Prolific songwriter though he is, Pat Fish has also always been a generous performer of cover versions. There’s a generosity to the audience — we get introduced to songs that we might not otherwise have heard — and a generosity to the original artists, especially those who are not so well known. Pat’s skill has been to make the songs his own without utterly tearing them away from their original performers’ versions. On his records there are songs by Lou Reed, Jonathan Richman, Classics IV, Kevin Ayers, and Pavlov’s Dog, but it’s at the gigs that the full range of his interests comes clear. At the first gig I went to, in March 1987, he announced that he was about to sing a sure-fire number-one song. Cue collective hush: is he about to perform a new song that will propel him to household fame? The opening bars revealed otherwise: it was Ben E. King’s’s ‘Stand By Me’, then enjoying a revival thanks to some Levi’s Jeans adverts. A few years ago he was frequently covering a song by an otherwise obscure Austrian songwriter, Wolfgang Tschegg, and he also did a great one, ‘Regrets of a Spaceman’, by Charlie Sundown. Most recently there have been songs by Peter Blegvad (Gold, Blue Flower) and Ayers again (Singing a Song in the Evening.)
But my choice is one that positions where The Jazz Butcher group were coming from on their early records, a song by Jonathan Richman that — as many people have said before me — is the missing link between the Velvet Underground and punk. There’s lots to love here: the relentlessness, the slightly mechanical (and very V.U.) chorus of ‘RADIO ON’, the spoken vocal in the breakdown. There’s the same rough-and-ready garage band feel to it as on the original ‘Southern Mark Smith’, and the home-made video brings out those qualities too:
Humour in songs is fickle, and that’s a problem for verbally witty songwriter. Music lives in the memory differently from humour; a good piece of music will survive repeated listenings, and will reveal new depths and new details, but the best jokes explode quickly and fade rapidly, and don’t usually reveal any new facets with repetition.
There’s a great deal of wit in Pat Fish’s songs, early and late, and in the early ones particularly there are some very sharp rhyming couplets, usually delivered at a fast pace, so that you’ve scarcely absorbed one before the next one comes along. There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, certainly on the first few listenings, but they survive as songs because of the musicianship, and because in most cases there’s something more to them than the joke. Even ‘What’s the Matter, Boy’, which I hope to come to in a later post, is about not fitting in socially.
‘Bigfoot Motel’ is great because there isn’t any higher justification for its existence, certainly not that wouldn’t require a strain of the interpretative faculties; but it bears repeated listening. It really is a song about a mythical North American creature checking into a motel only to find that it’s being processed for food. I wouldn’t claim that it still makes me laugh out loud, but I still enjoy being in its company. Here’s a live rendition:
For a long time I didn’t understand the basic conceit: in the USA there’s a device known as a ‘Roach Motel’ for catching cockroaches. In one of the recorded versions Pat begins by quoting the sales slogan from the Roach Motel: ‘They check in, but they don’t check out.’ The truly ingenious would see this as a song about counterculture (the West Coast mountain man in shaggy fur) being hunted down and destroyed. But I’d prefer to think of it as a very silly, very catchy song about a mythical beast with a credit card.
Partytime starts so unassertively it’s as if it had been going on for a while and you’ve only just become aware of it, the bass quietly pumping, Max Eider’s guitar gently spilling melody over it. The party is going on in another room; you’re aware of it but not part of it. Then the instruments fall away: ‘This is partytime’ our singer tells us; ‘and you must admit it’s better than a war.’
The ‘Jazz Butcher’ name was invented unseriously for a gig at Merton College, Oxford in 1982. Pat Fish had been in various bands while an undergraduate at Oxford (from 1976 to 1980), and this one emerged from them. There wasn’t any intent to play jazz, or to engage in butchery, but if the jazz part of the name connected with the music in any respect, it was in the laid-back stylings of this song, the major-7th chord that runs through this one, and guitarist Max Eider’s fluidity across the fretboard. Eider (real name Peter Milson), a former undergraduate from University College, Oxford, wasn’t in the line-up for the first gig, but joined soon after, and gave the early records their distinctive sound.
Musically and lyrically, ‘Partytime’ sets down some key themes for early Jazz Butcher songs: drinking and observing; scepticism and wit; an amused weariness giving way to a more passionate outburst (‘it doesn’t matter anymore, it isn’t funny anymore’). It’s hard, in fact, to choose Max Eider’s best guitar-solo contribution to these early songs, so this choice is somewhat arbitrary. There’s some brilliant, nimble stuff on ‘Just Like Betty Page’ (from the Scandal in Bohemia LP) and ‘What’s the Matter Boy’ (from Sex and Travel), but what I like about this one, especially the long upwards run in the middle, is the way it subtly lifts the intensity of the song; and the way that, after that long upwards run, it almost pauses, surveys the view, pirouettes, and then gradually returns to the song.
