loog Oldham prodigy and friend of The Small Faces Billy Nicholls suggests he may not have been as averse as might be assumed - but they were popular enough with listeners and Nancy Sinatra remains one of the few acts to be as popular with the 'oldies'-fixated mainstream as she is with the more discerning cult audience.

Released in 1996, The Greatest Hits Of Nancy Sinatra is only one of a great many compilations to have been issued over the years, but is also one of the best. Not only does it span several of her musical phases, it also takes 'Greatest Hits' in its broadest possible sense, and includes a fair smattering of tracks that, while not actual literal 'hit singles' in themselves, have found popularity through other means.

Predictably, the album kicks off – pun not intended – with These Boots Are Made For Walkin’. A bit of a lightweight novelty number and one that’s been tainted by overfamiliarity at that, it’s a pleasant surprise to discover that even aside from the amusingly camp vocals (which Hazlewood instructed her to sing as if she was a sixteen-year-old girl fending off a suitor old enough to be her father) there’s a lot of cleverness going on in the arrangement, particularly the dual bassline and the way the instrumentation slowly builds up verse-by-verse until the "Are you ready boots? Start walkin’!" climax. It’s a song that deserves rediscovery and rescuing from the world of unimaginative ‘Hits Of The Sixties’ compilations, not least on account of the fantastic technicolour promo film featuring Nancy and a troupe of dancers wearing knee-length boots, tight sweaters and very little else. It’s a sight that’s very hard to shake from the memory, but then again the sight of Julie Goodyear (aka Bet Lynch from Coronation Street) performing her own interpretation on a chat show in the 1980s is equally hard to shake, and for far less aesthetically pleasing reasons.

Similarly predictable is the inclusion of the similarly unnecessarily-apostrophed Somethin’ Stupid, the chart-topping duet between Nancy and Frank Sinatra. Hardly the most exciting song ever written or recorded and something of a fish out of water in this collection, it is at least impressively rendered by the two singing Sinatras, and indeed by whoever arranged the doubtless Arthur Lee-inspiring soaring orchestral middle section. It’s also faintly surreally amusing in that the co-sung nature of the lyrics suggest, in a dazzling display of logic-defying, that it’s both participants in the relationship who believe themselves to be spoiling it all by saying something stupid like ‘I love you’. Even this, though, is nothing next to the fact that it’s now impossible to hear the song without thinking of Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons singing "…and then I go and spoil it all by doing something stupid like explode you".

Nancy also gets to duet with her father’s ‘Ratpack’ pal Dean Martin on the slight but entertaining Things, and a duet by proxy with the swingin' theme from Tony Rome, Sinatra Senior's light-hearted 1967 lothario detective flick (which is quite enjoyable in a last-thing-at-night-on-BBC1 kind of a way), but the real twin-vocalled attractions of this collection are the co-headlining stints with Lee Hazlewood. The most famous of these by some way is Some Velvet Morning, and if you've never heard the song then it's not exactly easy to describe. More complicated than a simple duet, it alternates between ominous verses sung by Lee describing some mysterious ethereal being called Phaedra, and twinkly nursery rhyme-like verses (there isn't anything resembling a chorus to speak of) sung by Nancy as 'Phaedra'. Both sections are entirely different in mood, instrumentation, tempo and time signature, and as the song progresses they alternate with ever greater frequency, finishing up interchanging on a line-by-line basis. The lyrics are equally weird, and their meaning is difficult to decipher; it appears to depict Phaedra, whoever she might be exactly, as both a seductive and a destructive force, childishly enchanted by "flowers growing on the hill, dragonflies and daffodils" but also capable of toying with mankind's destiny, although the male character also talks of being 'straight' in the morning, which suggests that it might all have been the result of a bad trip. It's amazing that this song, which although fantastic still sounds downright weird forty years on, was considered commercial enough not only to be performed on a primetime TV special, accompanied by sadly lacklustre footage of them looking moody and mysterious on a beach, but also released as a single (in fact, it's reported in various places that the original single version is somewhat different, with a longer running time and additional lyrics; anyone able to shed any light on this?). Let's see Girls Aloud match that.

