ALBUMS WE LISTENED TO ON BANK HOLIDAY MONDAY

There's nothing like spending a Bank Holiday relatively quietly at home, not switching on the television, iPlayer or radio, staying well away from social media and catching up with some quality music listening. I'd recommend it to anybody. We ourselves should do it more often. Well, that is indeed what we did two days ago (19 September 2022 for the benefit of anyone who finds this piece via random Googling circa Christmas 2025) and here's a brief summary of what we listened to.

CHARLES STEPNEY: Step On Step

An emotional photograph, that cover. From my perspective it could be my father at some stage in the sixties or seventies. More emotional is the rear cover with the track listing which displays the same photograph minus the gentleman standing in its centre.

Charles Stepney was a genius. Not a competent craftsperson, but a genially mould-broaching genius. His art expanded orchestral maximalism perhaps to one good extreme - in one of the many reminiscing conversations which dot this anthology of homemade four-track recordings, one of his daughters remarks that with his arrangements he probably stretched the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, whom he generally used for his productions, as they had never been stretched before (or since?) - but the necessarily minimalist approach of this music, fragments recorded in the basement studio of his house, also proves that he was a visionary.

Although an extremely low-profile CD compilation briefly did the rounds in 2010, Step On Step is the formal culmination of many years' effort by Stepney's daughters to commemorate and more importantly contextualise this music; the basement demos are interspersed with his daughters' reminiscences of him and his method of working. As with Lena's father, business occupied his working week - and Stepney had plenty of business, as an arranger and producer, to be getting on with - and it was only at the weekend when the man was able to retreat downstairs and pursue what he really loved.

Some of the work on this record consists of blueprints for more familiar recordings, but it is still startling (in the best and cosiest of ways) to hear the early drafts of what would become Earth, Wind & Fire classics - with "On Your Face," "That's The Way Of The World" and especially "Imagination," you realise that the ingredients are already all there, just waiting to blossom. There is something almost unbearably poignant about "Imagination" as one of his daughters ponders on how sad it was that her father didn't live to see her getting married to the song (she was only two at the time of her father's death, and still hasn't married).

At other times Eibur, Charlene, and Chanté Stepney recall long, weekend car trips - many of these pieces have been retrospectively named by his daughters, and the one they call "Roadtrip" is a lovely, undulating avenue of hazy contentment which I recognise from the better days of my 1970s. Other pieces are given utilitarian titles - "Around The House," "In The Basement, "Daddy's Diddies" (in which latter Stepney even indulges in some wordless scat vocalese, somewhere between Arthur Russell - of whom Stepney's deployment of space, distance and patience is highly reminiscent - and Bobby McFerrin. If it had appeared on Warp Records circa 1992 you'd all be hagiographising it) - but the music seems agreeably infinite. At times - particularly during the final stretch of the record, when the vibraphone takes some precedence (though Stepney was plainly adept at playing a large number of different musical instruments) - one thinks of SMiLE, and overall wonders how greater and earlier the critical reception from certain stilted quarters would have been had these been outtakes by Brian Wilson or Todd Rundgren; cue the "thinky face" emoji.

At other times ("In The Basement") I am drawn to think of Thom Bell in terms of harmonic progressions and development. There is even a jingle soundtracking a commercial for a progressive Chicago magazine ("Chicago Independent") which, though clearly of its time, I want to read now. At yet other times, in particular the embryo for what would finally become "I Am The Black Gold Of The Sun," the stripped-down piano-dominant arrangement and the accentuation on the bossa nova beat (provided by Stepney's trusty drum machine) conjure up a close relationship with the "Linus And Lucy Theme" by Vince Guaraldi, another talented musician who died in 1976 at far too young an age (and only just over three months before Stepney, who suffered a fatal heart attack; Guaraldi is believed to have been felled by an undiagnosed stomach aneurysm).

It is of course impossible to say where Stepney could have gone had he lived. Plenty of work was still lined up for him, including with the likes of Barbra Streisand and Michael Jackson - with all due respect to the great Quincy Jones, what would a Stepney-helmed Off The Wall have sounded like? - and Elton John was also vocally keen on working with him (though he ended up working with Thom Bell). Nevertheless, his music remains in the present tense, and I would unreservably recommend finding everything he did with Billy Stewart, Ramsey Lewis (R.I.P.), the Dells, Marlena Shaw, Rotary Connection, Minnie Riperton, Terry Callier, EWF, Deniece Williams etc. etc. and luxuriating in it. In the meantime, Step On Step (which is what Stepney had always intended to call his first solo album) is a fitting and beautifully-assembled memorial to his art, and how it touched those closest to him, and we other listeners who were nowhere near as close. Well done to International Anthem Recordings of Chicago, currently the most important record label on the planet, for facilitating the availability of this approachably great music.

