(#564: 15 February 1997, 1 week; 23 August 1997, 1 week)
Track listing: "0:34"/Say What You Want/Drawing Crazy Patterns/Halo/Put Your Arms Around Me/Insane/Black Eyed Boy/Polo Mint City/White On Blonde/Postcard/"0:28"/Ticket To Lie/Good Advice/Breathless
One way of beginning this piece would be to revisit the notion of music from Glasgow and its two parallel paths to America. As I've discussed before, Glaswegian musicians from the eighties onward seem either to want the lush, sophisticated mainstream American sound, or the scratchy backwoods - Philadelphia International, or the Velvet Underground.
In the latter field, Glasgow seemed to be starting to make a substantial impact as 1996 moved into its successor, in particular the group of artists centred around the Chemical Underground record label. That group included Belle and Sebastian, Mogwai, Arab Strap and The Delgados, all of whom looked to be doing something unprecedented with the basic rock group model - even though Mogwai and Arab Strap come from Hamilton and Falkirk respectively, they still made the best sense in Glasgow.
On a tangent to this movement were Bellshill's Teenage Fanclub, then already easing into veteran status with 1997's excellent Songs From Northern Britain. So, from that perspective, it was all happening. But where did that leave the more upmarket Glasgow musicians who continued to crave a lush, mainstream nowness?
Although it would be tempting to talk of Texas, the group, in the same terms as Deacon Blue or Wet Wet Wet, that would be rather misleading. They never really pursued that clipped path, nor did they appear to have much to do with anyone's notion of America - bassist and co-songwriter Johnny McElhone, formerly of Altered Images and Hipsway, was inspired to name the band after the film Paris, Texas. If anything, the partnership which McElhone initially formed with singer Sharleen Spiteri - also technically from Bellshill, although she grew up in Balloch, by the shores of Loch Lomond - puts me in mind of The Smiths. Texas was their child and other band members were employed as a necessity; even that sounds quite harsh, given how integral, for instance, guitarist Ally McErlaine has been to the band's sound over the years. As a group, they have functioned together quite perfectly.
In 1994, however, Texas were not in a good place. Despite their initial 1989 success with the Southside album and its lead single "I Don't Want A Lover," they had subsequently struggled. Subsequent albums Mothers Heaven (1991) and Ricks Road (1993), though good, seemed too dour and withdrawn in an era of kandy-kolored rave and nascent up-for-it Britpop. Had it not been for a degree of continued success in mainland Europe it is likely that they would have been dropped by their record label back then.
Hence the three-year rethink and reboot, which saw the band come up with a large number of songs, far more than the fourteen finally selected for their fourth album. Their lucky break came when Spiteri was invited, at the last minute, to appear on Chris Evans' Channel 4 television show TFI Friday, where she performed a bit of Al Green's "Tired Of Being Alone" (a non-album single for Texas which briefly, if predictably, restored them to the top twenty in 1992), and observers were somewhat taken aback by how good a singer she actually was.
Evans duly and heavily plugged the lead single from the band's forthcoming album, "Say What You Want" on both radio and television, and listeners were moderately startled by how up to late-nineties date it, and they, sounded - which is to say that it sounded as though they had finally opened the curtains and windows and permitted modernity to enter the room. While the record remained redolent, to some extent, of "Tired Of Being Alone" - and, to a greater extent, "Sexual Healing" by Marvin Gaye and "Love, Thy Will Be Done" by Martika - it seemed in perfect keeping with what British pop fans seemed to want, and brought the band who made it dramatically back into the foreground.
There was to be no compromise with White On Blonde. The band felt confident enough to produce the record themselves - though, as I will mention later on, were happy to bring outside producers on board on the rare occasions they were needed - and Spiteri in particular was intent that the record sound as contemporary as possible. No doubt she was influenced on this front by her then-partner Ashley Heath, at the time Associate Editor of THE FACE, who I'm sure gently prompted her towards what was then going on musically. She was not interested in Texas being a working museum of the worthy.
The consequence of all of this thinking was that White On Blonde sounds commendably modern, even if its modernist sheen sometimes conceals a slightly traditionalist outlook. Songs like "Drawing Crazy Patterns" and "Halo" offer vocal stylings which sound as though they're sharing a flat with Chrissie Hynde - although, much as happened with The Pretenders through tragic circumstance, you could view the Texas of 1997 as having reduced to the bare bones of a frontwoman, one other musician and anybody else she could find to understand her.
And the sound of White On Blonde is quite striking in its absence of comfort and reaasurance. The record commences with a brief ambient soundscape - police sirens, Evening Times vendors; oh, this must be Glasgow - which is almost immediately subverted by a sampled string orchestra performing Cole Porter's "I Love Paris."
This then segues into "Say What You Want" - it was a smart idea to frontload the record with its most familiar song - but the song itself is hardly cosy or comforting. Indeed it seems to be much more of an extended fuck-you sermon to somebody who clearly doesn't give a shit what Spiteri wants and more or less sneers at her dreams. Fine, the singer says, but your crap is just going to push me forward, not hold me back, as you so clearly desire. How many of the song's many fans twigged what it was really about...
