Chapter 4

Marvin Gaye - Got to Give it Up

By 1976 Marvin Gaye had blown the world apart with some of the greatest albums ever produced, namely, I Heard It Through The Grapevine in 1968, What's Going On in 1971 and Let's Get It On in 1973.  By 1976, despite these successes, he was in massive financial difficulties due to lawsuits from previous band members and a costly divorce from his first wife Anna Gordy (Berry Gordy’s elder sister).   By 1976, his record label wanted him to record in the latest style, they wanted Marvin Gaye to go Disco.  By the beginning of 1977, Marvin Gaye's financial problems led him to undertake a lengthy European tour, where he received rave reviews and the release of the incredible live album, Live at the London Palladium.  The pressure on Marvin Gaye to do Disco increased though.  He produced his fifteenth studio album during this period, a record dedicated to his troubled first marriage, and released in 1978 as Here, My Dear - and it was certainly not on the same level as his previous studio albums.  The pressure for Marvin Gaye to go Disco just kept growing.

Finally, in the spring of 1977, Marvin Gaye produced a song which he described as parodying Disco, which could be best described as pure Funk, it was Got To Give It Up (Part One).  It is cool, it is sexy and it is fun.  The song is about a man, at a party who is too shy to join in.  Needless to say, by the end of the song, he owns it.

Choosing this song was never going to be easy.  Marvin Gaye was shot dead by his father in 1984 when I was just a boy, and I knew little of his body of work, but I instinctively knew that it was a day to mourn. Interestingly when Lennon died in December 1980, I never understood what the fuss was about.  Whilst I can respect the Beatles, they are undoubtedly one of the greatest bands of all time, they have never meant as much to me though. On the other hand, Marvin Gaye's death was a tragedy I didn't fully appreciate at the time, but I did feel.  Call it prescience if you like but Marvin Gaye really is an icon in my life. 

Chapter 8

Primal Scream - Movin’ On Up

Not everything by Primal Scream does it for me, but Screamadelica certainly does. It is, quite simply, one of the greatest albums ever produced.  It is outstanding.  The first Mercury Prize winner in 1992, it is one of the best albums of the 1990s and has steadfastly stood the test of time.

With influences from Gospel and Dub, it was a clear move away from their earlier Indie Rock sound, much of which can be accredited to the production skills of the DJs Andy Weatherall and Terry Farley who introduced a flavour of House Music.  For many though, it screams Ecstasy, and will remain the epitome of that drug-fuelled scene of the time.

Movin' On Up is the opening track and hits you straight between the ears.  Two bars of hard-hitting acoustic guitar, a dash of piano, some Rolling Stones style percussion, and then Bobby Gillespie's vocals accompanied by a Gospel chorus.  It is soulful, it is funky and it is uplifting.  Even the greatest of atheists will raise their hands in praise - and I have, on numerous occasions!

Chapter 11

The Clash - London Calling

Take five minutes and look through the list of number ones in the UK charts in the 70’s and you can see why punk emerged. Banal easy listening interspersed with the odd piece of commercial disco, there was little room for the angry young soul that should form a part of all our personal evolutions. By the end of the decade and the start of the 80’s, punk had turned it all inside out with New Wave, Two Tone and New Romanticism all competing to take the mantle of the rebellion in new directions. At the heart of this revolution was The Clash.

Their origins, from London SS, spawned The Damned, as well as The Clash. Unlike the Sex Pistols, they weren’t created from scratch by an empresario, like an ugly version of the Monkees, they came out of the pub band scene, influenced by rock n roll and even the hippy-dippy-airy-fairy folk scene of the time. They set out to compete with the Sex Pistols, and embraced such an eclectic range of sounds that they outreached them. With elements of dub, funk, reggae, ska, and rockabilly, The Clash took punk to a place that categorically laughs in the face of time.

Released in December 1979, even the iconic cover of London Calling stated its intent to kick back at the rock n roll traditions of the generation that cut the path before them. A straight take off of Elvis’ 1956 debut album (a guilty pleasure of mine), the cover ousts the guitar picking image of Presley, to be supplanted by the bass smashing Simonon. And generations of T shirts were spawned.

London Calling isn’t the best song on the album, and it barely makes the Clash’s top ten, but that says a lot more about the strength of their catalogue. It is a brilliant song, wonderfully angry, and unnervingly prescient, the sun is zooming in, meltdown expected, the wheat is growin' thin, engines stop running, but I have no fear, 'cause London is drowning, and I, I live by the river.

