The CHARLATANS: The Charlatans

 

(#534: 9 September 1995, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Nine Acre Court/Feeling Holy/Just Lookin’/Crashin’ In/Bullet Comes/Here Comes A Soul Saver/Just When You’re Thinkin’ Things Over/Tell Everyone/Toothache/No Fiction/See It Through/Thank You

 

In that singles chart of August 1995 – you know the one, the arena for that “historic” chart “battle” – bringing up the humble rear at number 12 was “Just When You’re Thinkin’ Things Over.” It’s always the way, isn’t it; you make your plans and some flash, smarmy gits veer up on the outside lane and swiftly overtake (at the time I was secretly hoping that The Original’s “I Luv U Baby” would outsell both of those “classic pop singles” and become a real party-pooper).

 

By far the most interesting moment on the third Charlatans album is the first one, or at least the first bit of the first one; a tape recording of the Jesus Army singing and tambourining their thing at Oxford Circus, a bus pulls up and the music almost instantly kicks into a lethal groove. “Nine Acre Court” is a word-free world-indie-dance chant in the Transglobal Underground mode, and the high-pitched voice you hear throughout it is not that of Tim Burgess, but of the drummer Jon Brookes.

 

It is probably entirely characteristic that the best (and, typically, least typical) track on this album is one of two (the bookending “Thank You” is the other) which do not involve Burgess at all. I suspect that his main contribution to the gaiety of the world is going to be remembered as his ongoing Tim’s Listening Party set-up, which in the enforced absence of live performances helped many music lovers get through the pandemic, and I am sure that he is a fine human being in many ways.

 

But the central problem with The Charlatans here is the same one which Lena previously identified; a group too ensnared by rock history to transcend it, who are, as she says, perfectly content to paddle around in the paddling pools of “heritage” rather than try to take the story forward (or even interestingly sideways). This is really unexceptional meat-and-potatoes indie-rock, as a look at the song titles alone will tell you – “Lookin’,” “Crashin’,” “Thinkin’,” all tethered inoperatively to received notions of Rock History (as is the record's ghastly retro-nuevo cover).

 

The band stuff themselves with far too much suffocating respect for the record-collecting past when they should be seeking to blow it apart and afresh. Imagine fifty or so minutes of the actual Primal Scream moments on Screamadelica and you’ll get the stolid idea; drearily loping rhythms which imagine themselves to be The Faces or maybe (given the keyboard element) Little Feat, and Burgess’ unbearable post-Gillespie whine – on “Just Lookin’,” he sounds as though he’s trolling Liam Gallagher.

 

“Toothache” is a would-be epic guitar/organ workout described by one seemingly semi-literate chronicler as being “driven along by filthy blues supplied by the hot, wired [Rob] Collins (a particularly inapt metaphor, given the eventual fate of the hapless organist), crashing the songs (sic) with powerful riffing alternated (sic) with catchy as fuck (sic) guitar riffs.” It is actually five-and-a-quarter minutes of Racey pretending to be the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

 

Ultimately The Charlatans gets in the way rather than carving a way out. And I have been far harder on them than on Boyzone because they, and their misled adherents, think they’re far, far better. And I would have much rather written in this space about Goldie’s monumental Timeless, but that came out in the same week as the Black Grape album and only peaked at number seven. You’ll have to pay me if you want that written up.

BOYZONE: Said And Done

 

(#533: 2 September 1995, 1 week)

 

Track listing: Together/Coming Home Now/Love Me For A Reason/Oh Carol/When All Is Said And Done/So Good/Can’t Stop Me/I’ll Be There/Key To My Life/If You Were Mine/Arms Of Mary/Believe In Me/Father And Son

 

When Louis Walsh set about auditioning and recruiting the members of Boyzone in the Dublin of 1993, his declared ambition was to form the “Irish Take That,” and, like Take That, the band – as their very name would indicate – gathered their initial experience performing in gay clubs and pubs; their early, atypical appearance on RTE’s The Late, Late Show confirmed these initial aims.

 

Some of that residual high energy is intermittently evident in their first album. “Together,” if taken as a mid-nineties post-House club banger, is really not bad at all, showing determination and purpose. Aptly, given the Take That template to even out, “Believe In Me” pursues the mood and setting of “Pray.”

