A month of Songs about being looked after (KT’s Top 20 – Number 3)

Lucky Man – The Verve

The policeman was very nice and apologised for waking me up at three o clock in the morning.  He told asked me if I was the future wife of a male called Dom.  I nodded and daintily gripped the bottom of the stairs as I braced myself for bad news.  The officer had taken his hat off and I know very well that this means bad news is coming.

“Well” he says. “Dom is currently in a cell in Newquay Police Station”.  Oh God I think, I’m marrying a criminal. “He is not under arrest, he is free to leave at any time”, the officer continues. I sigh a little.  Dom hasn’t been caught with 600 kilos of Moroccan hashish or at the very least the police haven’t found it yet.

“He just hasn’t got any clothes…” the officer says with a smirk and bursts out laughing.

What has happened is that Dom has had his stag weekend.  He and about ten of his mates have gone to Newquay for the evening, they travel down on the Friday book into a hotel and spend Saturday surfing, eating and drinking.  It turns out that around midnight after they have finished in some bar, they end up on the beach and go swimming.  Unbeknownst to Dom, his best man, and I use that term loosely, bribes three of the other chaps on the weekend to remove his clothes – which of course they do.  Then they all bugger off and leave him drunk, tied to a small fence and just standing in his pants on a beach.

Ok it is quite funny.  If not slightly clichéd.

Dom is helpfully untied by a passing drug dealer.  Then he stumbles off the beach at Newquay (where apparently drunken nearly naked men on stag nights are quite common, so common in fact that the police usually reserve a cell for such occasions, a cell they call rather drolly ‘The Wedding Suite’) and pretty much straight into the arms of a nearby Street Pastor (basically kindly vicars who hand out hot drinks, sweets and advice to drunken and lonely revellers).  The Street pastor gives him a blanket, a pair of flip flops (another great idea, usually reserved for women, but Street Pastors in Newquay are armed with cheap throwaway flip flops, which they hand out to women so that they can walk safely to a taxi rank, instead of tottering on high heels and breaking their fragile ankles (which again is quite common)) and hand him over to policeman (I think it’s a PCSO) who takes him to The Wedding Suite for a cup of strong coffee.

At the wedding suite Dom asks the officers if they can call me so I can bring him some new clothes. I am 90 miles away just outside of Exeter, not even in the same county and that explains why a local officer has turned up at my door.  Within seconds the neighbours start to twitch their curtains, as I open the door to the officers in my pyjamas.  In roughly ten minutes, I am in my car with a small bag of clothes and heading down to Cornwall after leaving a very cross voicemail on the best mans phone.

The (now sheepish looking) best man does meet me in Newquay at the hotel and is very apologetic (to the point where he paid for us to have a night in one of Cornwalls best hotel on him) when I get there.

Badger – my stag night was very quiet, four blokes went to the cinema, watched a film, went for an Indian and then went home, content.  These kids don’t know they are born.    On Your Own

SWC – I went to Blackpool for mine and on Sunday morning before I was allowed breakfast I was made to ride the Pepsi Big One right at the front.  I’d had three hours sleep and was very hungover.  This Is Music

Our Favourite Record Labels of All Time – Number 7

Hut Records

What follows below is an exact reconstruction of a conversation in that took place in a meeting and lead to why between 1991 and 2001, nearly everything that was released on Hut Records was essential listening.  Probably.

What you have to remember is that Hut Records started out in life a label that specialised in promoting music that ‘made the listener look down at their shoes, sway a little, and flop their fringe about a bit’.  In other words it released shoegaze records from the likes of Moose and Revolver.

And by and large they were ok. Apart from the Moose and the Revolver records.

But (and here is where the story begins) one day, the manager of Hut, one David Boyd, was in a meeting with the manager of Caroline Records, and a bunch of other labels who all collectively came under the Virgin roster.   In that meeting the bosses were all talking about how the acts on the labels were doing (actually I have no idea what goes in these meetings, I am using something called imagination here) and David, with his fringe all floppy (again I have no idea what David looks like, I am, again imagining) whilst looking down at his shoes, said to the boss of Caroline, “I could sell more copies of ‘Gish’ than your entire record company could”.   A small argument ensued, and the big lad from V2 records had to dish out a couple of Chinese Burns to stop the boys from Caroline and Hut arguing.

