(#578: 27 September 1997, 1 week)
Track listing: Hundred Mile High City/Better Day/Travellers Tune/Big Star/Debris Road/Besides Yourself/Get Blown Away/Tele He’s Not Talking/Foxy’s Folk Faced/All Up/Spark And Cindy/Half A Dream Away/It’s A Beautiful Thing
Presume for a moment that you’re in your early twenties – 23 or 24, perhaps. You were brought up to expect such promise. You were given your moment and then either you blew it or – more likely – your moment was taken away from you. And now you’re stuck in whatever crappy suburb from which you’d hoped to have escaped years ago, impotent and watching your old mates – well, they were never really your mates, old or otherwise; they just happened to go to the same school and at the same time as you – get somewhere. Anywhere. Those joke bands you used to go and see rehearse in your pal’s front room or garage; why, some of them have recording contracts, you’ve seen them in the papers and maybe heard them on the radio, and one or two, if they’re truly lucky, get into the pop charts and suddenly your mother stares at you while Top Of The Pops is on and it looks as if she’s about to cry.
Nobody really gets you, anyway; what you know in your bones you are, weighed against what you’re expected to be. Since you have no desire and perhaps no capacity to connect the two, you’re marooned in the wilderness. People in the street laugh mirthlessly at you or cross the road you’re walking down, on your way to the dole office, and you can read their semi-concealed lips muttering about the you that never was.
But there’s something ultra-stubborn hidden in your you that won’t give up, knows you have something to say and by God and fortune you’ll eventually be given and grab the opportunity to say it. Presume that you’re a musician in a group and that group got shoved down the river of fashion and hurtled over the waterfall of cool before it was even able to complete its swimming lessons. You’re a hasbeen and not even twenty-five yet. But you’re also still a could-be.
So your group gets the chance to record sixteen songs for a Japanese record label, or something similarly remote. And because a couple of reasonably influential people remember what your group once was and could still be, twelve of those songs get worked up professionally and end up becoming your group’s second album – and what do you know; your timing is absolutely right, and you’ve hit the fuck-you jackpot.
And those twelve songs have been bottled up within you for half a decade; they speak of thwarted dreams, desperate ambitions to escape the rubble that’s been planned for you, the urgent craving to flee and finally to fly. Who’d have thought it – these songs are what hundreds of thousands of people also wanted, and they hadn’t even known they’d wanted them. And no, they are not radically different sorts of songs – your ambition is not to break the aesthetic bank but to express your emotions in the context of the type of music that you’ve known and felt flowing through your aorta all of your life.
The above is the story of Simon Fowler, and Ocean Colour Scene, and Moseley Shoals, which came out in 1996 to critical indifference and huge commercial success. That album didn’t make it into Then Play Long because it was kept at number two, mostly by Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill juggernaut. Most of its professional reviewers felt the album to be musically too conservative, overly shackled to the past. There may have been a subtext of class hatred (that certainly made itself apparent with the general critical reaction to Oasis).
Within its proudly-defined parameters, however, Moseley Shoals works surprisingly well, or perhaps it isn’t that surprising, given Brendan Lynch’s constantly inventive production which never quite allows these dozen songs to sink into stolid traditional mud. “The Riverboat Song” is unashamedly traditional in outlook, but less so in structure – you don’t get those odd rhythmic pushes and pulls with Golden Earring - and, as I’ve already intimated, it works. The chorus of “The Day We Caught The Train” may resemble the work of Chris de Burgh but its overall ambitions – you know, we’ve gotta get out of this place - and modest adventure shift the song a step above. You’re always aware that Fowler, lead guitarist Steve Cradock, bassist Damon Minchella and drummer Oscar Harrison function as a band – they interact and swing, as their West Midlands forefathers Slade had managed.
No, Ocean Colour Scene have never been an ostensibly radical rock group – their radicalism has been subtle. Yes, they exist as part of the generational lineage of British mainstream rock, but I fear that our music press’ constant, and ultimately fatal, search for instant and recognisable novelty has been in danger of throwing the consolidatory baby out with the bathwater. Disliking Ocean Colour Scene for not being, I don’t know, Pram or Broadcast or Orlando, is rather like knocking Ruby Braff for failing to be Lester Bowie, or Scott Hamilton for the alleged crime of not being Peter Brötzmann. Work needs to be carried out in all areas of music, not just the flashier and more readily accessible ones. Moreover, Moseley Shoals just made a lot of people feel good, and what is wrong with that?
The band retained Lynch to produce the follow-up, and what a solidly unnerving record Marchin’ Already is. What it isn’t is record collector rock, and the music that informs these thirteen songs is by and large not the sort that self-appointed authorities would tend to “collect.” It’s the music of the working classes, who don’t give a toss if Ian Indie thinks, never mind what he might think.
Marchin’ Already is also what a musical adaptation of Young Mungo might sound like. Remember what Douglas Stuart says in that book about how, as firm and protective ostensibly socialist working-class collectives (e.g. council estates in west central Scotland) can be, in certain aspects they can also be the most conservative and destructive of environments – anybody who exhibits the slightest sign of difference, intellectually or otherwise, is rudely instructed to remain in their place – “you’re letting the rest of us down.”
