Tag Archives: #31songs

#31songs: 17: A song about travelling

1 Reply

The Jazz Butcher: Hysteria

‘Hysteria’ is the third track on Big Planet Scarey Planet, and after ‘New Invention’ and ‘Line of Death’ (about the USA bombing of Libya in 1986), it represents a brief change of tone and pace. It runs the risk of being a touring band’s song about life on the road, but the complaints about the hardships of touring are only part of it; it’s really a song about America from viewpoint of a European, and as such it fits well with the first two songs, the first being about an Americanized Britain, and the second being about American paranoid fantasies about Arab leaders.

There wasn’t a video on YouTube, so I’ve made one:

 

The Jazz Butcher website also has a live version from 1989, which goes at a much faster tempo than the studio version and loses some of the mood:

 

Musically, there are some unusual things going on here.  The 3/4 waltz rhythm is part of it, and the vocal line has some unusually big leaps in it, especially when we get to ‘It’s alright for a while’.  There’s a suggestion in this, and in the descending chords, of some Sixties folk-pop classic, but never specific enough to make it into a steal: is it the Beatles’ ‘Hide Your Love Away’, or Peter Sarstedt’s ‘Where Do You Go To, My Lovely?’  The organ line (funereal at the start, but warbling at the end) takes it out of straightforward folk-pop territory, but also has a sixties ambience about it.  The spaciousness of the song also gives it a cinematic feel.

What stops the lyric being simply a touring song, or simply satire, is the way it’s caught between distrust and disdain on the one hand, and longing on the other; and even the longing isn’t resolved.  At one point its a longing to join in the luxury and excess, if only as respite ‘We drove the bus through Heaven / There were people in their best suits in the bar. / We’re far from home, we’re far from well, / I wish I could have joined them for an hour’. Elsewhere it’s pity (‘But look at its children, too human and sad’), and elsewhere its a desire to change it.  The song builds to a final list:

So what for did we come here?

Well, we came here to learn,

‘Coz somebody told us

You’ve got books here to burn.

And we came for your buildings.

And we came to see your fountains.

And we came for the restaurants.

And we came for your women.

And we came for the Pacific Ocean.

And we came for the drugs.


And we came for your souls.


Sounds stupid, but we came for your souls.

Those ‘fountains’ might be ‘mountains’ (see here), but it doesn’t matter too much.  While some of these in isolation might read like straightforward decadent rock and roll (the women and the drugs), taken with interest in  books, and architecture, and the fountains/mountains, it’s more complex, and the final touch is both to admit to some sort of reforming mission (‘we came for your souls’) and in the next breath to admit that such a project might have been utterly misguided.

#31songs: 16: Song you liked at first but liked less over time.

2 Replies

The Jazz Butcher: New Invention

‘New Invention’ was recorded in February 1989 and was the only single off the Big Planet Scarey Planet album.  I seem to remember Pat introducing this around the time of its release as ‘a song specifically designed to overthrow the government’, and while that introduction has a healthy dose of self-mockery in it, this and the album pursued the condition-of-england idea from Fishcotheque with greater directness and aggression.  I like the lyrical richness and the implication that there’s more to be said than can be packed into one song — it’s the lyrical equivalent of pushing the guitars into the red zone — especially when we get to this passage:

Grace and hailstorms, trains and brainstorms,
All-night bus rides, brand new life forms,
Ancient Rome in your very own home,
Sex on the phone — I can’t see for the pheromones.

For Big Planet Scarey Planet the band returned to John A. Rivers in Leamington Spa, and the sound is notably different from the cleanness of Fishcotheque.  At times there’s a psychedelic shimmer to it that anticipates Levitation, the band that bassist Laurence O’Keeffe would join a few years later.  The vocals sound different too, with Pat unleashing anger on this song, and delivering a different tone, a cold fury, on the almost-spoken ‘Bicycle Kid’ (‘evil little fucker put his pet through the window …’).

Why I came to like this less wasn’t because of its failure to overthrow Margaret Thatcher, but the feeling that some aspects of the production were distinctly of their time: the digital reverb just a bit too pronounced; too much top end and not enough bass; snare drums sounding too big.  After the next two albums, Cult of the Basement and Condition Blue, this already sounded dated.  Condition Blue  had big songs, but their magnitude didn’t feel like a trick of the mixing desk.