Later to provide the ‘inspiration’ for countless Belle & Sebastian songs, the dramatic Summer Wine casts Lee as a wandering cowboy, and Nancy as a local girl who plies him with the titular intoxicant, allegedly made from "strawberries, cherries and an angel’s kiss in spring", before stealing his treasured silver spurs (and, slightly less impressively, "a dollar and a dime"). Continuing the theme of unrelated television programmes bespoiling songs of ostensibly serious intent with unintentional comic associations, concern for the spur-deprived cowboy is somewhat tempered by thoughts of Compo, Clegg and their assorted pension-drawing hooligan accomplices whenever the "woah, woah, summer wine" refrain crops up. The absolute highlight, though, is the sublime Sand. The narrative is simple enough; Lee plays a Clint Eastwood-style 'Man With No Name' figure going by the enigmatic handle 'Sand', who stops off in the desert where he meets Nancy, who allows him to sit by her campfire and keep warm for a while before departing in the morning, doubtless bound for some one-horse town and a lot of being asked 'where you from, stranger?'. Yet even in this familiar Western scene, much weirdness is afoot. While Lee croaks and drawls like an authentic karaoke bar impression of Lee Marvin doing Wan'drin Star (and sounds scarily like Graeme Garden on The Goodies' country & western sendup Workin' The Line), Nancy opts for cut-glass vocal sounds and also makes inexplicable use of words like 'thee' and 'thy', suggesting that she's not exactly supposed to be some Southern Belle with a liking for the great outdoors. More perplexing still is that it has a recognisable 'country' tinge despite being performed almost entirely on harpsichord, kettle drums and a mind-melting backwards guitar solo that sears across the track like the glare of the desert sun.

None of the other duets between the pair are anywhere near as good as these three outstanding efforts, but to be fair they're a hard act to follow. The yee-hah hoedown tale of feudin' lowlifes Jackson is amusing enough, while Did You Ever? is distinguished by sounding alarmingly like it’s about to turn into the theme from Terry & June at one point. The dramatic Lady Bird, which despite its oddness skirted the UK singles chart, begins by appearing to be a grim tale of an abusive relationship, but then turns into a song about two people teaching each other to fly. And that's not 'fly' in an emotional, allegorical or even hallucinogenic sense, but flying as the "eagle flies" ("rode his wings 'cross autumn skies"). Elusive Dreams suffers from being little more than a 'straight' travelogue and sorely misses the in-character exchanges. Continuing the odd preponderance of inadvertent links to The Simpsons on this collection, it also sounds very like that 'I brought my love a chicken, it had no bone' song that Homer sings in Marge Vs. The Monorail. Much the same is true of Storybook Children, in the sense of missing proper character definition rather than obliquely recalling episodes of an animated sitcom. Far more worthwhile is their haunting take on You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling, which strips Phil Spector's original epic arrangement down to a sparse, airy 'alt country' sound, with the vocals delivered as largely tune-free spoken word drawls.

You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling isn't the only interesting cover version to be found here. A laid-back reading of Son Of A Preacher Man has a loose, lazy feel that gives the impression of her idly singling to herself while doing the housework, albeit with a full band and gospel choir in hot pursuit, and for that reason alone is – controversy alert – vastly superior to Dusty Springfield’s better-known Tarantino-endorsed rendition. This loose funky feel also flavours Highway Song, which borders on free-form in places, and a jazzy take on The Doors' Light My Fire that resembles Jose Feliciano jamming with Traffic. Being a peak period James Bond theme, You Only Live Twice is always going to be ace, and as Bond themes go it’s right up there with The Living Daylights, A View To A Kill, Live And Let Die and Goldfinger. There is of course the slight problem that its descending strings were nicked for Robbie Williams’ irritating protest song about nothing in particular Millennium, but as the original also features a nasty distorted electric guitar line that the ex-Take Thatter would never even have nightmares about using in his gallery-waving lighters-in-the-air slabs of boredom, it’s easy to overlook that. Less arresting but no less endearing is Sugar Town, a fluffy country-bubblegum number that wins extra points for sneaking Summer Wine into the US top ten as a double a-side.