Because if there’s anything Simon Fowler still wanted in 1997, it was to get the fuck out of the polite and less polite outskirts of Birmingham – it is worth remembering that many of this album’s songs derived from the same built-up stockpile as its predecessor. Anyone stuck on the perimeter of Glasgow, Liverpool or even London will recognise his emotions immediately. Over and over, these thirteen songs tell of the urge to break suffocating bonds, to get away from what people expect Fowler to be and move towards what he is – the principal theme of the closing song “It’s A Beautiful Thing” is about the singer coming to terms with his gayness, hence the deliberate conflicts encased in its refrain: “Ooohhh it’s a beautiful thing/Ooohhh it's a terrible thing.”
Musically, the album veers all over the place, which isn’t as confined and certainly not as loud as you’d have initially imagined. On a hit-after-hit basis it’s hard to argue with its first three songs. “Thousand Mile High City,” powered by a riff which at the beginning reminds me a little of “The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme” and guitars that clang like fire engines when they’re not being spooled backwards, not to mention the mid-song punctum of a police whistle, is terrific rock, a bit like a Thin Lizzy demo produced by a Midge Ure looking for more adventure and they’re just waiting for Phil to wander into the studio and do his bit. It’s as traditional as marmalade but really, what a rhythm section – these guys know how to listen. “Better Day” is Oasis balladry filleted down to its core. “Travellers Tune,” one of two songs co-starring P. P. Arnold, rocks and bumps as mellifluously as the Primal Scream of 1994 never managed to achieve.
Unexpectedly, the lights go down somewhat after that introductory triptych. About half of Marchin’ Already is quiet, virtually folk-like music. With “Big Star” and its patient congas underlining Fowler’s clenched whisper, you could almost be listening to mid-period Tim Hardin. “Debris Road,” which I guess is about the rubbish suburb and preordained ruination that Fowler and the band are keen to escape but from which they can’t really pull themselves away emotionally (“I’m not scared but it’s something I cling to”), establishes a not displeasing halfway house between early seventies Fairport Convention and the Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker.”
One could spend days trying to work out the grain of Simon Fowler’s voice. Overall he tends to remind me of the ballad-singing, non-yelling variant of Noddy Holder, the one that sang “How Does It Feel?” – it’s that West Midlands thing again – but throughout the more restrained moments of Marchin’ Already’s second half I’m drawn to think of the quieter George Harrison (“Long, Long, Long” etc.). Indeed, in songs like “Besides Yourself” and to a slightly lesser extent “Tele He’s Not Talking” we could be back with the Boo Radleys of Giant Steps, dreaming about leaving, formulating fantastic plans – Fowler sings “Besides Yourself” as though he were underneath his bedclothes.
In the midst of which you stumble across a pretty phenomenal song in “Get Blown Away” which not only cross-references a central theme of “Better Day” (“And then the nightmares come, and you get blown away”) but whose main riff and harmonies are fit to reside three streets away from “I Hang Suspended.” If the Suede of Coming Up had come up with this song we’d have long been celebrating its power. “All Up” is also a convincing Northern Soul-ish instrumental, akin to a sequel to “Wake Up Boo” awaiting its lyric.
In Marchin’ Already’s final three songs, Ocean Colour Scene remind us that, as much as they protested about the unauthorised remixing of their first album, the shoegazing element hadn’t really been jettisoned from their music – “Spark And Cindy” is embellished by all sorts of guitar and electronic oddities. “Half A Dream Away,” with obliging guest trombonist Rico, dabbles in dub with guitar pedal elements which place us back in the Town and Country Club circa 1991 (these elements sound awfully reminiscent of…Slowdive).
Meanwhile, the superb album closer, the aforementioned “It’s A Beautiful Thing,” which Fowler vocally divides between P. P. Arnold and himself – I wonder how Ms Arnold, uniquely placed as both participant in and observer of the multiple musical scenes in the West Midlands of the nineties, having worked with both Ocean Colour Scene and Stafford’s Altern-8, viewed things; far more fully than us, I’d imagine – sees the experimental dams slowly being burst as abstract noises slowly flow into the musical picture (complete with the bookmarked return of the clanging fire engine guitar effect); damn you who would deride us as trad fodder for bricklayers (who have generally harboured a more comprehensive understanding of what makes pop music click over the decades than most music critics – they are mercifully allergic to writing out tick sheets), bear witness to what we have sneaked into the world!
In acting terms, Fowler does not possess the slightly self-conscious extravagance of Brett Anderson (not that there’s anything wrong with slightly self-conscious extravagance) but is rather more Scofield than McKellen; turning inward to contemplate what he can create from the ruins that he inherited. If you seek to be quickly thrilled, Marchin’ Already may not be the record you might wish to seek. But if you possess openness and patience, it might prove one of those records you didn’t know that you wished to seek. It’s sometimes too easy and simple merely to presume anything.
Posts