...or even whom it might be about, since White On Blonde functions as a partial concept album about a failing relationship, if not with a partner as such then maybe with the record label? The record itself implies rather than clarifies such a scenario, since Spiteri's observations are more often than not oblique. There is the profoundly unhappy protagonist of "Drawing Crazy Patterns" who has married too young and is already seeking escape, perhaps violently. But who is the subject of "Halo" - Diana? Thatcher? Spiteri herself? Not that it matters much musically; visiting producer Mike Hedges makes the song sound good - if Spiteri can't haul herself too far from Hynde vocally, Hedges brings that Manic Street Preachers - and Associates - rusted sparkle, as well as the entirely unanticipated mid-song outbreak of squally guitar and Tackhead-y breakbeats, to proceedings.
More disturbing still is "Put Your Arms Around Me," the album's big ballad, for which Texas called on the services of Dave Stewart. If Spiteri moves much closer vocally to Maria McKee on this song - and it is inconceivable that the band would not have been thoroughly familiar with McKee's 1996 album Life Is Sweet, one of the decade's very finest pop records - it sounds much more like "Show Me Hell" than "Heaven." The song sounds as though being played in a mirage, with nightmare effects whirling around Spiteri's increasingly desperate vocal ("Are you ready to let yourself drown?"), clinging on to a chimera of love rather than the thing itself ("You let me believe that you are someone else"). The corridors of shriek pile up until the plug is abruptly pulled from the song, as though the dream, or life itself, had ended.
The record's intensity does not let up; "Insane," also done with Hedges, bears some modish trip-hop touches, including a mournful trombone, real or synthesised, but is generally a grim and unforgiving lament ("No one believes in you...I understand") which grinds its teeth into your neck like a vengeful vampire. Marti Pellow and Ricky Ross did not harbour such ambitions - although Arab Strap certainly did (see "Girls of Summer" from 1999's live Mad For Sadness, the recording of a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in Lambeth which I attended, for confirmation).
"Black Eyed Boy" goes for a sixties Northern Soul mood but sounds a little overcooked, which may well have been the intention; it also shows a mastery of silence and pauses worthy of Ultravox. It isn't a simple Vandellas stomper (although Martha and the Vandellas' work was anything but simple); over it, Spiteri is essentially essaying a concerned variant on the fuck-you template.
There follows a brief but exceedingly strange breeze of what used to be called "illbient"; "Polo Mint City" seems to be an especially woozy variant on "Wild Thing," possibly threaded through Blur's "He Thought Of Cars," and initially sounds actually quite disturbing. However, since I grew up in Uddingston and Bothwell, I know that Polo Mint City is the local slang name for East Kilbride - so called because the town is surrounded by many, many roundabouts - so I wonder whether this is the band having a wee laugh at the Jesus and Mary Chain.
That interlude leads into the relatively conventional title track, one of those portraits of a lady of her time who has not aged too well (perhaps Spiteri was thinking of how she herself might end up if she weren't too careful). In turn this takes us, unexpectedly, towards the sleazily-garbled rocker "Postcard" which appears to be a send-up of Oasis (Spiteri does a great Liam Gallagher, albeit from a get-me-the-fuck-out-of-Muirhead perspective). The ghost of "Polo Mint City" then performs a fleeting orbital lap of honour, like a recurring dream that cautious consciousness cannot quite shake off.
"Ticket To Lie," though musically the album's most straightforward song, is a nihilistic and threatening précis of a profoundly disturbed mind (its opening line is "Attention annoys me"). It is as if Spiteri is addressing the listener - look, you came here, do you like what you hear, tell me what bullshit you desire and I'll manufacture it for you, oh and I'm not sure that I care that much...
(abrupt fast forward to the Charli xcx of "360" - "I don't fucking care what you think"...!)
Spiteri's expressed essence of insecurity - which has also turned out to be Charli xcx's hallmark - continues to wander through the elegantly-writhing Greek Thomson cloisters of "Good Advice," written and produced with the excellent Rae & Christian and utilising a sample of John Cameron's library music piece "Half Forgotten Daydreams"; "I need some good advice, some good advice, to wear my crown."
The album concludes with "Breathless." Ostensibly a hands-in-the-air end-of-the-show singalong ballad - Lord forbid one should term it an "anthem" - attentive listening reveals the song to be a fairly brutal examination of domestic abuse; the other side of the scenario coin traced by The Blue Nile in 1996's "Family Life" and perhaps revealing the record's real and bloodied subtext.
Whose is that male voice which materialises towards the end of the possibly literally-entitled "Breathless"? The album's credits show it to belong to one Steven Granville, although the harmonica solo in the same song is uncredited (given the fact, however, that three of White On Blonde's songs were co-written with Robert Hodgens, a.k.a. Bobby Bluebell, I wonder whether Ken McCluskey might have played it).
And although Mr Granville sounds like nobody's ghost - an understudy for Marti Pellow, perhaps, but definitely nobody's ghost - he does instinctively put me in mind of another voice (and the presence of Hedges here cannot be coincidental), a voice who could have sung "Put Your Arms Around Me" so easily and beautifully, a voice belonging to the person about whom several of these songs might just, if only marginally, have been concerned.
A person who, not yet forty, had elected to take his own life on 22 January 1997, ten days before White On Blonde was released. While Belle and Sebastian had initially been instigated as a university project, under the tutelage of Alan Rankine, Billy Mackenzie - the great not-wholly-told story of Scottish pop music - had fluttered, flustered and faded. At the time, Texas' record felt as much to me as an unwitting requiem as well as a defiant comeback. Maybe Billy could have done with a lot more of that properly-channelled defiance. But White On Blonde suggested with such subtly persuasive force that some stories' endings had to be defied. Texas' story will continue here.