A couple of tracks have a less cordial relationship with the 'skip' button; in common with most follow-up singles of the day, How Does That Grab You, Darlin'? is an unashamed rewrite of These Boots Are Made For Walkin’, but worth it for the bowdlerised ‘radio friendly’ insults hurled at the hapless object of feminist ire, and Friday's Child goes in for sub-Aretha Franklin soulful wailing to no great effect, mainly because the tune isn't much to write home about to begin with. There are also a couple of surprising omissions, notably her shuffling cover of The Rolling Stones' As Tears Go By and Northern Soul-favoured sprint through The Beatles' Day Tripper, which aside from being great tracks also underline both how much influence the decade's biggest 'pop rivals' had over their peers and how skilled Sinatra and Hazlewood were as interpreters of other artists' material. That's for the converted to quibble over, though - as an introduction to one of the most unusual and undervalued figures in rock history, this collection is hard to beat.

The Greatest Hits Of Nancy Sinatra is not currently available, although it does appear to be commanding a sizeable second-hand price; odd, given that there are other broadly similar compilations around, and that every track featured is now also available on straight reissues of her albums. Most of them can also be heard on Nancy Sinatra's official website - http://www.nancysinatra.com - which also reveals that she's still making off-the-wall music, still collaborating with Lee Hazlewood, and still, erm, posing for Playboy.

Peter Cook & Dudley Moore - The LS Bumblebee/The Bee Side (Decca, 1967)

2006-07-21T15:39:00.000+01:00

"Freak out baby - The Bee is coming!"

'Comedy is the new rock'n'roll!' was a popular journalistic cliche in the early 1990s, but Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had done much to deserve such a tag almost three decades earlier. Although they came to prominence as part of the stage revue Beyond The Fringe along with the hardly degenerate Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett, Cook and Moore were a lot more 'hip' than the vast majority of their peers; they hung out with pop stars and trendy actors, were able to parody youth culture and pop music in an incisive and unpatronising fashion, and even managed to score a couple of hit singles of their own.

First heard in the 1966 Christmas Special of their BBC TV sketch show Not Only... But Also..., and released as a single the following January, The LS Bumblebee was one of the few that missed the charts; ironic, as it was by far both their most effective pop parody and best single overall.

Written for an extended sketch lampooning the then-current fervour around the Carnaby Street-centred 'Swinging London' phenomenon, The LS Bumblebee was intended as a parody of the exciting new 'psychedelic' sounds that were drifting out of the capital's live music venues on a swirl of paisley-patterned mist. Unlike other attempts at celebrating the scene, most notoriously Roger Miller's England Swings (not only written and sung by an American, but also labouring under the misapprehension that the most noteworthy facet of this technicolour explosion of arts and culture - which, lest we forget, "swings like a pendulum do" - was a preponderance of policemen), Cook and Moore's spoof newsreel feature showed that they had enough of an understanding of what was going on to be simultaneously excited and irritated by the whirl of media attention, and were thereby able to mine some first-rate humour from it.

Lyrically, The LS Bumblebee is essentially a send-up of the decidedly unsubtle 'subtle' references to various non-prescription substances that were beginning to find their way into the lyrics of pop hits such as The Small Faces' My Mind's Eye. The psychedelic 'insect', it is claimed, allows its disciples to "hear with my knees, run with my nose, smell with my feet" and other amazing feats of altered perception, hilariously punctuated by the duo chiming in with gasps of astonishment in 'awestruck idiot' voices (particularly great in response to a mention of top far-out combo "Alf Herbert & His Marijuana Brass, with their hit waxing 'Spanish Bee'"). It's entirely possible that the chart failure of the single was down to nervous radio programmers feeling uncomfortable with its content - even without the words 'psychedelic' and 'druggy' showing up, it's pretty explicit stuff - and deciding that even despite its obvious comic intent it was a little strong to inflict on the average fan of Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers.

If anything, the musical accompaniment is even further 'out'. An odd rumour has grown up over the years that the music for The LS Bumblebee was written and recorded by The Beatles, and given to Cook and Moore to use as they saw fit. This seems to have no basis in truth whatsoever; apart from the fact that it doesn't even sound like The Beatles, but does sound not unlike The Dudley Moore Trio, Moore did discuss the recording session in a couple of interviews, revealing that Cook lost his voice halfway through and, more tellingly, that the song was always intended as a parody of the Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys rather than The Beatles. It's certainly possible to detect more than a hint of Brian Wilson's Psychedelic Barbershop Quartet about The LS Bumblebee, and given that the Beach Boys were then being hailed by the UK music press (unlike in the US, where Pet Sounds was largely ignored on release) and had a far greater influence on the paisley-shirted bandwagon-jumping hordes than any American adherents of overlong improvised blues jams ever did, it's probably better to take his word for it rather than that of the 'Beatlologists'.

