» Listings for 2024

1. 2023/4 Albums Thing 405 - Paul Weller “A Kind Revolution”

   Posted on 9:15am Thursday 22nd Aug 2024

   I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Paul Weller ever since he split The Jam up. Apart from a handful of songs (and at least one of those is a re-recorded Jam demo!) you can keep the Style Council thank you very much. I loved his first 3 or 4 solo albums but after “Heavy Soul” his records have been so hit and miss I really don’t care for more than one or sometimes two tracks from each. I have a soft spot for “22 Dreams” and “Sonik Kicks” but since then his records have been so increasingly lacklustre I haven’t listened to a new release since “True Meanings” in 2018. If you’re not gonna make the effort Paul then I can’t be arsed either.

   As I’m a bit of a nerd and I love a list I’ve got all my records catalogued online, on not one one but two websites, on one of which you can put a score out of 10 for each track. 8’s, 9’s and 10’s are to me damn near or actually perfect, a 7 means it’s OK, nothing special just what you'd expect, 5’s and 6’s are just “meh”, they’re just there and anything under 5 well you may as well not have bothered recording it. “A Kind Revolution” has a couple of 6’s and everything else at 5 (and that’s being very lenient to one or two of them)…meh.

   When I looked at the track list before starting to write this the only track title I could mentally put a tune to was “Woo Sé Mama” and that only because I think it’s bloody awful (yet it still somehow manages to be one of the two better songs on here) ! Maybe he needs an editor as it seems like he keeps releasing almost anything he records without any time to consider “is this any good ?”. Maybe he needs to work with different people who can drag something else out of him. I don’t know but it’s a great pity to me that I no longer get excited about this guy, who soundtracked my teenage years, announcing a new tour or record. I live in hope that the fire hasn’t really gone out and he’ll make a blinding record one day but I fear that those days are far, far behind him.

   Hopper - https://youtu.be/V4pJMn053Wk?si=BBcxDflcU4SCnXmK

2. 2023/4 Albums Thing 404 - The Waterboys “This Is The Sea”

   Posted on 9:30am Wednesday 21st Aug 2024

   My brothers favourite album (or at least I think it still is). It’s an album that marks the end of the “Big Music” period for The Waterboys, their next album was “Fisherman’s Blues” and that marked a whole new musical direction that I chose not to follow too closely.

   The song everyone will know is of course “The Whole Of The Moon”, a spectacular pop song and a #26 hit when originally released in 1985 and then re-released in 1991 (to promote “The Best of the Waterboys 81–90” compilation) when it reached #3.

   Just in case you only know The Waterboys from “The Whole Of The Moon” and “Fisherman’s Blues” let me assure you, The Waterboys could rock (see Mike Scott’s statement later). “Don’t Bang The Drum” hangs off a thunderous drum sound and a guitar that prime Banshees John McGeogh would have been proud of, “Medicine Bow” and “Be My Enemy” rattle along with a sense of desperation to make this the most impassioned performance you’ve ever heard.

   But there is of course shade among the bright light. We’d already heard “Old England” (along with “Medicine Bow”) on a Radio One session earlier in the year (I still have the recoding I made off the radio) and between that session and the albums release the lyrics changed. The part of the song on the album that now went “Evening has fallen, the swans are singing, the last of Sundays bells is ringing” on that BBC session had been “Hey Bob Maxwell I wrote you this song, About a funny old world that’s coming along…Many things are right but you’re all wrong” which, when you tie it to the rest of the songs lyric, is a pretty scathing take down of the (later) disgraced but notoriously litigious media tycoon. I guess nobody wanted the law suit that would inevitably follow.

   “Spirit”, “The Pan Within” and “Trumpets” give us the gentler more spiritual side of this album. It all comes to a crescendo on the title track. Those massed 12 strings are back from “A Pagan Place” but this time the closing song is more hypnotic than its predecessors strident build toward its end.

   Me and Deb went to see The Waterboys on a bill with Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe in 2018. I hadn’t seen them live since the late 80’s and the possibility existed that they could play a set full of songs I didn’t know at all. They walked out on stage, Mike Scott spoke “we’re The Waterboys, a rock & roll band” and BOOM straight into this albums “Medicine Bow”. There were a handful of songs I didn’t know but they included in their set “All The Things She Gave Me”, “A Girl Called Johnny” and “The Whole Of The Moon” (of course) from this “Big Music” period. It’s said Mike Scott can be “difficult”, but on that afternoon his Waterboys showed they’s still got it. 

   Old England - https://youtu.be/V4CPezSV198?si=LJ35obQQj-Z_bUYa

3. 2023/4 Albums Thing 403 - The Waterboys “A Pagan Place”

   Posted on 9:30am Tuesday 20th Aug 2024

   I don’t recall where we first saw The Waterboys. It may have been at the Triangle at Aston University in Birmingham, in fact we saw them first on Channel 4 show The Tube after initially being introduced to them by old friend Phil Barlow. I do know it was around the time of this album and it’s one of my very favourite records of the 1980’s (it wasn’t all synths and tutu’s). It’s also my favourite of The Waterboys opening trio of albums.

   This time out we have a real drummer throughout, Karl Wallinger has joined the band to handle the keyboards. Mike Scott is still producing but a list of notable recording engineers might help account for the overall improved and consistent sound of “A Pagan Place”. Every song here feels like an old friend I’ve played this record so much over the years. The “she” sung about in “Church Not Made With Hands” and “All The Things She Gave Me” feels like someone I know; the thrill that has gone from “The Thrill Is Gone” feels personal; when Mike Scott sings “Somebody says "Well, hey, what are you waving at?", Well what have I got to lose, Somebody might wave back” I’m thinking "I would"; “The Big Music” is a manifesto in song, the thing Scott is reaching for “I have heard the big music and I'll never be the same, Something so pure has called my name”.

   But to me this album hinges on 3 songs. At the end of Side 1 is “Rags” a post punk slash and burn built of crashing guitars and a vocal that sounds like a lifetime of emotion and frustration led to that outpouring. “Red Army Blues” comes at you like an alternative “Song Of The Steppes” and tells of a Soviet soldier in WW2 “seventeen years old, never kissed a girl”, the things he saw and did, his excitement to be going home crushed by the realisation they were all being sent to Siberian prison camps “All because Comrade Stalin was scared that we’d become too westernised”.

   The finale is “A Pagan Place”, massed 12 string acoustics play the chords, they never change but they build and Build and BUild and BUIld and BUILd and BUILD to a shuddering crescendo. It’s a masterclass in simplicity and meticulous arrangement in just over 5 minutes

   There’s not a song out of place nor anything that outstays it’s welcome on “A Pagan Place”. It’s not held in as high regard as its follow up but this is the one I turn to most often.

   Red Army Blues - https://youtu.be/Ncgb8qBbD1U?si=KtfEGWKSzwRfbXIg