Plain Or Pan

It began as an angry release from teenage woes, a swift early January 5k in the howling rain the antidote to the blues that beget all young folk at some point in their lives. The next night, another 5k, quicker and slicker and, dare we say it more enjoyable. Then 10k… then 10k in under an hour… under 50 minutes… pushing 40 minutes. Minutes and seconds shaved from personal bests as regularly as left foot follows right on the nightly pound around the streets. Proper running.

“I’ve applied for the Edinburgh Marathon,” announced the boy, one night in February.

“This year’s marathon?” we asked, not really believing him.

“Yeah. It’s in May.”

“What, this May?” we ask. “As in three months from now?”

“Yeah. Nae danger,” he shrugged.

He’s already set up a Just Giving page. He’ll run for Prostate Cancer UK, in recognition of the illness that took my dad’s – his papa’s – life.

He has sponsors, he has a training plan, he has it all sorted out without any help from us.

Young folk and their gung ho-ness is really something to be amazed at.

And so, we (mum, dad, big sister) found ourselves in Edinburgh on Sunday, watching all manner of ordinary people do an extraordinary thing. Old folk, young folk, middle aged crisis-averters, the lanky, the limbless and the laudable all coalesced in one giant, humming and thrumming, stretched out line, pounding the cobbles of Edinburgh’s Old Town and out….waaay out…beyond the coastal holiday resort of Seaton Sands to Prestonpans then back again to cross the finish line at Musselburgh Race Course.

We see Calum off at the starting pen then hot foot it to Waverley Bridge to catch him at the one mile mark. It’s a slow mile, he tells us later, given the sheer number of runners boxing one another in, but by miles 3, 4 and 5, the lines begin to stretch.

Our plan…and that of thousands of others, as it becomes apparent, is to get the North Berwick train and get off at Wallyford to cheer the boy on at mile 13. But the trains are ridiculously oversubscribed and ScotRail really isn’t much help. We can’t get on our intended train and are herded onto another one which won’t be leaving for an hour. We sit, packed in at our table and track the boy on our phones, watching his digital icon crawl across our screens as it makes its steady pace towards the half way mark. Of course, by the time we’re there, we’ve missed him. Our train has slow-snaked its way out of Waverley Station and despite our best efforts to get to the crucial mark on time, he’s two miles further up the field.

That’s good, I suppose.

He’s making excellent progress, despite the weather, which has in typical Scottish fashion been warm and sunny but windy to the point of gale force, then calm and still and punctuated by a stinging 10 minute attack of hailstones, to pure golden sunshine and torrential rain then back again. He’d confidently predicted he’d finish somewhere between 4 and 4 and a half hours and it looks as though he’s on course for that sort of time.

As mile 13 also doubles as mile 25, we leave and aim to get as close to the finish line as possible. By mile 26 the crowd is three-deep at the barrier. We find a spot 150 yards or so from the end, where the route turns into its final stretch and watch the blur of runners going past.

Some are as fresh as the moment they leapt out of bed that morning. Tattooed hipsters with unravelling man buns and glistening, rain speckled beards throw their arms aloft to elicit mass hysteria from the crowd and testosterone-pumping bursts of hidden speed from their sleek, muscular legs. Runners in wraparound glasses and backwards baseball caps coast past like the supreme beings they are. Runners with jaws set in stone and jutting at 90 degree angles push their very limits to new, far-put places. Teeth are gritted, facial muscles are stretched to sinew-snapping levels. Pain – pure pain – is etched on many faces. D’you know these Peter Howson paintings of hard-working industrial guys from the small towns of Scotland? Just like that. Everyone in the crowd, many of us who will never experience what running a marathon is actually like, shouts out the names of these strangers that are on the final stretch.

“Go on Samantha!”

“You can do it, Luca!”

“Keep it going, Abigail!”

Two younger men walk/slow-jog past with an elderly man propped up between their shoulders. The man in the middle is out of it. His legs don’t work and he’s unaware of where he is, but his two helpers are making sure he’ll cross that line.

A guy in his twenties rounds the bend, zig-zagging like a drunk man at closing time on Christmas Eve, left to right to left to further left and back again. His arms flap loosely by his side, he staggers to fall, lurches and rights himself at the last second. The crowd will him on.

“Come on Kenny, son! One last push, big man!”