The backing - which, as noted before, bears some strong similarities to other Dudley Moore Trio efforts (notably the tremendous Love Me from the Bedazzled soundtrack) - is performed in a straightforward 'beat group' style, but embellished with what would soon become recognised as psychedelic hallmarks; droning organ, tons of over-the-top sound effects (including seagulls, a crying baby and a car screeching to a halt), and what sounds like somebody scraping the strings inside a piano. It's also dominated by a downbeat and mysterious melody, reminiscent of The Zombies' She's Not There, Herman's Hermits' No Milk Today, and other similar songs that probably unintentionally predicted the psychedelic sound.

In fact, The LS Bumblebee did a fair amont of predicting itself. It's staggering to think how effectively they managed to nail the sound of British psychedelic pop, given that the song was written and recorded in the Autumn of 1966; before Traffic had even released Paper Sun, let alone the hallucinogenic free-for-all that followed the release of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. While hardly indicating that Cook and Moore were psychedelic cheerleaders themselves - as has been well documented elsewhere, they shared an enthusiasm for more mundane forms of intoxication - it does at least suggest that they were hanging out at the right venues and lending a keen ear to various late-night pirate radio shows.

If there is a downside to The LS Bumblebee, it's that the visuals aren't anywhere near as exciting as the actual song. It's a fair bet that most viewers who weren't lucky enough to see Not Only... But Also... the first time around will have heard The LS Bumblebee long before they ever got to see the Swinging London-satirising sketch that it hailed from, and doubtless will have formed tantalising mental images of Cook and Moore waving their arms around in front of flashing lights and rotating shapes whilst a line of go-go dancing girls in swirly body paint writhed behind them. Instead, in something of an anti-climax, all we get is the two of them politely lip-synching in Nehru jackets whilst pretending to hand things to each other in a factory sequence.

The b-side, punningly entitled The Bee Side, is a four and a half minute Pete & Dud dialogue that sees them "take the opportunity of these few grooves at our disposal to give you a solemn warning against the dangers of the drug traffic - this peril that lurks in teenage haunts where beat music pulses out into the night, keeping vicars awake and old ladies jumping out of their beds continuously". This takes the form of a series of case studies of respectable members of society who fell victim to the illicit thrills of the hallucinogenic experience, including a scientist previously noted for his work in the field of pouring milk on mice, and a critical assessment of artists who have drawn influence from mind-bending substances. Probably largely improvised in the studio, it does lack the structure and wild escalation of the 'proper' dialogues, but as throwaway sketches go The Bee Side is a cracking effort, particularly the cautionary tale of a man left so ravaged by his experiences that he ended up believing himself to be a rake ("the only time he moves is when somebody treads on him, and he jumps up and bangs them in the eye"). It's only a pity that this was never extended into a full-blown Pete & Dud item, although how comfortable the BBC would have been with any such sketch is open to question.

Unfortunately, The LS Bumblebee/The Bee Side isn't very easy to get hold of nowadays. For some peculiar reason, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's considerable discography has been not so much shabbily treated as almost completely ignored by the reissue market, with the majority of album tracks and single sides unavailable in any format. The LS Bumblebee itself has seen reissue as part of Acid Drops, Spacedust And Flying Saucers, a four-CD box set compilation of UK psychedelia put together by Mojo magazine, but if you already own the more obvious tracks on this admittedly well-thought out compilation and aren't that tempted by the other material - and that's assuming you're interested in the first place - it's a rather expensive way of getting hold of one rare track. Even the episode of Not Only... But Also... that it appears in is rarely glimpsed, on account of the boring legal nonsense surrounding John Lennon's guest appearance in a couple of sketches.

But if you still want to fly to the land where my hand can see and my eyes can walk and the mountain talks to me, and are happy to risk the dangers of keeping vicars awake and old ladies jumping out of their beds continuously, both tracks can be heard at the brilliant Peter Cook fan site The Establishment (http://www.stabbers.org/).