There are at least two studio versions, one on the debut LP, Bath of Bacon, and another (to my ear the better one) on the Gift of Music compilation. There’s also a great return to it on the 2000 live LP Glorious and Idiotic, and a quick search of YouTube will find you videos of other live outings. It seems appropriate that it’s being played outdoors in a leafy cafe, even though it’s baffling that there are people in this world oblivious to its charms:
Throughout July I’m going to be writing a blog a day about a favourite singer/songwriter, Pat Fish: mostly his work as The Jazz Butcher, but also with Sumosonic and Wilson. I’ve already set myself my list of cues, but I’ll be reordering them to provide an almost chronological narrative.
Southern Mark Smith (Big Return)
It’s intriguing and illuminating, and at times disorientating, when bands reinterpret their own material: not just granting themselves more bars for a guitar solo or to play out in a live version, but when they change the essential mood of the song. The Jazz Butcher reworked ‘Southern Mark Smith’ quite rapidly in the first years of their existence as a band. The first version was recorded in the summer of 1983 and came out as their debut single soon after; it was later collected on The Gift of Music (1985). The second (‘Big Return’) was recorded the following summer and appeared on their second album, A Scandal in Bohemia (1984). The first has a roughness, jauntiness, and directness to it; the revised version is smoother, but hints at a musical energy and rage that only fully emerged many albums later. In the first version, the organ mostly sets down the main chords, while on the later one it moves more sinuously, reinforcing a song built around guitars, acoustic and chorus-pedalled. In the first version the guitars are choppily asserting a rhythm, but in the revision they’re softer and more melodic.
There are differences in the lyrics, too. In the first, thousands of people are ‘queueing in the rain to meet the pope’, while in the second, there’s a less specific ‘thousands of people out there’ who ‘have to be okay’. By some rules of lyric and poetry writing, this shouldn’t work (be specific, go in fear of abstractions, etc.), but it does: attention turns from the rain-sodden seekers of salvation to the singer’s own ambivalence. In the first version ‘don’t you know they only make those bracelets out of plastic’ suggests disenchantment with consumerist disposability; crucially in the revised version, this becomes ‘don’t you know they only make pop records out of plastic.’ This could come across as self-contemptuous, but in the smooth-running musical context of the revised version, it comes across only as cautiously self-aware.
The self-awareness is important, because, cryptic though it is, it appears to be a self-referential song about finding one’s personal or musical identity. For a long time I thought the Southern Mark Smith of the title was Gerard Langley of The Blue Aeroplanes, who had been speak-singing his lyrics since 1978; there’s been two-way traffic between the two bands, but when they first became aware of each other I don’t know. More recently, Pat Fish, who is essentially is ‘The Jazz Butcher’, has said that the title is an oxymoron: Mark E. Smith is irreducibly northern (English) in his identity, and a southern one would be a contradiction in terms. So it’s about coming to terms with those inner contradictions and mysteries, but because it never says so directly, it’s less earnest than any paraphrase can make it sound. There’s an aura of melancholy about it too, especially in the ‘Big Return’ version, to do with the way the vocal melody descends.
I must have first heard it in the summer of 1986. Chris F., a friend at sixth-form, was appalled that I was listening mostly to early Genesis (Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, etc.) and put together a tape with a few Jazz Butcher songs on it and some early James (the Village Fire E.P.); and maybe some Woodentops and Jesus and Mary Chain. He didn’t make me see the error of my ways (I’d still defend Nursery Cryme if I had to), but he did open me up to a whole load of new bands. He handed the tape over to me at the Angel-on-the-Bridge in Henley. I may be conflating several such afternoons, but also present was Huw R., whose younger brother would go on to become a Chemical Brother, and Peter Crouch, who would go on to play guitar on several Jazz Butcher albums.
I enjoyed #BookadayUK, enjoyed the opportunity to write flexibly and personally, and the discipline of having to do it regularly, but wouldn’t want to do it for another month. Instead, I’m going to try to write about 31 songs by a favourite songwriter and musician, one a day for a month. The categories are hopefully flexible enough that I’ll be able to use them again in future for other musicians and bands. I want the account to be more-or-less chronological, so apart from the first and the last categories, I won’t be doing them in this order.
First song you ever heard by them.
Song you sang the wrong lyrics to for ages.
Song that should have been a hit.
Favourite song from least favourite album.
Best cover version.
Best intro to a song.
Best ending to a song.
A song that reminds of you of somewhere.
A song that reminds you of a certain event.
A song that reminds you of a great night out.
A song about other worlds, outer space, dreams.
A song with a number in the title .
A song with a name in the title / A song about a famous person.
A song with the day of a week in the title.
Best drums , or best bass.
Best instrumental solo.
One you want to listen to in the car.
A song about travelling.
A song that makes you feel like you’re in a film.
A song about music / about the creative process.
Best guest appearance on someone else’s work.
A song about the weather .
Title alludes to a film.
Song about death / song you’d have played at your funeral.
A political song.
Song you disliked at first but grew to love.
Song you liked at first but liked less over time.
Best closer on an album.
Song you always used to put on a mixtape.
A song that makes you laugh out loud.
If I could choose just one for my desert island disc?
Some of these derive from various thirty-song challenges that have done the rounds on the internet; for others, many thanks to Rachel B., Paul W., and Alex H.
Michael Whitworth 