When that Beta Band comeback was announced a few weeks back, my initial thought (much as I love that band) was to think about The Earlies. Like most ‘scenes’, when you have a leading act, you need secondary acts to create that scene and The Earlies were The Hollies to the Beta Band’s Beatles.

Anglo-American (I think), The Earlies were very much an early ’00s band. They merged tradition with technology to create the sort of beat-driven laptop folk that was precisely the product of musicians eschewing old-fashioned 4-track TEAC demos in favour of Apple-powered multi-track home recording. Their debut album, 2005’s These Were The Earlies features this slice of machine-driven psychedelic folk. If you’ve never heard it before, prepare to be dazzled.

The Earlies – Morning Wonder

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Looping in on a head-nodding, sampled and twisted Jew’s harp, it might remind you of Lemon Jelly or one of those other progressive dance music acts of the time, but a tight ‘n taut Telecaster riff twangs its way to the fore, its snapping single coils sending any notions of ‘dance’ into the ether. The beat is human heart slow and steady, the twang relentless, the tune unspooling and hypnotic. A cut ‘n pasted keyboard riff becomes a recurring motif, a high up the frets woody riff plays on the guitar, a gliding G-funk refrain wheezes the whole thing skywards and then…

…the most glorious of woozy Beatle-ish harmonies – proper John and Paul and George and Ringo on Revolver harmonies, y’know, the best sort – fill the space. A high lead vocal sings about Mother Mary (Beatles again, yeah yeah yeah) before giving way to a repeated “It’s alright, bay-bee” vocal which is eventually overlapped with a “Take me home” refrain that carries us until the song’s conclusion. Before all that though, it ebbs and flows, rises and falls, aural sunshine bursting through the quiet parts, the fade-out in the vocals drawing your attention to that relentless and free-flowing backing track. It’s a bit Beach Boys, a bit Tuung, a bit smart-arsed and scratchy beard…but a whole lot of great.

Morning Wonder is music as patchwork quilt – a little bit of this, a little bit of that, sewn together, melded and welded and presented as a jigsawed collage of sound. It’s quite possible that at the track’s conclusion, you’ll take it straight back to the start for a second listen. I know I did, and still do. There’s a lot going on here and repeated plays reward the most keen of listeners. I should know, it’s played in the background all week.

As far as repetitive, earwormy and extremely Beatles-ish tracks go, Morning Wonder is right up there. Not for The Earlies the hair or the clothes or the riffs or the stance… they’ve taken that most singular of Beatles references – the Fabs’ vocal stylings – and twisted them into something uniquely their own. As much as I’m looking forward to seeing the Beta Band later this year, I’d really love to hear this played live.

Comin’ outta the traps at 100mph, I Want You was the rich fruit of the unlikely pairing of Mark E Smith and Inspiral Carpets.

I Want You – Inspiral Carpets feat. Mark E Smith

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It’s a brilliant racket, Mark’s gub full o’ gum filtered through a megaphone vocals the snarly yin to Tom Hingley’s look ma, I made the school choir bellowy yang. It’s very Fall-like, a clattering slab of snarky garage punk that might’ve peeled itself from the caustic grooves of Extricate or Shift Work, with Mark coming in, as is his wont, half-way through the second bar, the group behing him revving up slabs of power chords, propelled breathlessly by a rifling snare drum that sounds as if Craig Gill himself toppled backwards from the top of the mountain marked ‘indie-dance’, broke his drum kit but somehow kept it together enough for the length of the track. Essentially, the song is a three minute snare solo with shouting.

The Inspiral Carpets provide the pop edge, both Tim Hingley and Clint Boon wrapping their Oldham vocal chords around the melody to provide some good old-fashioned call and response backing vocals like some lost in space ’60s beat combo. Hingley takes the second verse. Mark spits his replies. The hefty chunk of basic barre chords and concrete slab bass maintain the urgency. And still the snare drum rattles. There’s some sort of warped duet by the third verse, Hingley’s baritone allowing Smith to freeform and riff around the melody. There’s nary a hint of Boon’s trademark wheezy Farfisa nor the hippity skippity shuffling beat that made early Inspirals so goddam infectious, garagey and danceable. Indeed, ol’ Mark E goes out of his way to blast any silly notions like that clean outta the Lancashire air. He drawls, he shouts, he coughs, he yelps…and he’s totally, totally into it. Driven on by their master, the Inspirals find new sounds in this brave new world of theirs. The record is billed as ‘Inspiral Carpets featuring Mark E Smith’, yet if it was billed as ‘Mark E Smith featuring Inspiral Carpets’, no one could question it.