It’s cliche central, but what else d’you say in times like this? I really hope Kenny made it.

There are at least 3 hot dogs running. A dragon, a chicken, a handful of fairies not far behind them. And then…

…the boy!

He’s almost past us…in fact, he is past us by the time I shout his name.

“Calum! Calum!! CALUM!!! GO ON SON!!!!”

Erin shouts his name. Anne shrieks. Calum looks back, smiling widely and delighted to see us.

And I burst into tears.

Proud barely begins to cover it.

The boy clocks a very impressive 3 hours 57 minutes, a sub-four, in marathon speak. It’s an extremely impressive time for a first marathon, for an 18-year old who only started running out of frustration a few months ago at the bum hand life was dealing him at the time.

Calum had a playlist made up, the idea being that he’d cross the line to Vangelis’s Chariots Of Fire (!), but because he was faster than anticipated, he ended up finishing to Sigur Ros’s atmospheric, anthemic and yet quietly restrained Hoppipolla. As you know already, ‘Hoppipolla’ in Sigur Ros speak means ‘puddle hopper’, a very apt track given the soaking roads and puddle-heavy route in places. A fitting tune to cross any line to, let alone that 26.2 mile line. I bet this sounded epic!

Sigur Ros – Hoppipolla

Ever since the Electric Prunes mixed their mojo and told us they’d had Too Much To Dream Last Night, licence was given to your more outré groups – the ones who perhaps make a riot of layered noise with a pop sensibility at the core – to mess with your mind and get all psychedelic on yr eyes ‘n ears.

Yo La Tengo come, like Frank Sinatra before them, from Hoboken in New Jersey, but they’ve as much in common with Ol’ Blue Eyes as I do. Sinatra croons. Sinatra swings. Yo La Tengo swoons. And occasionally, Yo La Tengo stings. The groups’ group, they have a tidy way with minimalist backing and a bah-buh-bap backing vocal. They can weave silk worm-like tendrils of unwinding melody, gossamer-thin and stretched out for miles, and they know how to hook you in with a Bacharach-like parping horn and finger-clicking beat, but it’s when they’ve ingested the good stuff –  when they’ve had too much to dream last night – that Yo La Tengo becomes a different beast entirely.

Yo La Tengo – I Heard You Looking (Peel Session)

I first came to I Heard You Looking via Teenage Fanclub in the mid ’90s. Theirs is a faithful interpretation that had me scampering backwards to see what I’d missed out on, and as much as I really like YLT tracks such as My Little Corner Of The World (the Bacharach one) or the locked-in groove of Autumn Sweater (like Spacemen 3 writing for St Etienne), I always return to their original version of I Heard You Looking.

Maybe it’s because they’ve spent their time looking across the Hudson at Manhattan’s skyline that the tune – and it is a tune, in all senses – is massive. It builds from the very foundations like a skyscraper itself being constructed. A hesitant electric guitar creeps in with an upward-moving riff, all sliding chords, open strings and nerve-jangling expectation. Splashes of ride cymbal wash across crackling, electrified, open-miked airwaves. The drummer scratches his Noo Joisey ass and yawns his lazy way in. The bass player falls in line with both his drummer and the riff-playing guitarist and the group lock in to begin their slow jam.

Subtle shifts in the ambience – there’s two guitars interplaying by now, one sticking to the motherlode riff, the other wandering gaily up the frets, free-soloing and feedbacking and pulling the group ever-northwards – lift the volume and the intensity to the max. One guitarist has enough of the straightjacket approach and breaks loose in vivid technicolour, John Coltrane with an offset Fender and seemingly free reign to do whatever. The group surges and pulses in waves of electric guitar, pushing and pulling, ebbing and flowing, tearing the ears and the heart and the head in an unspooling of structure and frame. Then, an unseen nod of the head between the assembled musicians and the shards of white-hot noise and scattergun Moonisms are brought crashing back to earth by the anchor that is the riff.

And the group goes again.

And again.

For almost ten headswimmingly magic minutes.

…..

Another group who are no strangers to the effect of a noisy and epic jam is Mogwai.

When Stuart Braithwaite’s book came out a couple of years ago, the chapters fell into easy chunks;

I formed a band. I got really wasted. I listened to The Cure.

I rehearsed with the band. We got really wasted. We went to see The Cure.

We got really good. We got reeeally wasted. The Cure asked us to support them.