Chapter 14

David Bowie - Sorrow

Are words required?

Chapter 17

Barrington Levy - Here I Come

It’s a thing about different genres of music, such as classic soul, jazz, or reggae, we like much of what we hear but sometimes we just don’t know where to start. I was certainly like this with reggae. By the time I turned 20 I had pretty much bought everything by Bob Marley on vinyl, and then I was introduced on to the scene. British bands like Aswad, Steel Pulse, and Misty In Roots. From there to Jah Shaka, Burning Spear, Gregory Isaacs, Mikey Dread, Hugh Mundell, Horace Andy, Lee Perry, and of course the great Jimmy Cliff. A massive range of styles, beats and grooves that I still listen to now, with the bass turned up high.

Jamaican born Barrington Levy released his first single when he was just 14, quickly creating a huge following in the Dance Halls. His big breakthrough in the UK didn’t come until he toured with the album Here I Come, in 1984, but I didn’t discover him until a couple of years later, when I was a student in Birmingham. I don’t know what the scene is like now, but back then it was thriving and I went to some of the best gigs in my life there. Some bands, like Aswad, had two facades. There were the touring commercial sounds, consummately professional and thoroughly entertaining, and then there were the home crowd gigs. It was the latter which showed me what the reggae scene was really about. Your chest throbbing to the bass, the slow grinding grooves, and the MCs competing to outdo each other for the crowds’ approval. My joints are no longer what they were and I now dance like a Dad, but if the house is empty and I’m all alone, I still like to wind up my hips Dance Hall style.

Chapter 20

Chas & Dave - Ain’t No Pleasing You

What can be said about Chas and Dave?  I was just a kid when Gertcha made the charts and I thought it was incredible.  Of course, the charts were full of 'novelty' songs back then but Chas and Dave's 'rockney' style was special, it was more targeted at grownups and not just Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart's Junior Choice on Saturday mornings.  The fact I was so young probably provides the contradiction to that statement, but I've always felt that they were capable of crossing the age divide, and I think that is fundamentally down to the fact that they are genuine musicians.

They were both well-known session musicians in the 1970's and even got to open for Led Zeppelin at the Knebworth Festival in 1979.  Their particular style was an authentic rejection of the fake American accents adopted by many British singers at the time, they are not putting something on, they are genuinely being themselves.  I think that the constant look of surprise on their faces is a reflection of the fact that they are having good old honest fun, they don't take themselves too seriously, and still find it hard to believe that they've made their livings this way.

As a child we would travel down to London for the occasional family party, a wedding, birthday, christening, or anniversary, and the whole clan loved an excuse for a knees up old style.  The kids would all be dressed in our best clothes, which we would then spend the rest of the evening ruining, running around in all the glory of a feral pack.  The men propped up the bar drinking pints of bitter whilst the women sat in packs with endless glasses of sweet sherry and stout.  Avoiding the kisses of the elderly moustachioed matriarchal great-aunts was the biggest challenge but the outcomes were inevitable. Chas and Dave are evocative of an era that forms a part of who I am. If you don’t like them, then look within, I am sure you can find your own Chas and Dave.

Chapter 23

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Messiah Ward

Chapter 26

Lloyd Cole & The Commotions - Forest Fire

Lloyd Cole and the Commotions were a breath of fresh air in the ’80s, following a period over-dominated by the emergence of electronic music. Don’t get me wrong, I embraced the New Romantic scene with the best of them, sporting my Phil Oakey fringe with much pride. OMD’s Architecture and Morality, released at the end of ’81, remains one of my favourite albums of all time, and I have been proud to pass my vinyl version on to my youngest son, safe in the knowledge that it still sounds good almost forty years on. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions were different though, with two guitars, a bass, keyboards and drums, they were much more pared-back and natural in their style - bear in mind that even bands like the Sisters of Mercy went with this whole synth feel, preferring a drum machine to the real flesh and blood thing, even going so far as naming it Doktor Avalanche and gave it credits on the album covers.

Their debut album Rattlesnakes was released towards the end of ’84, just a few months before my eighteenth birthday, and a new album was a treasured thing then, so they would be played over, and over, and over again. Shut away in my bedroom, feigning working for my A-Levels, this was one of my favourite LPs amongst my 30 or so I was proud to own at that time. And it was an album that spoke to me directly. Varied enough to keep it interesting, upbeat rhythms set against acoustic moments soulful enough to be emotional, with sufficient angst for any teenage man-boy riding his latest and most current emotional love turmoil. It also helped that Lloyd Cole has a vocal range pretty similar to my own (although I have to admit that he may be a trifle better than me), and many of the songs are slow enough, with lyrics of such a memorable nature, that it was prime for the singalong.