I think you should remember whose side you are-ah on-ah, as he states on I Want You. “I love the Inspirals,” he said at the time. “Pure pop, innit?”

Released in 1994, just as the UK was waking up to the hot new sounds created by a former Inspiral Carpets roadie and the promise of a new musical movement just around the corner, it’s a real pity that neither Smith or the Inspirals thought to eke out an album’s worth of tunes. Perhaps the Inspirals had desires on recreating their late ’80s/early ’90s success with an audience tuned in to all things ’60s, or perhaps they realised the game was up. Their record compnay certainly did – Mute dropped them four months later. The Fall would turn up as support act on the last Inspirals’ tour. Mark would continue to kick against the pricks, releasing a pair of patchy mid ’90s Fall albums – Middle Class Revolt and Cerebral Caustic – that never veered far from the Fall blueprint, whether the public at large liked ’em or not. And he kept rollin’ on regardless.

The charting of the single meant going on Top Of The Pops, something that Mark E Smith hadn’t experienced at this point. He was – expectedly – awkward and contrarian and managed to offend 2 Unlimited, Eastenders’ Gillian Taylforth, the sainted Elvis Costello and most of the TOTP team. By the time the band was due to film, it had been put to the Inspirals’ manangement that they might be better going on without him…but no one was brave enough to confront the guest vocalist.

Here’s the brilliant Mark-enhanced Top Of The Pops appearance that found its way into living rooms up and down the country, the Inspirals bowl-cutted and rockin’ out (and Martyn perma-fiddling with the tuning pegs of his bass guitar – how very Fall), Mark with one hand in the pocket of his leather blouson, occassionally freeing it to read the song’s lyrics from a scribbled piece of paper. It’s a darkly-lit studio, there’s a lightning war of strobes to accompany the Stooges thunder on the stage and the front couple of rows in the audience are shakin’ loose and gettin’ down to it. A properly great piece of pop telly.

I’ve fallen out with BBC 6 Music in the morning. It’s all gone a bit too Radio 1 for me; no Lauren Laverne + 1 very sterile playlist x Nick “yawlraight?” Grimshaw ≠ a good start to the day. Since the turn of the year I’ve been using the daily commute to catch up with Guy Garvey’s Sunday afternoon show. Depending on the traffic and if I’m able to fast forward through days’-old news bulletins whilst driving, I can listen to the I’m Guy Garvey From Elbow Show in 8 or 9 chunks – almost a perfect week of soundtracked commuting. Guy Garvey From Elbow plays a decent mix of old and new, from the unheard and unknown to the overplayed and overblown, but there’s usually something every three or four records that really piques the interest – and that’s a high kite mark and very good personal ‘hit’ ratio by any show’s standards.

A couple of shows ago, Guy Garvey, the Elbow singer, played this. I was instantly grabbed.

Richard Swift – Looking Back I Should Have Been Home More

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What a tune! From its opening clip-clopping barroom piano via its sunstroke cymbal splashes and Swift’s gear-shifting vocal in the chorus, right to the bit at the end when the wind instruments swirl and dance around the melody in a none-more-Beatles way and the backing singers go, “Woo-ah-ooh-ah-oo-oo!” until the fade out has been, gone and vanished, I knew this was a track that I’d be playing on repeat for the rest of the journey…and the rest of the next week, as it came to it.

Repeated immersion in the song revealed some lovely touches; little piano trills and triplets at the end of occasional lines…a horizontal drummer (very probably Swift himself) with exactly the right wee small hours feel… a drop out and a build up… a great chord change in the ‘hold on…’ section of the chorus…but most of all the greatest of all unravelling melodies, delivered in the basking warmth of the singer’s homely tone – breathy and reedy in the main but with requisite crack and crumble for the many sad parts (the title is the great giveaway here). It’s just about the greatest song I’ve heard this year, and it’s taken from an album that was released 20 years ago.

I don’t know how I missed out on Richard Swift until now. Looking Back… ambles along like some of those great Ed Harcourt / Cherry Ghost tracks from 20+ years ago, tracks I formed a mild obsession with at the time and I’m certain Guy Garvey From Elbow will have played Richard Swift in the past. I guess my antennae hadn’t been fully receptive until now. It turns out that (of course) Guy Garvey, the Voice of Elbow, is great friends with Richard Swift.

Or, rather, was friends with him.

In a sad twist of affairs, it turns out that back in 2018, Richard Swift was an alcoholic who very slowly and very methodically and, it seems, somewhat deliberately, drank himself to death.