 

JANE SIBERRY: No Borders Here

 

Now this was a timely (and at the moment non-streaming) find on Saturday; Siberry's second album, from 1984, and the first to be released outside of Canada. Astoundingly it was released on a subsidiary of New Age label Windham Hill, but Siberry does her best to turn that chimera of licensed reassurance into spiky fractals; many of these songs collapse their surface Fairlit politesse into tongues of veracity which foresee Mary Margaret O'Hara (as well as, obviously, The Walking). Pick: the possibly in part autobiographical epic "Mimi (Me? Me?) On The Beach" which is the sourly compassionate aunt of del Rey's "Summertime Sadness" ("The arrangement's not quite...not quite there").

 

BENJAMIN BIOLAY: Palermo Hollywood

Biolay is everything Jarvis Cocker wishes he could be. A gloriously decayed maximalist, in this charmingly explosive 2016 record he deploys girl groups, football commentaries and the Orchestra of Buenos Aires to summon a vast cauldron of resentment, frustration and paradoxical tenderness. The epic "Pas sommeil" seems to confirm that his is hardcore. And because he is French, you don't know him. But you should.

THE QUINTET: Jazz At Massey Hall

Yes, there are "fuller," "complete" editions of this concert available - in my youth, that took the form of a two-LP set on Prestige calling itself The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever - but the original album, seemingly edited with a pair of gardening shears, is the one Lena and I have known all our lives and we couldn't imagine it otherwise. Since it was recorded in Toronto's Massey Hall it is doubly relevant to us now.

You probably know the story behind the record, or can easily look it up if you don't; the Massey Hall three-quarters empty because the concert coincided with a major heavyweight boxing fight (Rocky Marciano versus Jersey Joe Walcott, sports fans), Parker, sans saxophone, had to borrow a plastic alto (and yes he certainly anticipates Ornette Coleman in places, e.g. on "Hot House") and for contractual reasons had to be listed on the sleeve as "Charlie Chan," and so on and such forth...but these were probably the five leading exponents of their respective instruments at the time (Parker, Gillespie, Powell, Mingus - who unmistakably yells and prompts throughout - and Roach, on especially demonic form, for instance during "Salt Peanuts") and the music they make here, recorded just under one month ahead of the Queen's Coronation, has not diminished in power or imagination in the intervening sixty-nine years.

STEREOLAB: Pulse Of The Early Brain (Switched On Volume 5)

First disc of this 2-CD set only because one CD at a time is quite enough for us. More than worth it, though, for the extraordinary Nurse with Wound tag team-up "Simple Headphone Mind" and its superior 21-minute B-side "Trippin' With The Birds"; the riff goes on as lengthily and unstoppably as Canned Heat's "Refried Boogie" (and that is not a farfetched comparison point; on the bonus Recorded Live At A Sloan Party! disc which came with U.S. pressings of the band Sloan's 1996 album One Chord To Another, they pull off a seamless segue from "On The Road Again" into "Transona Five") - yet the things Steve Stapleton does with, or to, that raw material, with its suddenly-emergent yet not-quite-decipherable closer-than-the-ear-can-hear voices (and their emphasis on the word "spiders" which was accidentally relevant to the events of 19 September), clearly predicate what the likes of A.G. Cook would later get up to, specifically Charli XCX's "Shake It." And yes, it reminds me of being in hospital four years ago, delirious, pained, hearing distorted voices from a parallel parabola of what wasn't quite existence. The rest of the first CD is taken up with the four tracks of 1992's Low-Fi E.P. which succeed in distorting notions of "rock" into shapes even MBV or A.R. Kane hadn't yet succeeded in sculpting.

SUEDE: Autofiction

 

 

A lot of tommy rot in the reviews of this album about it being a "punk" or, worse, "back to basics" album. The narrowing arteries of male-dominant music writing do not seem capable of expanding or evolving from either contrived precept. What Autofiction is, if anything, is the first U2 album - in places it really is only missing the glockenspiel - although Brett sounds much more like Peter Murphy than Bono. I could also cite the Danse Society, Comsat Angels, the Sound and other bands the sixteen-year-old Anderson would have appreciated. It's loud but possesses purpose. "She Still Leads Me On" makes complete sense when you realise it's about Brett's mother. "What Am I Without You?" is a genuinely touching tribute to the singer and band's fans, in the lineage of the Mission's "Tower Of Strength" and Presley's re-reading of "The Wonder Of You." The one truly great song here, however, is "Drive Myself Home," with those fatal(istic) chord changes and general hue of impending autumn which would have spoken to every one of us who was in possession of a Walkman in 1994 and used it to play albums such as Dog Man Star. It is though Anderson is speaking for, and to, all of us, and that remains his greatest gift.