Having said all that, re-listening to ‘New Invention’ to write this, I found it’s not as drenched in reverb as I remember it, and the sheer energy of the song, verbally and musically, has impressed me again.

 

#31songs: 15: Best closer on an album

1 Reply

The Jazz Butcher: Keeping the Curtains Closed

Filled though they are with wonderful material, the Glass-era Jazz Butcher albums never had a strong sense of shape.  Part of the problem was the band’s musical eclecticism. Yes, the right songs were chosen as closers, though I’ve never been fond of ‘My Desert’ from A Scandal in Bohemia; in the case of Sex and Travel, ‘Walk with the Devil’ is the real closer, and ‘Down the Drain’ a brief, bitter coda.  ‘Angels’ is a great last track to end Distressed Gentlefolk, but doesn’t bring the album together; no song could achieve that.

With the Creation era, the albums began to be coherent entities rather than stockpiles of brilliant songs, and when it comes to perfect closers, I’m spoilt for choice.  ‘The Good Ones’ (especially as a song that follows ‘Bad Dream Lover’), from Big Planet Scarey Plants?  ‘Sister Death’ from Cult of the Basement?  ‘Racheland’ from Condition Blue?  the American record company resequenced the album so it ended with ‘Still and All’, a decision that makes no sense and indicates how careful Pat had become about such matters.  But this one sets the standard:

The lyrics pick up ‘Next Move Sideways’ and the state of the nation as gauged by roads, cars, and public transport, but now presented in the third person. Musically the clean guitar sounds and the delay on the lead guitar line keep it sounding spacious; the simple melodic bassline in the intro and play-out gives it a kind of optimism despite itself.

#31songs: 14: A song with a number in the title


1 Reply

The Jazz Butcher: Looking for Lot 49

The early Jazz Butcher records had shown an intermittent interest in rockabilly beats, with songs like ‘Red Pets’ and ‘I Need Meat’; their friends The Woodentops likewise mixed those insistent pounding rhythms into their work.

The beat, the harsh echo on the vocals, and the pause in the middle of the chorus locate ‘Lot 49’  clearly enough in that lineage.  In the background there are delays on the guitars that almost start to work against the basic beat, especially in the closing 30 seconds or so, and by the end there’s a feedback drone that suggests a more psychedelic style, but these things are only hinted at; ‘Lot 49’ is classical, concise and focused, and doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Lyrics-wise, the title alludes to Thomas Pynchon’s 1960s classic of delirious paranoia, The Crying of Lot 49, and just like that novel, the Jazz Butcher’s ‘Lot 49’ is concerned with postmen, postcards, and the unreliability of the postal system.  I think the Jazz Butcher song must have first alerted me to Pynchon’s novel, though it was my interest in literature and science that have me the final nudge towards reading it.  The novel’s fantastic, particularly if you’ve been reading Jacobean revenge tragedy for your exams and have murderous henchmen called Antonio spilling out of your ears with their poisoned Bibles, or skulls, or signet-rings.  That said, I don’t think you need to read the novel to appreciate the song.

#31songs: 13: One you want to listen to in the car

1 Reply

The Jazz Butcher: Next Move Sideways

Let’s be clear from the outset: I hate ‘driving music’, if by that we mean bland, unchallenging, predictable, steady-paced stuff that aims to lower blood pressure and heart rate as you hurtle down the fast lane.  Moreover, I rarely actually enjoy driving. But for a long while, living in north Wales but trying to keep in touch with friends and family in southern England, I was doing quite a lot of it.  And it became almost ritualistic to put on a tape of Fishcotheque, the Jazz Butcher’s first album for Creation Records, which begins with ‘Next Move Sideways’; so much so that I associate it very closely with a particular junction on the A4074 in south Oxfordshire. Something about the opening few chords before the song really gets going also embodies my reluctance to set off on any journey, so maybe that’s why this one feels so closely connected to driving. And of course the lyrics have a lot to say about bypasses, buses, and the car-oriented atmosphere of 1980s Britain.

Fishcotheque was released in 1988, but I suspect the songs and the recordings date from late 1987. (Looking at the live line-up, by December 1987 the band has become Pat (guitar and vocals), Kizzy O’Callaghan (guitar), who does play on the album, and Paul Mulready (drums) and Laurence O’Keeffe (bass), who don’t.) It was recorded at Alaska near Waterloo Station, and takes its name from a fish and chips restaurant under the arches of a railway bridge.