A musicians’ musician, he was a touring member of The Shins and The Black Keys, a foil and touring support act for Jeff Tweedy and Wilco, someone equally at home blasting out southern-fried Strokes with the Kings Of Leon as he was when putting together his own bible belt southern soul gospel-tinged records. A studio obsessive since his early teens, he famously had a trailer in his back yard where he maintained a cluttered but inspirational studio that he modelled on the creative chaos of Lee Perry’s Black Ark space and called National Freedom. It was here that Swift summoned the magic that went into his songs and onto record. He’s got a whole catalogue out there, most of it conceived in National Freedom, and I’m looking forward to jumping in head (and ears) first. Better late than never.

Coincidentally, I saw David Hepworth on Instagram tonight talking about his record collection – “or rather an accumulation of records…records that followed me home over the years and got filed away,” and how he’d picked out a 45 year-old Brian Eno album that he’d never listened to until this week that he now can’t get enough of. “Don’t pursue the music,” he advised. “The music will find you at the time when you’re ready to hear it. Sometimes it can take 45 years…and that doesn’t matter.” Good advice, that. And spot on too. Guy Garvey From Elbow’s show on BBC 6 Music is proof of that.

Just search for The Guy Garvey From Elbow Show and you’ll find it all in one click.

You can find Richard Swift’s music on Bandcamp and Secretly Canadian.

Ill Wind by Radiohead is, to use the parlance of the day, a particularly deep cut. Recorded during the sessions for what would make up the last Radiohead LP, A Moon Shaped Pool, it was ultimately shelved and saw the light only as a fleece-the-fans cash-grab bonus track on the album’s deluxe edition.

Radiohead – Ill Wind

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It’s a pity that, out with a fervent fan base, Ill Wind isn’t wider known. Being a late-era Radiohead track, it bounces along on the jazziest Fender Rhodes ‘n Fender Tele groove this side of the Krautrock-heavy ’70s and has, in its rolling and tumbling paradiddles, a particularly spectacular and free-form drum pattern. Eerie Star Trek-y keys (or is it Ed on ambient space guitar?) and sequenced bleeps begin to to lift the whole thing skywards, Jonny’s tapestry of vintage synths fizzing to a crescendo midway through before eventually falling by the wayside as Thom’s super-falsetto maunders its way back to the fore. The Radiohead rhythm section is doing all the heavy lifting here, wee Colin wrestling with his bass and gnarling his way up and down those wide and woody frets, Phil’s drums ka-bamming and ker-planting like a stone skillfully skiffing across still waters. Great stuff.

In a statement of equity and uniformity, the tracks on A Moon Shaped Pool were, as I’m sure you know, sequenced alphabetically. Ill Wind could’ve easily slotted its way on there between the glitchy Identikit and the unspooling The Numbers without upsetting the balance or flow of an album which has, over time, slowly grown to be a far more substantive record than these ears perhaps first gave it credit for. Time for reappraisal, I think.

As if proof were needed that the Radiohead vaults harbour many of the band’s greatest tracks, here’s another session track that only saw the light of day as a, yes!, fleece-the-fans cash-grab bonus track on the album’s deluxe edition.

Radiohead – If You Say The Word

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If You Say The Word was recorded in the sessions that brought the two-album wham-bam of Kid A and Amnesiac to unsuspecting masses but only appeared on 2021’s Kid A Mnesia set. Hindsight has been kinder to these albums than many of the critics at the time, but back then both records left many fans high and, er, dry at the unexpected embracing of jazz and electronica and uneasy listening effect of it all. I know this to be true as I was a foot soldier on the counter of Our Price at the time and Kid A especially saw record returns – no pun intended (it was all CD sales back then) from quizzical fans looking for yr more anthemic guitar anthem version of the ‘Head. By the time of Amnesiac, Radiohead’s audience had shrunk to the hardcore and the more open-minded of folks and those people were, of course, rewarded with some fairly spectacular music; challenging at times, hard to wrap your head around at first, but interesting in a soundscapey and proggy way and with great tunes that eventually showed themselves after a few listens. Pay yr dues as a listener and you’ll be rewarded ten-fold. Today’s instant world of skip, delete, next… would find this era of Radiohead a real challenge were it to be newly released in 2025.

I don’t know if If You Say The Word would’ve been more appealing or not to those who never bought into Kid A, but it shows itself to be a fantastic piece of Radiohead mood music. Lush, melancholic, ambient and jazzy (there’s the ‘j’ word again) it slowly envelopes itself around the lugs, worming its way in there after a few plays like all the best tracks do. And it’s a track, not a song in the traditional sense. Thom Yorke’s voice, coated in reverb and echo and sounding like it’s being sung from high and right down a wind tunnel, is an instrument here in the same way that the percussion and the strings and the ambient electronica are constituent instrumental parts of the track; understated in the verses, soaring and stretching in the chorus, wandering free and taking you to new places.