THE BETHS: Expert In A Dying Field

Some jolly excoriation on the New Zealanders' third album. It is essentially a breakup record but must sound phenomenal when played live. Gleeful yet firm. Picks: "Head In The Clouds," "Change In The Weather" and the closing "2am" where the band takes you somewhere you didn't know you wanted to visit.

KIWI JR.: Chopper

A mix of humour and unaligned nostalgia which may or may not be characteristically Torontonian, but a witty and at times surprisingly dreamy record from this quartet. Picks: "Clerical Sleep," "The Extra Sees The Film" (a great song), "Downtown Area Blues" (if you know Toronto, Lena says, you'll know exactly what they're singing about here), "The Masked Singer."

KOKOROKO: Could We Be More

This album reached number four in our charts (yes, in the sales chart, but for decades that was the chart which counted), and I'm reassured by the fact that music of this degree of imagination and subtle power can be loved so widely. Sheila Maurice-Grey and Cassie Kinoshi seem to lead the group but it is all about the expression of a cautiously harmonious collective; the music is warm, luscious, sometimes comparatively restrained but at other times generously opening out its wings to embrace the world. Key song: "Age Of Ascent."

LIFE NOTES: MAY 1977

It would have been late May, 1977, coming towards the end of my second year at Uddingston Grammar. On balance I’d say that was my favourite year there. In the first year you’re all nervous, trying to figure out how the thing works. By year two you’re used to it and know how to work the thing. Apart from the fact that we had to pick out which subjects we were going to do for our O Grades – determining our future lives at an age when we really shouldn’t be asked to make such major decisions – there wasn’t any pressure. When spring arrived and the streets of Uddingston (or street; there really is only one Main Street) felt brighter and warmer, there was a slight swagger to one’s sense of freedom. You could saunter to class in a red Adidas T-shirt with the white stripes on the shoulders – most of the boys did so, anyway – and not worry about such oblique concepts as “The Future.”

 

I could get away with anything in English class. It helped that I had a great teacher that year, Mr Shaw, at whom all the boys not so secretly laughed for liking such profoundly uncool things (by 1976-7 standards; no revisionism here) as Amon Duul II. My ink exercise book was dotted with maximum marks for my writing. Mr Shaw seemed impressed that I knew and used words like “succinctly” in my stories. That year I came joint top in English with a whopping mark of 98%. Besotted by Damon Knight’s Science Fiction Argosy anthology which I’d borrowed from the library and kept in my bedroom for fully six months, and too much Spike Milligan and Monty Python for anyone’s own good, I also embarked on a crazily radical novel entitled Leap Into Version Five, which cheerfully broke all the rules of literature in ways which anticipated Nicola Barker (and I was also not unaware of B.S. Johnson at the time). The fourth wall? Leap Into Version Five erupted through at least six walls. Publish it now – or, better still, then – and it would probably win (or have won) the Booker. I never finished it and don’t know what became of the stock requisition notebook in which I wrote it.

 

Uddingston Grammar also – at the time – did annual House Shows and amateur dramatics every May. I was in Calder House – the pupils were assigned a House on the basis of their surname, and if yours was A-C you were put into Calder – but since I couldn’t and cannot sing or dance for toffee I declined to participate in their House Show and acted in the plays instead. That year we produced something called The Chinese Mask, written by one Michael Drin, an actor about whom it is very difficult to find information online, except that he was likely South African and his real name may well have been something like Mike McCullaugh.

 

The Chinese Mask was 20 or so minutes of modestly-entertaining juvenile trivia, and its prep school study setting and arcane schoolboy vocabulary were, even in 1977, probably already a couple of generations out of date – the play is included in the 1963 anthology The Second Windmill Book of One-Act Plays. Still, we were set on getting it right and spent some six months rehearsing it over and over until we did so. There is very little to its story, which centres upon a group of schoolboy friends, one of whom is a wannabe detective (the character is appropriately named Pinkerton), and a valuable stamp goes missing – the mystery being: who stole it? The mystery is solved, nothing major occurs as a consequence, nobody gets hurt, and life goes on, though not quite as before.