We got really, reeeally wasted. We got really, reeeally wasted with Robert Smith.

Life is complete.

C’mon Stuart! Life might be great cos you get to get up to shenanigans with Robert Smith every once in a while, but life is really complete because you happened to record, amongst a back catalogue of well-thumbed and well-spun albums, the most perfect track somewhere along the way.

For all of Mogwai’s loud/quiet/hailstorm of anvils that they’ve committed to record, none of it – none! – sounds so thrilling as The Sun Smells Too Loud. It really is the greatest track Mogwai have stuck their name to.

Mogwai – The Sun Smells Too Loud

Electro pulse. Shimmering twang. Whammy bar action. A great second chord. And a great third chord. A fantastic sliding up and up and down guitar riff, the group surfing the action in the background. The Sun Smells Too Loud is a hazy, woozy end of the night beauty. Great for cycling to too.

Repeated listens (and there’s been more than a few since parent album The Hawk Is Howling first appeared) throw up new melodies and counter-melodies within the spaces, not to mention tinkling milk bottle percussion and vintage, droning synths, but more importantly, The Sun Smells Too Loud throws up an aching melancholy. It’s all heart, all soul and all good. It might simply be non-organic electric guitar music played atop a rudimentary beat box, but The Sun Smells Too Loud is as soulful as Sam Cooke. It just is.

Sometimes, as on nights like this, the electric guitar, in all its variances and guises, is all y’need. Turn up to 10, as they used to say on the run out grooves.

It’s bombastic, booming and utterly brilliant. The Beethoven’s 5th of that awfully-named Britpop era.

It’s the drums.! Fucking great echoing and cavernous drums, like Hal Blaine on Hulk-sized steroids, forearms like Popeye as he nails the four to the floor. Tambourines ride the hi-hats, percussive and metallic, clattering toms tumble like the walls of Jericho. Biblical, as a bow-legged frontman of the times was wont to proclaim.

It’s the strings! The total antithesis of the era’s coke-flecked guitar bands’ syrupy and de-rigueur, bolted on after-thoughts, these are fucking great strings, soaring and sweeping and swooning their way through the summer of ‘95 with graceful elan, the way they might’ve done 30 years previously had The Beatles been commissioned to write a smash hit for Dusty Springfield;

Oh, the guitars! It’s the great guitars, the fucking great guitars, electrified and fried, feedbacking and freewheeling, searing and tearing and twanging and chugging their holy and wholly amplified way from uproarious beginning to spent out end. Six nickel-wound and steel strings never sounded so alive and so essential before now.

It’s the incidentals; the way the guitar slips through the gears, taking those gliding vocals with it, the pause mid-way through when the guitar player plays some hammer ons around open chords (just the way he did in his previous band) before the expectant and fantastic lift-off as the vocalist breaks free and tears off out into the great wide open, hand claps and drum beats and gospel soul backing doing their best to hold on to his coat tails. What a fucking arrangement!

Oh yeah. The vocals. It’s all about the vocals. Great octave-leaping things of joy that neither you nor I, regardless of how often we’ve opened our hopeless holes and sung along, will ever be able to get close too. They start down here, somewhere around the diaphragm, and end up waaaay out there, somewhere north of the moon, beyond God and all the greats who’ve gone before. Fucking stratospheric and then some.

What. A. Fucking. Record.

It’s Yes, by McAlmont & Butler, if you haven’t worked it out already.

I noticed that, from Bernard Butler’s Instagram feed, Yes had somehow turned 30 this weekend.

“I had a conviction from the moment of conception in the summer of 1994…make a piece of music that transcends…it had to make you feel the exhilaration of how sound and song can transform your experience of being a human.

It is totally ramshackle, noisy and out of tune (is it!?!) and that is how we all are flying through the universe…

I can visualise me and Mako (drums) in the cellar of Mike Hedges chateau, screaming at each other, David across the ballroom straining for every ridiculous key change without a concern.

We were all on fire and that’s what you hear.”

They could do it pretty spectacularly in the live setting too:

There’s a part in John Niven’s viciously brilliant Kill Your Friends when two A&R guys are shamelessly scouring the small print in the charts in Music Week to find the ideal hit-making producer required for one of their new signings.

“Mike Hedges…his mixes are just too middle-y. Not enough top or bottom end.”