There’s a Radiohead immersion coming my way. Can’t stop it. Wouldn’t want to anyway.

Just to follow on from the previous post (directly below this one) about existential crises and impending doom…

We had a gig last Friday night and we were setting up when someone remembered that the planets were to align in the skies above us at 6pm. Out we scarpered, not sure where to look exactly other than upwards. Not that it mattered. Our lovely west of Scotland skies, backdrop to much recent Aurora activity and crisp ‘n clear displays of constellations, comets and the ISS every now and then, were dull and cloudy and definitely not presenting us with the ideal circumstances in which to view Mercury, Venus, Mars et al as they lined up in a rare parade of perfect order.

“Never mind,” said one of the amateur astronomers in our midst. “They’ll be back again in 2040 – that’s only 15 years away.”

“We’ll be pushing 70,” said one of my pals quietly.

Fuck.

We all fell silent. Contemplating. Possibly shivering. I know I was in a cold sweat and panicking.

Yeah. Existential crises and impending doom.

At roughly the same time as we were fruitlessly skygazing, two of the leaders of the free world were bullying and verbally battering one of our world’s oppressed leaders, live on TV, in the White House, with the whole world (minus skygazers) gape-mouthed and watching dumbfounded. There’s been plenty written since; that Trump turned the whole thing into a baseless and degrading reality TV spectacle, that he and Vance approached the whole thing like an Asda-priced Tony Soprano and Pauli Gaultieri, only with far more power and reach than those two mobsters could ever have had, that the whole thing was a live-on-TV mugging, all soundbite ‘n snarl, Zylenskyy the unwitting fall guy in a power play so stinking you could, if you squinted, just about see the actual hammer and sickle-branded puppet strings working the two Americans from above. When I watched it back later, I hadn’t felt real anger boil up in me like that since…well, forever, really. Someone ought to take the big orange traitor out, and properly this time – none of that faked-up, vote-winning stunt of yore. But you knew that already.

In times like this, thank fuck for music.

It’s fairly ironic that our show last Friday featured Wojtek The Bear, a band named after a wartime bear adopted by Polish soldiers who were evacuated from the Soviet Union during WWII. The Soviet leader Stalin had taken sides with Hitler, leaving the Polish soldiers no option but to run for safety. Unhinged leader sides with Russia? Sounds kinda familiar. History repeating, as Shirley Bassey once sang.

Wojtek The Bear are terrific. They come in some quarters with that unnecessary addendum ‘Scottish band‘, a tag so derivative that it instantly conjures up images of the Reid brothers (Craig and Charlie, not Jim and William), the gallus and Glaswegian Sharleen Spiteri, the stadium conquering Jim Kerr, the bagpipe skirl of Stuart Adamson’s guitar, Marti Pellow’s rictus grin, Rod Stewart in a tartan suit… all that sort of cliched nonsense. Wojtek The Bear are a band that happen to come from Scotland, nothing more, nothing less. They’ve far more in common with fellow countrymen and women Admiral Fallow and Belle & Sebastian, groups for whom a flute solo is far more appealing than a baws oot burst of shredding, groups for whom a carefully arranged brass-augmented bridge is infinitely more preferable to a staged call and response with a debased audience. Considered. You could call Wojtek the Bear considered. Every element of their output is just-so.

They’ve three albums in circulation, released through the ubiquitous Last Night From Glasgow and much of Friday’s set is drawn from these records. One verse into the first song – Second Place On Purpose – and it’s clear that the planets have aligned after all! Bunched up across the tiny stage (the Harbour Arts Centre in Irvine – the best small venue in the country) the on-stage 6-piece meld and weave together; a chiming electric here, an open-tuned acoustic there, a trumpet refrain that cedes to a meandering violin solo, a wandering bassline in that part, a technically-awkward but perfectly executed drum pattern in this part. If you’re new to the band, that opening track is as good an intro as you could wish for.

Wojtek The Bear – Second Place On Purpose

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This is pretty much the Wojtek sound – produced by yr actual Stephen Street, dontyeknow. And in the ideal confines of the HAC, you have everything you need. Here comes a melodica. There goes a Drop D. On goes a capo. On goes a Strat. Off counts the drummer – “one and two and three and four and five and six and baba-daba-dum…” A Sunday Without The Fear, Ferme La Bouche, Slowly Then All At Once, Shaking Hands With The NME. They’re intricate songs with fancy time signatures and vocal arrangements, expertly played, sounding in the here and now exactly as they do at home; approaching the midnight hour, a glass of whatever your fancy nestled in your hand, stereo turned low enough that the house won’t wake up. The best time to listen to Wojtek The Bear.