 

Mostly, however, this is fastidiously-tooled, easy-on-the-ear, middle-of-the-road pop; it is, however, salutary that the band members get co-composer credits on many of these songs (although it clearly took pros like Ray Hedges and Martin Brannigan to help knock the ideas into a commercial shape). The music, to my ears, takes a step up whenever Stephen Gately is up front – he does a very convincing Michael Jackson on “Can’t Stop Me,” and his counter tenor, balancing out Ronan Keating’s gruff authority on the record’s most intriguing song, “Oh Carol*,” helps escort the performance into areas of androgyny.

 

(*Pointedly far more harmonically intriguing than the group’s usual work, “Oh Carol” was co-written by Hedges with Des Dyer and Clive Scott, of the seventies group Jigsaw, who in themselves also composed some of that decade’s oddest pop songs, including Candlewick Green’s “Who Do You Think You Are?”)

 

I have to be honest (because what is the point of this tale if I am not?) – this is not my type of musical thing at all. I did not purchase or listen to this record out of personal preference. But then again, this record, in keeping with the band as a whole, is not meant for people like me at all.

 

Boyzone are essentially for young teenage girls, growing up and gradually finding out things about the world and themselves, who are aware of the existence of something called love but are not yet fully confident about assimilating it. To help them do that, this pop music acts as a gentle guide, comforting and reassuring them about the absolute and central importance of romance in the world of love, offering them a hand of premature, and perhaps parental, compassion (many Boyzone consumers were parents, buying the records, videos, tour tickets and merchandise for their kids). A beneficent escort towards adolescence is what this sort of pop offers those who decide to love it; the loving gaze which Gately bestows to the camera – to his audience – at the beginning of the “Key To My Life” video, before the song has even begun playing – emphasises this very vital intention of reassurance.

 

Walsh’s marketing was typically very canny. There are three cover versions here, one of which gave the band their first hit single, all of which are from the seventies – thus giving the fans’ parents a sense of inclusive identity and continuity with songs they recognise, perhaps from their own youth. It is pointless to say that, for instance, this “Arms Of Mary” might iron out most (although, crucially, not all) of the complex and affecting chords of the Sutherland Brothers and Quiver original, because the Sutherland Brothers, like Cat Stevens and the Osmonds, probably mean nothing to the children of the nineties, even as they might mean everything to their parents (aren’t they nice, doing those old songs we know so well?).

 

The Osmonds act as a useful parallel, though. It is equally fruitless to ponder on the syntactical defect at the heart of the lyric to “Love Me For A Reason” and skip over its three equivalents near the core of the contemporaneous “You Make Me Feel Brand New” because, to those of whichever generation loves either or both of these songs (Johnny Bristol or Thom Bell; your call), it simply does not matter; both songs bestow their intended effects, and both bands were there for their identical demographics at the time when they were needed.

 

This record ends with “Father And Son,” the song Ronan Keating performed at his audition to become part of Boyzone. If its words sound rather premature coming from someone who was no more than sixteen or seventeen at the time, then remember that Cat Stevens wrote the song when he was barely twenty. Keating’s interpretation does little for me, but I cannot ignore the fact that his rendition of the song onstage frequently moved the band’s audience to tears.

 

Boyzone are going to become regular visitors to Then Play Long, as eventually will Keating as a solo artist. My reception may find its undue limits; there is only so much one can say about what is essentially a well-fashioned formula. But the tentative, and hopefully inclusive, tone of my review may come as a welcome relief from the red-nosed clowning of the “I don’t like this so it’s no good” anti-school of music criticism which certain writers have made tiresomely familiar. Allow me to conclude with a triad of premises from Neale Walsch’s 1995 book Conversations With God, the importance of which was certainly acknowledged by Stephen Gately:

 

“All things are one, there is no polarity, no right or wrong, no disharmony, but only identity.”
“We are not here to learn anything new but to remember what we already know."

“One cannot understand one thing unless he or she understands its opposite."

BLACK GRAPE: It’s Great When You’re Straight…Yeah

 

(#532: 19 August 1995, 2 weeks)

 

Track listing: Reverend Black Grape/In The Name Of The Father/Tramazi Party/Kelly’s Heroes/Yeah Yeah Brother/A Big Day In The North/Shake Well Before Opening/Submarine/Shake Your Money/Little Bob

 

The Stone Roses don’t make it into this tale – or at least haven’t yet done so – but two of Happy Mondays, possibly the most important two, do, along with three members of the Ruthless Rap Assassins, the guitarist from Paris Angels and the assistance of a former member of Altered Images (Stephen Lironi co-produces with L.A. studio stalwart Danny Saber – who also contributes bass, along with one Anthony Guarderas - and Shaun Ryder). So you could call this Madchester’s Revenge.