Stelfox, the main protagonist, rolls his eyes in exasperation at the cluelessness of his A&R partner. It’s not informed knowledge that’s important in the A&R game, it’s having a view. Everyone must have a view, thinks Stelfox, even if your view is of no consequence at all.

Exhibit One: Mike Hedges manned the mixing desk when McAlmont & Butler recorded Yes, capturing forever the sound of pure magic via his fingertips and faders. (see above)

Exhibit Two: Mike Hedges would use his own blueprint within the year when helping the Manic Street Preachers construct A Design For Life, another of the decade’s stand-out tracks. (a future post for sure)

A record that’s both out of its time and forever timeless, Yes is an undeniable classic in anyone’s language.

It’s 1978. World Cup summer. Irvine is underneath the flightpath flown by the very helicopter that will bring Ally McLeod and his winning team of world-beaters from Hampden (not far over there) to Prestwick Airport (just down the road) where their plane for Argentina awaits, so it’s fair to say excitement is at fever pitch. We’ve all (Mark, Stuart, Graham, Chrissy) got Scotland strips; dark blue, white triangular collar, Umbro diamonds running for miles down the sleeve, and we kick balls and become World champions for hours between the garages at the back of our houses. John Gebbie and his wee brother Derek join in, although Curries in Townhead was long out of Scotland strips by this point and their mum has got them sky blue Manchester City strips instead. Hours of booting light flyaway plastic balls and rolling around in the stony dirt later and my brother Euan has a hole in his socks and shorts and that triangular white collar on the top is misshapen and filthy. By comparison, Derek’s strip is still tucked neatly into the high waistband of the shorts and is as pristine and clean as his pure white Milky Bar Kid bowlcut to the point that he could probably return it to Mr Currie for a full refund. Funny what you remember.

We live in a quiet pedestrianised street that’s as safe as you could ever hope for if you are a parent of young kids. My sister Shona is playing with her pal Kirsty, their dolls scattered across our front grass. Kirsty lives diagonally across the path. In a t-shirt and nappy, her wee brother Roddy is running happy barefooted circles around the front garden before being lifted inside by his mum. At some point, Mrs Woomble, Roddy and Kirsty’s mum, invites me in to their house to see the electric trainset that Mr Woomble has built in the loft. I stick my head up and in and the train whizzes around the hatch, under a bridge, past some fake trees and plastic cows grazing on a piece of green felt and back again. It’s very impressive.

In 1980, we move to a new house in Bank Street, a main throroughfare into and out of the town and definitely not the quiet suburban street we’ve just left behind. The Woombles move to Bank Street too, funnily enough, and once again live diagonally across the road. At some point they move away (to France, as it transpires, with Mr Woomble’s work, and then the States) and we’d never meet again until…

…I’m in the trenches of music retail. I enjoy the spoils of listening to all the new releases in the stock room the Friday before the Monday release. When processing stock, I’ll take time to read sleevenotes and credits… all of the stuff that both you and I still do to this day. One day I unpack an Idlewild album. I stick it on, and as its jagged and angular guitars clatter like the anti-Oasis (a very good thing by this point in time). I read the small print on the CD booklet. It’s the name of the singer that jumps out at me. Roddy Woomble. There can’t be too many Roddy Woombles in the world, surely. I invest extra time in this particular album – Hope Is Important – and fall for its wonky and angry sound. By the time of the next record – 100 Broken Windows – and its follow up, The Remote Part, that wild ramalama of guitars has continued to mellow and Roddy has found his true voice. He has a way of phrasing that brings to mind Michael Stipe on those IRS-era REM albums; circuitous, literate, slightly unsure of himself but squeezing as many words as possible into each line. Roddy Woomble. Roddy Woomble. This isn’t the same wee guy running around in nappies in Adam’s Walk, is it? Is it?

Turns out it was.

On Sunday night there, we had Roddy in Irvine’s Harbour Arts Centre for the third time in maybe 8 years or so.

“I’ve just driven past my old house!” he says to me on arrival.