‘Next Move Sideways’ is every bit as much a political song as ‘Olof Palme’, but it’s a bigger survey, and kind of Condition-of-England song for the late 1980s.  The lyrics are looser-knit than on some of Pat’s earlier songs.  Where his wittiest earlier songs had been built around sharp rhyming couplets — ‘Hungarian Love Song’ on Distressed Gentlefolk had been the pinnacle of achievement in this regard — the rhymes in ‘Next Move Sideways’ aren’t insisted on. Likewise, the vocal melody almost deliberately avoids having a catchy tune; in this regard there’s a similarity with The Blue Aeroplanes: what the vocal line lacks in melody, the guitars more than compensate for. The atmosphere is one of disempowerment, of a personal melancholy (‘your letters never arrive’) that isn’t purely personal because it’s due to the political stagnation of the time. It’s a song about being literally and metaphorically bypassed.  From this point of view, the single most devastating line is ‘Smoking on the bridge like a tourist by the Houses Of Parliament’: we had become tourists in our own country, and the representational democracy wasn’t representing us.  The other great, deep, and complex line is ‘I smell the diesel in the air, it lets me know I’m alive’: it hints at Marx’s recognition that there’s something revolutionary and destabilising about capitalism, even when it’s expropriating everything and polluting the country; all the references to traffic in the song hint at circulation, though the instinct of the owners of capital is not to ‘spread it about’.

Musically, I love the way the relatively careless vocal line plays off against the rhythmical tightness, particularly the very abrupt staccato chords; and the way those chords play off against the sparkling guitars; and the way that Alex Green’s saxophone solo cascades generously over the later part of the song.  Musically it manages to acknowledge both downtrodden melancholy, and a concerted effort to make sense of everything, and a gift of optimism that comes unexpectedly from some entirely other place.

#31songs: 12: A song that should have been a hit

2 Replies

The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy: Angels

The Jazz Butcher website says that the later Big Planet, Scarey Planet album reached the top of M.T.V.’s alternative chart in 1989, but on the whole the charts and the band have scarcely been on speaking terms.  In the era on Glass Records, from the 1983 to 1987, the eclecticism of the music must have made them a difficult band to market, but the small-scale nature of Glass probably meant there wasn’t in any case much promotional muscle behind them.  In a just world ‘Southern Mark Smith’ would have been a hit, ‘The Human Jungle’ would have been a hit, and ‘Hard’ would have been a hit. They even performed ‘Hard’ on Channel 4’s The Tube in February 1986, and, in a feat of astonishing neurological resilience, Pat claims to remember something of the experience.

One might argue that the British record buying public didn’t get the Jazz Butcher’s variety of irony and emotional reserve. That’s where ‘Angels’ comes in, recorded in May 1986 as part of the Distressed Gentlefolk album, their last for Glass Records. The whole sound and emotional attitude of the song is quite different, while still recognisably being The Jazz Butcher.  There was even a video, reconstituted here by a fan from a wobbly VHS tape:

In sleeve notes for a later compilation, Pat says he wrote it on the day the USA bombed Tripoli (i.e., 15 April 1986.)  If the lyrics seem a little abstract, his remarks on that compilation aren’t the place to go to for clarification: ‘I never make any sense when I start to talk about this tune. The lyrics just showed up, like automatic writing or something.’  It could easily be the sort of ‘life is hard when you’re on the road’ song that bands with a busy touring schedule end up writing, and 1985-86 were the busiest touring years for the Jazz Butcher Conspiracy. But this one largely avoids the specifics of musicianly suffering, and so becomes a more general song about distance, separation, and longing.

Fans have always loved it; I get the impression Pat has mixed feelings about its simplicity and directness.  Someone called out for it once at a gig and he said words to the effect of ‘you don’t want to hear that stadium shit, do you?’ In the production that John A. Rivers brought to it, the sound is almost too big, shimmering in digital reverb and a big snare-drum sound, but the song itself is solid, and works when played by the band or played solo.

#31songs: 11: A political song

1 Reply

The Jazz Butcher: Olof Palme

The Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated on 28 February 1986.  Exactly when Pat wrote and recorded this song I don’t know, but as the split with Max Eider came later that year (27 November, after a gig in Zurich), it was some time in 1986; the recording surfaced on the fabulous compilation Big Questions (The Gift of Music, vol.2) released the following year.