 

Or you could just go with the 1995 flow and call it a bloody great party album. It is fair to say that nobody was expecting Shaun Ryder, or for that matter Bez “Bez” Bez (as he is credited on the album sleeve, with “Vibes,” though not in the Milt Jackson sense), to rise again like a baggy phoenix, but that is exactly what he (they) did, and it was a much more satisfying and gladdening welcome-back than those of certain overly-gnarled veterans.

 

“Reverend Black Grape” hooked me the first second I heard it, and became one of those singles I had to spin on several dozen consecutive occasions to impale myself on its vinegary brilliance. It just contained everything I was looking for in summer ’95 pop; my eyes blinked and my jaws gasped repeatedly at second after second of invention and newness.

 

The greatest thing about “Reverend,” and indeed Black Grape, is its proudly unapologetic nature. As everybody noted at the time, Ryder gargled like Grampa Simpson, but his was a gargle of newly-freed exultation. With Paul “Kermit” Leveridge goosing up the pulpit, and samples from H*tler (still a “WTF?” moment at the time, fifty years on) and a prematurely crusty-sounding Conservative MP*…

 

(*Sir Tom Arnold, representing the Greater Manchester constituency of Hazel Grove, who in 1994 was not yet fifty – yet shares my birthday – but who was not having a go at rave culture as such. In fact he was replying in Parliament to John Major with regard to the latter’s article on the European Union, published in The Economist in March 1993, in which the then-Prime Minister stated: “I hope my fellow heads of government will resist the temptation to recite the mantra of full economic and monetary union as if nothing had changed. If they do recite it, it will have all the quaintness of a rain dance and about the same potency.” This was in relation to the proposal for a common currency throughout Europe.

 

Sir Tom’s full question to Major was: “I invite my right hon. Friend to use the time between now and the start of the intergovernmental conference in 1996 to persuade our partners in the European Community to adopt a moderate rather than ambitious agenda. Does he agree that a stately minuet would be preferable to the rain dance that he described in his celebrated article in The Economist one year ago?” Sir Tom was, and is, firmly pro-Europe.)

 

…”Reverend” radiated with the return of dizzying, thrilling excitement to pop. It was as though Screamadelica had been resuscitated and upgraded. Ryder and Kermit compete amiably and loudly to outdo each other’s exhortations, and harmonica, tambourine and demonic slide guitar are violently shuffled into action, rendered from dreary cloisters of worship. It was more “Loaded” than Loaded.

 

“Reverend” is the album’s highlight, but it hardly dips in quality or thrills from there. “Kelly’s Heroes” is a fairly acerbic glare at burned-out “celebrities” dressed up as a school playground conversation. “Tramazi Parti” and “Submarine” shuffle with genuine swing, as opposed to cut-and-paste “authenticity.” “Yeah Yeah Brother” (Michael Corleone tells Fredo he knows it was him on the Haçienda dancefloor) and “Shake Well Before Opening” (one of the best uses of the “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough” gesture in pop, and of course Robbie Williams was taking notes). “A Big Day In The North,” in all its ominous glory, contains the second-best use of a Serge Gainsbourg sample in pop (the best, as every pupil knows, is MC Solaar’s “Nouveau Western”).

 

“Shake Your Money” is a wondrously damaged midtempo groove which Ryder systematically undermines and randomises. As well as anticipating (and surpassing) the mores of later Oasis (purposely non-sequitur but apt-sounding lyrics, unashamed musical borrowings from random sources), it is Black Grape’s scruffy scattergun of playfulness which puts them a league above Primal Scream and The Charlatans insofar as they are not weighed down by fatal “respect,” are capable of avoiding the Record Collection Rock cul-de-sac.

 

The enjoyably stuttering closer “Uncle Bob” joins the important dots with Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches, and Ryder’s final words may run backwards but there is nothing backward about Black Grape’s music – unless you interpret their art is going back to the future, or simply (or complexly) going back to what provoked you to give a damn about pop music in the first place. “In the name of YOUR Father and YOUR Holy Ghost!” Shaun Ryder might have metaphorically died many times for somebody’s sins – usually his own - but not ours. As for Kermit, Psycho and Ged – no, it really wasn’t a dream, other than the exciting dream of now and tomorrow which was so tangible in the 1995 air. How absolutely fucking glorious it was to be so alive and so receptive in that age.