 

We did two performances of the play; one just after lunchtime, in front of an audience of our cynical pupil peers, and – more glamorously – one in the evening, in front of an audience of children’s parents, including mine (I tried to talk them out of it but they insisted on coming). Now that felt really special; Mr Ross, the English teacher who was directing us, dressed in a flashy early seventies casual shirt, and there was a genuine excitement; it felt as though we, as children and perhaps as actors, were actually going somewhere. It was frankly liberating to exist outside the narrow circle of Being A School Pupil. We might actually count, mean something. It was good to be outside our assigned selves.

 

It couldn’t and didn’t last. In the evening performance, despite endless weeks of rehearsal, I managed to corpse. As with sport, so with drama; it doesn’t matter how good you are, what matters is that you have to be good, if not great, at a very specific time in a very specific environment. If you can’t manage that then I’m afraid you’re never going to count for anything in that sphere, and buona sera sonny. Wee Ross Phillips, who played mild-mannered Milton, was certainly the best actor out of any of us.

 

But there was never any follow-up. I didn’t get the call from Scottish Youth Theatre. Who knows what I could have gone on to do? In my third year, however, the plays and House Shows were cancelled, because our teachers had gone on strike and were working to rule, thereby ruling out any extracurricular activities. So that pretty much fucked up any future I might have had as an actor. I don’t blame the teachers or their union – their cause was justified and righteous – but if you are of a certain vulnerable age, such things impose scars which reside with you lifelong.

 

Things just went…back to normal. There were musical productions, of course (“operas,” they called them) – Oklahoma! and Oliver! being two of them (and possibly the only two – but the latter boasted a tremendous performance from the aforementioned Ross Phillips in the title role, and a quite remarkable one from my art teacher Mr Graham as Fagin). But it wasn’t quite the same. It was O Grade time and your options were being dutifully and mercilessly narrowed down. My peers started talking about university, careers, cars and mortgages. They were of course growing up. But it didn’t seem much fun any more, third year. Everybody was getting serious. MC Joker Carlin was beginning to come across as a minor embarrassment. When’s he going to grow up, ffs?

 

Actually I took things a lot more seriously than it seemed to my fellow pupils (and perhaps also my teachers) and it may well be that I was actually the most serious pupil of the lot, since I ended up being one of just two pupils in my whole time at the Grammar who made it to Oxbridge (albeit, in my case, after a false start at St Andrews). Out of myself and my best friend at school, Alex S (who played Pinkerton in The Chinese Mask) I’d maintain that only one of us was ever really serious – and it wasn’t the one Alex thought it was. Nevertheless I continued to treat it as an extended joke, even as I realised that by then most of the things I was learning about life and art weren’t coming from school, as such. The solitary wanderer haunting Glasgow city centre, Kelvingrove/Hillhead and the Mitchell Library of a Saturday, buying records, reading, looking at and absorbing works of art – that was the actual me, the MC you never saw in school during the week. And perhaps the autodidactic element of me ended up taking over.

 

This, of course, is now over forty-five years ago, and I wanly shudder still to think what might have become of everybody else at the Grammar. Oh, most of us got proper careers, and we cautiously reckless kids are now nearing sixty; most of those with whom I sat, and argued, in the various classrooms we had to attend, are almost certainly now grandparents. However, there is the realisation that, by the law of averages, some are gone; the ones whose names didn’t turn up on Friends Reunited, let alone Facebook or Twitter. Well, you know, most of them are likely living more than decent lives some way away from any social media. But you also recognise that there are a few who didn’t make it, went prematurely - in one recent case, they magically rematerialised on Facebook very near the end, like the extra light a bulb suddenly radiates before it is extinguished. My teachers are now either very old (and therefore retired) or (as sadly I suspect is the case with most of them) deceased.

 

I don’t intend the above to read as anything more than a melancholy reminiscence. I have no wish to deploy my recollections as a metaphorical stick with which to beat Today. Children now have infinitely more possibilities and chances than my generation could ever have had (what I would have done with the internet in 1977! Although the restoration of free tertiary education would be more than welcome…). We had disco more than punk in 1977, and a lot of gloopy AoR. Now there are Kendrick Lamar, Wet Leg and, as I speak, Eliza Rose at number one, which is a hell of a lot more happening than, say, David Soul. Pop now is at least as good as, and very probably superior to, what was in the air when I was a young teenager. Which is fine; that’s pop’s purpose.

 

I should, however, point out that, at the end of my second year, I didn’t win any prizes. Those were determined by averaging out everybody’s exam marks. Despite coming first in four different subjects (including a perfect 100% in one), and second in two others, I got a miserable 12% in Technical Drawing and that dragged my overall average down to well below prizegiving level.  Hence even then I got the message that life isn’t about how great you might or might not be, but how well you fit in. But you didn’t – yet – need to take any of it seriously. It was a laugh. I’m not certain I’ve ever grown out of that.