As an album, it has stood the test of time, as has their second release, Easy Pieces. I prefer the slower tracks such as Speedboat, Down on Mission Street, 2CV, Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken, and, of course, Forest Fire. It doesn’t matter that some of the lyrics are a little pretentious, Lloyd Cole was very young when he wrote them, and like anger, being pretentious is a rite of passage we should all go through when we’re young enough not to care.

Forest Fire, quite simply, is one of the best tracks, on one of my favourite albums of all time.

Chapter 29

Nina Simone - Little Girl Blue

Little Girl Blue is one of those songs that has been covered more times than can be listed. It’s considered as a standard for any piano teacher, managing to lend itself to a range of styles from soulful jazz, to the blues, and even upbeat honky tonk. Written in 1935 for the Broadway musical Jumbo, with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart, it was considered a standard for jazz aficionados in the 50’s and 60’s. Oscar Peterson’s 1964 is the benchmark for all piano versions, whilst Janis Joplin’s 1969 rendition manages to reach the most heart-wrenching depths of any blues version I have ever heard.

Nina Simone’s version is unique, and not just because of her voice with its depth of history and pain, there are versions of similar virtuosity from Sarah Vaughan, Sam Cooke, and Ella Fitzgerald. Context is part, given its position on the album of the same name. As the fourth track following on from Mood Indigo, Don’t smoke in Bed, and Little Girl Blue, by the time the track starts, there is a mood set that has already prepared the listener for an emotional journey that cuts straight to the heart. The fact that it is followed by the upbeat track, Love Me or Leave Me, always feels wrong to me, but who am I to criticise? Having taken a four-track journey of such touching poignancy it always feels like a slap in the face when this fifth track kicks in. It is worth it though for the preceding joy.

The Lyrics are touching, and Nina Simone’s voice is exquisite, but there is an added oddity to the song that I have heard on no other version. Simone started as a piano player, in a nightclub in Atlantic City, before releasing this track, her very first, in 1958. There are times throughout her repertoire where her joy at playing the piano certainly comes to the fore, and if any criticism can ever be laid at her feet, it is that she sometimes overdoes this. In this version of Little Girl Blue, she provides a new melodic layer, with the tune of the Christmas Carol, Good King Wenceslas. It doesn’t feel like it should be right, but it is, adding another level of sorrow beyond what was already there.

Chapter 32

Frank Wilson - Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)

There’s something quite wonderful about a genre of music that develops completely disassociated from its origins, and then for that genre to be defined so superbly in the tale of one record.

For anyone who knows nothing of Northern Soul, it is upbeat black American soul music, particularly from the 1960s, generally originating from Motown or one of its many influenced labels. As a rule, it is the faster music, usually around 100bpm, that makes it in to the Northern Soul genre, quite simply, music that is danced to. So, when I first came across the name, I assumed, quite wrongly, that it was so-named due to its roots in the Northern States of the US, particularly Detroit. In fact, it’s down to a scene that developed from the British Mod scene, in the north of England, in particular in its most famous venues, the Blackpool Mecca, the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, and the Wigan Casino, alongside clubs in Wolverhampton, Stoke-on-Trent and Droitwich. 

A predominately white audience in the industrial north and west midlands developed a very specific and frenetic dance scene based around a sound produced a continent away. It is a very specific sub-genre of Soul music, and it developed its own particular style, both in relation to the dances, which pre-emptied disco by a long shot, and the style of dress. And in order to keep the clubs fresh, the DJs would take buying trips to the States where they would refresh their playlists with “new” unheard and rare tracks. This is where Frank Wilson’s Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) comes in.

Frank Wilson was a Singer, writer, and producer with Motown, and originally recorded the track as a demo in 1965, and just 250 singles were pressed. After he decided to focus on his work as a producer, Berry Gordy had the demos destroyed, in order to ensure that Wilson focused on his work in the studio.  Two copies survived, resulting in one finding its way, in 1970, to the Wigan Casino. It became a massive hit and is often cited as the best record of the Northern Soul genre. It also led to the surviving discs being considered amongst the rarest records to be found. In 2009 a Scottish record collector sold his copy for £25,742.

It is a song that epitomises a genre not for its rarity but rather because it is just such a damn good dance track.

A fuller version of the story can be found here.