But, the big boss, one Richard Branstons Pickle (I bet he’s never heard that one before – gag ed), agreed with the chap from Hut, and immediately transferred the Pumpkins over to Hut, who then got caught up in the Nirvana boom and made the label a few billion pound.

Within six months, Hut had signed The Verve and the rest was rock history and that folks is pretty much why Hut Records was so important because of a conversation (slightly over imagined) between two labels.

She’s A Superstar

Over the next ten years, so many amazing were released on Hut, records by the likes of Gomez, Embrace, Placebo, McAltmont & Butler and u-Ziq, I mean even These Animal Men released a semi decent record on Hut Records.

Hut Records was of course, also the home to The Auteurs, which gives us the chance to repost this

Show Girl, because it is utterly brilliant.

Hut also signed a band who were irritatingly called The Music, who were for about six weeks, the future of rock.  The Music basically tried to reinvent baggy and it sort of worked, they were all about the groove and long old songs with no words, swirling guitars and freaky organ noises.  They also had an enigmatic lead singer in Rob Harvey, who before, he discovered some really strong drugs and made friends with Mike Skinner from The Streets, was nearly the new Robert Plant.

They also had a knack for catchy radio friendly song titles.

You Might as well try to Fuck Me

 

30 Songs Chosen at Random

A simple concept – fire up the iPod and post the first song that comes on.  Some days you might get more than one song, some days you might not.

Number 5

History – The Verve – Taken from ‘A Northern Soul’ (1995)

As first songs of the day go, this is pretty hard to beat.  It is almost exactly as some chump from the Melody Maker wrote back in 1995 ‘an epic windswept symphony of strings, flailing vocals and staggeringly bitter sentiments’.  I’m not sure if this description includes the hand claps provided by Liam Gallagher – which he described once as ‘the best thing on the record’.

On Your Own (acoustic)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Greatest Britpop Album In The World….Ever – Number 9

A Northern Soul – The Verve

By SWC

The fact that all three of us picked ‘A Northern Soul’ over ‘Urban Hymns’ when selecting this list of Britpop albums should tell you how tremendous this record is. We all happen to think that this album is The Verve’s finest moment.  Badger even made a few notes about it when he emailed across his selections, according to him “‘A Northern Soul’ is brilliant, and that is largely due to the fact that throughout Richard Ashcroft sounds extraordinary, moving from this fragile tortured soul to rock god genius effortlessly and brilliantly”

He is of course quite right.   I’ll give you two obvious examples.  ‘This Is Music’ is the first one, where we have Ashcroft sneering about “being born like you without a silver spoon” and then compare that with ‘On My Own’ a ballad so achingly beautiful that you can’t help but sit in reflective silence at its wonder.   He sounds vulnerable, he sounds sincere, and he’s not putting this on either. Of course, The Verve were a band at the point of breaking at this stage of their career (not helped by the drink and the drugs one supposes), it wouldn’t be for the last time either.

This Is Music

On Your Own

About halfway through you start to realise that ‘A Northern Soul’ is a confessional kind of record (although it’s kind of an hour long ode to drugs as well).  An album about pain, suffering and feeling abandoned by everything.  It’s about giving up and that is hammered home perfectly in the beautiful ‘Drive You Home’.   In which Ashcroft pretty much admits that he is too stoned to care anymore.

Drive You Home

And then you get ‘History’.  The strings break out and the result is a heartbreaking work of genius.  Ashcroft gives us a spine tingling tale of “how he loved and failed”.  It is a soaring brilliant moment and I remember distinctly sitting in my lounge listening to it and silently pleading with The Verve to carry on, because they, this, and everything they touched was just too good to stop.

History

But.

Then you hear ‘Stormy Clouds’ and you realise that it had to.  There is to be no happy ending and if you were ever in doubt Ashcroft confirms it near the end, whilst the guitars twist and the drums pound in sombre and ominous way he reverts to a kind of whisper and you can hear him, just, say “Stop the Love”.

Stormy Clouds