A bit of a change again for this week’s hour long isolation mix, this time a trip into more psychedelic and psyche areas, some guitars, a couple of cover versions, some remixes and a re-edit of an 80s alt- classic with an eye, a third eye maybe, on the cosmic and the blissed out. One of the segues is a little bit clumsy but I can live with it. I’ve had to move the host over to Mixcloud as I’d used up all my available space at Soundcloud without going to the paid for service.
Tracklist- The Durutti Column: Otis
Wixel: Expressway To Yr Skull (Long Champs Bonus Beats)
Moon Duo: Stars Are The Light
Curses: This Is The Day
Le Volume Courbe: Rusty
Sonic Boom/ Spectrum: True Love Will Find You In The End
Mogwai: Party In The Dark
The Liminanas: The Gift (Anton Mix)
Goldfrapp v Spiritualized: Monster Love
Julian Cope: Heed Of Penetration and the City Dweller Head Remix by Hugo Nicholson
Edit Service 8 by It’s A Fine Line: The Story Of The Blues (Talkin’ Blues)
I woke up recently with Pete Wylie’s single Sinful running through my head. Sinful came out in 1987, a hit that saw him return to Top Of The Pops with Josie Jones and three backing dancers dressed as nuns.
Ace isn’t it? The song, the Zeus B. Held production, what looks like Paul Weller’s pop art Rickenbacker, the performance, the presenters (John Peel and Janice Long), the sheer Wylie spirit. I’ve posted the Top Of The Pops clip before but shockingly, and in a clear breech of the bloggers convention that all music blogs must post Wylie or Wah! at least once in any given calendar year, there hasn’t been any Wylie or Wah! to date in 2019.
Here the same line up perform/mime on Wogan. Magic.
I’ve got an uneasy feeling that we’re all going to wake up on Friday morning in a very unpleasant state. There isn’t anything I’ve seen over the last few weeks that makes me feel optimistic about the result of the election and I think we going to be saddled with five years of Tory rule with a lying, racist, homophobic and vacuous Prime Minister.
In 1982 Pete Wylie, then operating under the name Wah!, wrote a song called The Story Of The Blues. It was partly in response to the then Conservative government and the portrayal of life and unemployment under that government in Alan Bleasdale’s series The Boys From The Blackstuff. The Blues of the title can be interpreted as the Tories. The first part of Wylie’s song is an exhortation to people who are about to give up, who have been kicked and kicked again, to be positive and strong, to organise and resist.
‘First they take your pride
Turn it all inside
And then you realise
You’ve got nothing left to lose
So you try to stop
Try to get back up
And then you realise
You’re telling the story of the blues’
Wylie was also expressing his frustration with his record company and the way they were trying to market Wah! and reduce the multi-faceted, rough edged group down into a single, shiny marketable product. Everyone hated their record labels in the 1980s didn’t they? It was par for the course for those inspired by punk to sign to a major for the advance and the distribution and then face battles in everything they did.
Wylie and Wah! recorded an extended version which took the pop single, full of female backing vocals and violins, further with a long spoken word section- The Story Of The Blues (Talkin’ Blues) and they run as one song on the 12″. In this section Wylie blasts the news media for selling Thatcher’s economic policies and for criticising people, young people especially, for being unemployed, as if being in the dole made you less of a person. These were all big issues in the early 80s- unemployment, the right to work, the destruction of manufacturing industry and the jobs that went with them, the throwing of people onto the scrapheap.
‘…well that’s my story and I’m sticking to that. So let’s have another drink and let’s talk about the blues. Blues is about dignity, it’s about self-respect, and no matter what they take away from you – that’s yours for keeps. I remember how it was, how every medium – T.V. and papers and radio and all those people were saying: ‘you’re on the scrap-heap, you’re useless’, and I remember how easy it was to start believing that. I remember how you’d hear people take it for granted that it was true – just ’cause someone with an ounce of power said so. And that’s a problem now, too many oddballs, too many pocketbook psychologists and would-be philosophers with an axe to grind. But there’s a solution, it’s not easy, but it’s a matter of coming to terms in your heart with situation you’re in, a matter of choosing how things go for you and not having things forced upon you. There are plenty of forces against you, forcing you against your will, your ideals – you’ve got to hope for the best, and that’s the best you can hope for – you’ve got to hope against hope… I remember something Sal Paradise said, he said: ‘the city intellectuals of the world are debauched from the full body blood-of-the-land and are just rootless fools’. So listen, when the smile, the condescending pat-on-the-back comes and says: ‘we’re sorry, but you’re nothing, you’ve got nothing for us and we’ve got nothing for you’, you say: ‘No’, and say it loud: “NO!”, and remember, people who talk about revolution and a class-struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love, and what is positive in the refusal and constraint…since people have a corpse in their mouth…”
In 2013 the I’m A Cliche Edit Service website presented an unoffical re-edit of The Story Of The Blues, credited to It’s A Fine Line (Tim Paris and Ivan Smagghe). This is a killer re-working of Wah!’s original with a long looped opening section, the backing vocals fading in behind the violins and then Wylie’s words. The last few minutes are quite heady and when you get to the end it’s very easy to just click replay and listen to it all over again. Several times. Even better, it’s still available to download for free.