They play three or four new tracks mid-set and these songs – these great songs – hint at a band only now hitting their stride, a rich seam of gold ripe for discovery. Speed Equals Distance is a standout. Kylie even more so, a song about writing too many letters to the titular Minogue, its chorus giving a huge nod and a wink to Kylie’s Got A Crush On Us by another ‘Scottish’ band BMX Bandits. Last time they were in the HAC they encored with it too, a nice bit of serendipity that isn’t lost on the Wojtek gang afterwards.

Wojtek The Bear. You should check them out before album number four takes them overground.

Latest album, Shaking Hands With The NME is available via LNFG here.

I have terrible existential dread. It probably comes from the rapid advancement of years and the musical milestones by which I mark them; that the time from Bo Diddley to My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless (35 years) is less time than the time between Loveless and now. That Johnny Marr had started and finished The Smiths and all the sparkling magic that he created in between before he’d had his 25th birthday. This place is littered with such examples that might question your own worthiness and contributions to society.

A friend recently shared a video clip of the opening of an art exhibition of his. It wasn’t dated, but it was dated; the grainy transfer of VHS to digital, with intermittent wobbly white lines descending the screen. The fluffy sound. The hair. The clothes. The people in it who are no longer with us. As the camera panned around the assembled art-praising masses of Irvine, two folk stuck out. There was my mum, an employee of the library at the time and invited probably because of that. Next to her, my dad. Sensible suit, grey hair neatly side-combed, ubiquitous moustache Souness/Selleck-full and eye catching. As I started to do the rough maths it dawned on me – my dad in this clip is younger than I am right now. Jeez. My mum is still very much with us, pushing 80 and only just about beginning to slow up. My dad is gone though. And the image of the man who looked the same to me my whole life is a stark reminder that I am entering – or have already wandered into – my autumnal years. It’s (hopefully) still early autumn, but it’s undeniable.

You’d think I’d want to do something about it. Travel, maybe. Join a walking football team. Plan retirement.

Or eat rubbish.

This time last year I had this thing going, a bad habit you might call it, of budgeting £40 for the petrol station every time I needed to fill up, but spending exactly (and with well-practised deft precision) exactly £38 on the fuel. The other couple of quid I’d lavish on Haribo Jelly Babies and Cadbury’s chocolate – one of those big bars that not that long ago cost a round pound instead of the £1.35 and more they’re currently asking for them. I’d leave the goodies in the semi-secret glove compartment down by the steering wheel and spoil myself rotten whenever in the car alone.

The spiralling fall-out of this dim-witted pampering was two-fold. Firstly, my car used to run on £40 a week of fuel, but by filling it up with only £38 worth, it would mean that every now and again I’d need to refuel before a Sunday night; so more frequent trips to the petrol station and even more stashing/guzzling of sweets and chocolate while commuting – never on the way to work though (I’m not a total disappointment), only ever on the way home as a reward for a hard day on the chalk face.

Secondly, my waistline expanded in direct proportion to my weekly skimming of the fuel budget. Funny that. I’d eventually run a chunk of it off in the summer holidays, with a daily target of running 5K my self-administered punishment for being addicted to sugar-filled car journeys. But not all of it was shifted. Much of the unwanted flab is still there as I type right now, a wee wobbly reminder of my Alan Partridge years. It is reducing though…and there’s good reason for this.

More recently, the old car has gone the way of all cars of a certain vintage and I’ve come to be the owner of an electric car (and none of your Tesla nonsense either – who wants to be seen in one of them?) I can charge the car at home. I can charge the car at work (if I’m the lucky electric car owner that day). There are now no more trips to the petrol station and, believe it or not, the result is twofold: not only does my belt go an extra notch again, there’s nary a whiff of sugar within five metres of the car. All those crumbs on new upholstery? Sticky fingers on the handles? Empty wrappers on the passenger seat? Of my new car?!? I wouldn’t want that.

I’m leaner, I’m greener. Everyone’s a winner, baby.

Everything’s Gone Green, baby.

New Order at their experimental, boundary-pushing best. Psychedelic dance music for the post-punk generation. I see my future before me. And it’s no longer Cadbury and Haribo.

New Order – Everything’s Gone Green

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