Around the time ‘Olof Palme’ came out, the only kind of leftist political songwriting that got attention was in the vein of Billy Bragg: passionate, direct, unambiguously committed.  (And by the way, if my sources are to be trusted, Billy Bragg and Pat Fish were born on the same day in 1957.) Most indie bands were perceived as anti-Thatcherite and belonging to a 1980s version of the counter-culture, but there was a gulf between indie irony and playfulness on the one hand, and what counted as political writing on the other.

For me at least, ‘Olof Palme’ was a revelation about a different way of writing political songs. It’s the first song in this series that doesn’t currently have a version on YouTube, but there’s a snippet on the Jazz Butcher website that gives a flavour:

Although Max contributes, this is almost a solo piece; it’s broadly in the cafe-jazz line of Jazz Butcher writing that started with ‘Party Time’.  There’s another strand to their early writing that I haven’t represented here, except perhaps in ‘What’s the Matter Boy?’, and that’s kind of witty drinking song; Max Eider’s ‘Drink’ and ‘Down the Drain’; ‘Olof Palme’ grafts that strand onto a more serious purpose, but keeps the light-hearted tone.

Well, you didn’t read about him in the English papers much
But he used to govern Sweden with a magic touch
Everybody liked him even though the liquor prices were high
And my god are they high

But all the taxation helped to pay the bills
For stuff like better work conditions and the curing of ills
It made sense, and ladies and gents that’s why…

I can’t think of any other song that makes a concise justification for redistribution and makes it light-hearted. Reminding us of the high price of alcohol in Sweden while exhorting us to drink in Palme’s memory is a lovely touch.  It’s not the first political song in the Jazz Butcher’s work: ‘Real Men’ from Scandal in Bohemia has macho masculine identity in its sights; more tongue in cheek, ‘Red Pets’ on Sex and Travel celebrates all things female and Eastern Bloc to an unstoppable rockabilly beat; and in ‘Southern Mark Smith’ there’s a passing reference to the BBC as an mouthpiece of the establishment. But ‘Olof Palme’ is the one where Pat really nails it, quietly, modestly, and brilliantly.

 

#31songs: 10: Makes you feel like you’re in a film

1 Reply

The Jazz Butcher, City of Night

Even granting the diversity of styles employed by the Jazz Butcher in the mid 1980s, musically speaking ‘City of Night’ isn’t typical of them; it feels like Pat is channelling someone else’s muse and I can’t put my finger on just who. The song was recorded 20 March 1986, and first appeared on a Glass Records sampler album, 50,000 Glass Fans Can’t Be Wrong; in then came out on the Jazz Butcher’s Big Questions compilation (1987), and reappeared on Cake City (2001).

Giving the keyboard such prominence, writing the melody in some weird Egpytian-sounding mode, and having a drum part that sounds like a preset electronic rhythm all make this an unusual proposition. The lyrics, though, are unmistakably Pat’s, and have the same self-deflating swift turns that characterise ‘The Human Jungle.’  In particular, the lines ‘I’ve seen the handcuffs on your shelf / I’d like to help, I’d like to help myself’; and ‘could it be shyness? It could be stupidity.’

The filmic quality comes mostly from the atmosphere of the music.  The drum pattern reinforces the sense of a life being lived to a mechanical rhythm; the weird melodic mode makes otherwise ordinary London images and scenes take on an exotic quality.  The film this places me in is predominantly monochrome, full of sharp contrasts between the bring lights of the city and its shadows, full of glittering surfaces and worn-down faces.

#31songs: 9: Title alludes to a film

1 Reply

The Jazz Butcher: The Human Jungle

‘The Human Jungle’ doesn’t in fact allude to a film, but to a British TV series from 1963-1965 based around the casebook of a fictional psychiatrist, Dr Corder, played by Herbert Lom.  I’ve never seen it, but suspect that doing so wouldn’t massively change my appreciation of the song. Mark Duguid writes that the case studies were ‘convincingly rounded and often bold’: ‘including a suicidal stripper, a young couple suffocated by their families’ love, and a schoolteacher punishing herself for a long-repressed crush on a pupil’ (BFI Screenonline). Here are the opening credits.

Pat Fish’s song takes the title as its starting point:

The Human Jungle starring Herbert Lom was never this much fun
And I’m ready to swear to that
The room is swaying like a boat
But I’m still afloat and that’s a matter of fact.