I was going to go full Pete Wylie and post Come Back and Imperfect List as well but maybe we should come back to them another day. Come Back is a political love song, an anthem and call to arms and Imperfect List a purging, a shitlist of all the things Wylie and Jones hated (two versions, one in 1990 and one in 2013). But I think I’ll come back to them another day.
…’As some are striving to survive, the others thrive’
I posted this song last year and once before that as well but sitting watching one of the Top Of The Pops reruns last week I was struck (again) by the brilliance and magic, the faith and devotion of Pete Wylie’s Mighty Wah! in the mid 80s. Come Back sounds like a love song but the verses read as a clarion call, a stand against Thatcher and forces of greed, a call for community and to stand together, a shout to those forced out by economic forces beyond their control to return to the city and to their roots. That reads as much for 2017 as it did for 1984. Pete said on Twitter recently that he wrote and played every instrument of Come Back except for the backing vocal by partner Josie Jones. In the TOTP clip Josie looks amazing, hands on hips, alongside Pete in his leather trousers and blow dried hairdo.
Sadly Josie, a big figure on the Liverpool art and music scene, died in 2015. She had also been the voice of Big hard Excellent Fish’s Imperfect List, which I’ve also posted before here and in its updated form here.
Pete Wylie has a version of The Mighty Wah! back out on the road with a handful of gigs this month and bunch more in November. It is a blogging requirement by constitution and tradition that The Story Of The Blues is posted by music blogs at least once annually. I’ve posted it before and a very smart re-edit version which some of you enjoyed a lot. In a break with expectation instead I’m posting another 12″ Wylie epic from 1984.
Today, Pete Wylie. Yesterday The Vinyl Villain published a post on the third member of The Crucial Three- Pete Wylie and his Mighty Wah! a blogpost so comprehensive and with comments so good I rewrote my planned post for today. So instead of what I had partly written I’m revisiting a version of a Mighty Wah! song I have posted before, a brilliantly executed re-edit of The Mighty Wah’s The Story Of The Blues (Part 2) from the Edit Service people. A long electronic drum intro, the female backing vox and then Pete Wylie’s spoken part, including that quote from Jack Kerouac- ‘I remember something Sal Paradise said ‘the city intellectuals of the world were divorced from the folkbody of the land and were just rootless fools” and Wylie’s message, ‘you’ve got to hope for the best and that’s the best you can hope for’ and ultimately say ‘No!’. If you love the original, you’ll love this too. Promise.
I just found this and thought some of you might like it- a re-edit of The Mighty Wah’s mighty The Story Of The Blues single, lovingly unwrapped over eight and half minutes, for a true Balearic end of night escapade where you want just one last song to send you on your way before you spill out into the streets to see the dawn. May or may not be the work of Ivan Smagghe. At Soundcloud here and available for download.
This is one of those records that often seems to populate the 7″ box in charity shops, all dog eared sleeves and scratched disc. I’ve written before of my buying multiple copies of records in Oxfam and suchlike over the years, just because I can’t leave them in the shop, decaying and unloved, surely eventually ending up as landfill. However I could not house the numbers of copies of this single I’ve seen. Why is it so often abandoned?
Our local Oxfam occasionally turns up trumps- one time it was full of the entire Siouxsie And The Banshees back catalogue and most of Wah!s output. I was trying to work out what sort of person would have such musical taste, to collect the full works of both the ice queen of goth and Liverpool’s ‘part time rock star, full time legend’. But then again maybe it was two different people, coincidentally getting rid of vinyl at the same time. Or even better, maybe it was a couple, each one dumping it’s youthful record collection to make space in a new place they’ve just got together, one a Banshees fan, the other a Wylie lover – that’s an idea I like. But I’m sure I would’ve spotted a Siouxsie lookalike and a Wylie wannabee wandering around Sale by now.
Enough blathering. From 1984, The Mighty Wah!’s mighty Come Back. It’s not as good maybe as The Story Of The Blues or Sinful, but it’s still worth a few minutes of your time.
I was never into The Mighty Wah!, Wah!, Wah! Heat, or any of the other names for Pete Wylie’s ego during the 1980s and into the 90s, but shifted recently. I played records at a wedding (friends of friends, not doing that again, stress and hassle), and the groom insisted I played The Story Of The Blues. Once it was on I realised it was better than I thought. A few weeks back I found a stash of Wah! 7″ singles in Oxfam in Altrincham and enjoyed most of them.
This is off the album A Word To The Wiseguy, much of which is Pete Wylie’s heart-felt response to the effects of Thatcherism on Liverpool. It’s a sprawling album, with some dated production, but some of it stands up today. This version of The Story Of The Blues comes up near the end, the horns from the single version looped while Wylie does some talking over the top, including quoting Sal Paradise from Kerouac’s On The Road, and maybe it shouldn’t work, but Wylie gets away with it.
Bagging Area 