More perfect pop, but of a different kind from ‘Rain’, ‘Big Saturday’ comes from the Jazz Butcher’s 1985 album, Sex and Travel.
I love how it builds from the delicate guitar melody, and how that’s suggestive of spring; love how the drummer (Owen Jones) initially holds back, only playing snare on the fourth beat in each bar, so there’s a kind of acceleration when he starts playing on the second beat as well; and love Max Eider’s embellishments and his Spanish-flavoured solo. The lyrics are perfect too: it’s a simple celebration of the beginnings of a relationship, but, with lines like ‘it doesn’t mean I’d die for you’, Pat prevents it from becoming too slushy. And as well as checking his affection in that regard, there’s also ‘We went through Saturday / And not everybody did that.’ Who were these people who didn’t go through Saturday? Lovers who split up? People who died? This is a song that starts by telling us that the weather’s grim, and for all that it’s celebratory, it’s also aware of what lies beyond and outside.
In this live version, from 1989, some of the delicacy goes, and there are significant changes to the vocal melody. The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy line-up at that date was great, but they don’t aim to create the feel of the studio version and they don’t put anything in its place:
And here’s a later live version, from 2013, just Pat and Max, which is closer in spirit to the studio version
Perfect indie-pop, a little rough around the edges, instantly catchy, and full of interesting guitar decorations. ‘Rain’ is from the same session that brought us ‘Roadrunner’, so I’m slightly out of chronological order with this one. Things to love include the backwards guitar (at least, that’s what it sounds like to me, though it also sounds fiddle-like); the staccato descending phrase that announces the vocals; Max’s various chiming embellishments; and the backing vocals, both on ‘Let the rain …’ and ‘Now-na-na–na-now’. For me this is the start of a line of short, sharp, focused pop songs by Pat Fish that later on brought us ‘Bad Dream Lover’ (on Big Planet Scarey Planet) and ‘She’s On Drugs’ (Cult of the Basement). It’s also the song that gave me a revelation about the lineage of indie-pop in general. That it sounds like the Velvet Underground is obvious enough — as with ‘Roadrunner’, it’s in the backing vocals — but that style of song and performance also owes something to American soul music from the 1960s; Lou Reed loved doo-wop and apparently also loved Motown. (Alex Petridis notes that the start of ‘There She Goes Again’ is virtually a quote from the start of Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Hitch Hike’). Pat’s love of soul emerges most clearly in ‘Come On Marie’ (on, of course, Rotten Soul, in 2000), but there are hints of it from the very beginning of his career.
A song I sang the wrong lyrics to for ages: Girlfriend
This sounds brings together much that’s excellent about the early Jazz Butcher records, both in music and lyrics. My confusion about the misheard lyrics has redoubled in writing this piece, because I’ve now seen a transcription that suggests I was right all along, but I want to write about it anyway.
The sound has much in common with ‘Southern Mark Smith’: an acoustic guitar (presumably Pat) and another, highly chorused one (Max’s) adding melodic details; backing vocals gentle and high-pitched. It’s a soft sound — there’s little distortion on the guitars, the backing vocals don’t do the hard, mechanical Velvet Underground thing — but it delivers surprising power. The acoustic guitar strums in the basic chords twice round before the whole band comes, and Max delivers his main guitar solo before the lyrics begin. It’s a bitter-sweet story of drunken inappropriate relationships: the happy-sad, bitter-sweet tone was widely prevalent in indie music at the time; and someone also wrote that having a song called ‘Girlfriend’ was a prerequisite for any indie pop band; but in neither aspect does Pat’s take seem derivative. What blew me away when I first heard this — it was another on the compilation that Chris did for me — was combination in the music of melodic details and unmelodic raw details (the rapidly strummed descending part near the close), and in the lyrics the ironic and nuanced take on romantic relationships: ‘It’s a measure of a feeling that I can’t identify that I can let you go’. Who had ever written anything as complex as that before? Well, probably plenty of songwriters, but it was still a revelation to me.
The ambiguous bit of the lyrics comes in the first verse. Here’s what I thought I heard:
Here I am, I’m just lying on the floor with you
We had to get drunk, it was the only thing we could do
Well, it’s funny ‘coz I thought that it could have turned out quite romantic
But it isn’t like that, which is fine, ‘coz it means I can stand it.
I liked the idea that the ‘romantic’ relationship was the one that would have been unbearable. But having sung this for some years, I saw — or thought I saw — a transcription that had the crucial word as ‘traumatic’. Once you’ve seen it written that way, it sounds that way; it would still be a great song, but it would be a marginally less interesting lyric. Now, turning to David Whittemore’s excellent Jazz Butcher website (source of the above lyrics), I’m led to believe I heard it first the right time.
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.
Michael Whitworth 