— all this suggests the connection between song and TV show is that our singer’s world is populated by mad people, and reliable reference points are few and far between.  Musically it’s subtle and stylish. It emerges from the same laid-back faux-jazz sound that gave us ‘Partytime’, but there’s a lot more going on.  But don’t believe me: listen.  And listen, in particular, to the extended version.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVps-Av6DDA

Musically there’s an intriguing similarity to ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, but in a way that   feels like an allusion rather than a theft: it’s there in the rhythm that Owen taps out on the hi-hat, in the sliding bass line, even in the rhythm of the vocal line.  There’s a feeling of familiarity about it, but nothing that should have got Lou Reed’s copyright lawyers excited.  Having that allusion further populates the song’s world with Reed’s New York transvestites and transexuals, without the lyrics having the mention them.

The lyrics are more abstract than any Jazz Butcher song I’ve written about so far.

I’m a camera, I’m a clown
And every move you make, I write it down
I know all about your house, I know all about your mouth
I know when I’ve got to leave your town

No sooner has the allusion to Christopher Isherwood come out — with further suggestions of decadence, inter-war and Berlin-based this time — and the possibility that Pat’s being just a bit too literary, than it’s qualified by ‘I’m a clown’.  And similarly with the stalkerish suggestions about knowing all about her (presumably) house and mouth: no sooner is that uttered than he realises he’s overstepped the mark and will have to escape.

Musically there’s a lot going on: vocals and guitars are carrying melodies, but they’re also interacting rhythmically.  There are subtle things: the four note guitar phrase that comes in at about 4.24: the first three repeats are based on one rhythm, but the fourth and final one varies it subtly to avoid monotony.  And in the long version, the final minute or so of playout has a really joyful exuberance to it, Felix the bassist playing high notes, other instruments risking discords.  I didn’t see the band in this incarnation, but this recording gives the impression that they were tight enough and confident enough to improvise. There’s nothing quite like this on a Jazz Butcher studio recording until Condition Blue in 1992, by which time the band’s sound had changed dramatically.

There’s also a video of a live version performed on German TV, from the AlabamaHalle in Munich, in November 1985. The sound quality is excellent; the band look entirely at their ease, even if musically they don’t stray far from the studio version:

#31songs: 8: A song that reminds you of a certain event

1 Reply

The Jazz Butcher: What’s the Matter Boy?

In 1986, in my second year at sixth-form college, it was decided to put on a touring production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Arrangements were made  to go to Köln, München, and, more adventurously still, Czechoslovakia. Costumes were hired from the RSC.  I played Lysander and had an old silvery costume from Love’s Labours Lost once worn by Derek Jacobi.  Bottom, when transformed, had a magnificent ass’s head.  The fairies were definitely not ‘gauzy’, but emanations from the unconscious, clad in skin-tight veiny costumes.

In Czechoslovakia we stayed in Karlovy Vary and Prague, though for our actual performances we were bussed out miles into the countryside, on one occasion to play in a Dom Kultury in what seemed to be a small village, and on the other to play at a holiday camp by a lake.  Our audiences there were not Czech, but East German holiday-makers. Some of the cast were at the end of their lower sixth year, but the majority of us had finished A-levels, and were in the mood for a party. The entire contingent acquainted themselves thoroughly with Germany’s and Czechoslovakia’s finest lagers.  I’d known many of the cast since starting secondary school, though others I’d met only at sixth form; but we were all fairly comfortable and trusting with each other, so it was ideal.

‘What’s the Matter Boy’, from the Jazz Butcher’s Sex and Travel album, doesn’t exactly allude to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but its central character is a familiar figure:

The shape of this is perfect.  It could go into the chorus after the first verse, but defers it for a while so that the clues are all presented and we’re fully primed for the big revelation.  And then more cunningly still, it shifts its sympathies slightly: the donkey-man may be a figure of ridicule, but he’s also a figure of pathos; people don’t like to be around him because ‘you make them feel uneasy when you say something profound.’ 

It doesn’t actually remind me of any very specific event, but of the whole tour and of the summer that followed.  Girls dropped drinks into their laps; boys fell off their chairs.  Catchphrases were invented and were mutated, in-jokes became deeply in-bred and cryptically funny only the initiates. The carefree mood of the music in ‘What’s the Matter Boy’ sums up that whole summer.  The song itself maybe goes a little deeper: there’s fun being had, but there are also superficial judgements being made, whereby the ignorant protect themselves from the profound stuff they don’t want to deal with.  But it wears its criticisms lightly.