“No way! I just left my mum’s 20 minutes ago!” I reply, and we fall into a long and easy chat about trainsets in lofts, Derek Gebbie’s pure blond Joey Ramone bowlcut, the big houses in Bank Street and a million other Irvine and music-related points of conversation. I mention that I’d walked my sister’s dog down Adam’s Walk only last weekend, the first time I’d been in that street for over 40 years. It looked reassuringly the same, I say. Both Roddy’s old house and mine look not much different, save the mature gardens and newer front doors and windows. There’s an extension bolted on to the back of where I used to live but other than that, time has been kind to it. The Gebbies are still next door, although Derek and his bowlcut have long moved away.

Today, I have had a nostalgic pang like no other. Roddy has lived all over the world. I’ve remained within a 12 mile radius of where I grew up. The circle of life has brought us once again into one another’s orbit. We are, as it transpires, still Irvine boys at heart.

I’ve always loved Idlewild’s American English, where the guitars are chiming and polished, the production full and anthemic and the group’s sights are firmly set on the bullseye marked ‘smash hit’. Straight in at number 15? That’s a hit in anyone’s books.

Idlewild – American English

https://plainorpan.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/idelwild-american-english.mp3

Born long after you or I, Mac DeMarco began releasing records in the strange, unclassifiable wilderness years of the 2010s. Unlike the ’70s (disco, punk) or the ’80s (new wave, electronic creativity), or the ’90s (grunge to begin with, Britpop mid-decade and a million genres afterwards) or the ’00s with its Strokes/Arctic Monkeys fixation the yin to reality TV’s yang, the 2010s were a bit all over the place. Fractured and cast to the wind, the music of the times formed less of a cohesive scene and more of a seeping splurge of internet-powered musical hopefuls, delivered like sewage directly to the listener via algorithms and targeted playlists whether you wanted them or not. And it’s mainly been like that ever since. There’s a lot to get through before you find the good stuff…and who’s got time for that these days?

You rely on tip-offs. A clued-in pal. A decent radio show such as Riley and Coe. A right time, right place support act. The cream rises slowly but surely.

Neon Waltz, a band I thought might really make it – whatever that is these days – turned me on to Mac DeMarco. In a local paper interview with them a good few years ago, their vocalist Jordan Shearer mentioned that I, with my fondness for a well-played twanging guitar, should look him up. Good advice, as it turned out.

Ode To Viceroy – Mac DeMarco

https://plainorpan.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/ode-to-viceroy.mp3

No one does lazy, hazy, somnolent guitar quite like Mac DeMarco. Cleanly picked and beautifully amped, his guitar oozes and woozes, tripped out and discombobulated, wobbbbbling and bending the notes right around the fretboard and back again; Kevin Shields without the fuzzbox. DeMarco utilises chorus and vibrato and rides a floating tremelo arm the way you or I might row a boat or attempt to use a chopstick on a chunk of Chinese chicken; up, down, in, out, fast, slow, seemingly rudimentary (but definitely not) and highly effective. It’s called style. Knopfler has that clean-picked glassy solo sound. Marr has the excitable arpeggiating riffage. DeMarco has an amalgamation of the two, jigsawed to drunk whammy bar action through a Roland Jazz Chorus amp. Unique and individual, it’s lovely stuff.

Ode To Viceroy is a song about the simple pleasure of smoking. Millennials, I thought, were health-conscious, gym-going, body image-conscious pictures of health. Not DeMarco. And it suits him. He sings with a yawn. He scratches his nether regions as he does so. Drags his hands through unkempt hair before reaching for his headwear. Pulls on his battered Converse. Might even tie them. The most important thing for Mac first thing in the morning is a good long drag on a Viceroy cigarette. Who’s going to begrudge him that?

Lo-fi and flirting with the idea of being in tune, DeMarco might come across as some sort of skip cap-wearing slacker dude, but he knows his way around an amp setting and a fretboard. That little descending run he plays in the outro is terrific, something that, with slightly different effect settings, John Squire might’ve got decent mileage from. His chosen sound is both signature and soulful, and if I had been born maybe 20 years later, I might have gone totally nuts for him in a way that this tired old cynic hasn’t. I could see myself trying to ape that sound and style – a sound and style, like all the best original guitar players, that is tantalisingly out of reach of mere copycats and wannabees such as myself.

He’s worth investigating, is Mac DeMarco. You don’t need a tailored playlist or an aggressive algorithm to tell you that, trust me. In something of a role-reversal, I’m now off to skim through my daughter’s records and borrow the DeMarco album that I know is nestled somewhere in there.

A seismic occasion occurred today with the breaking up of the boy’s football goals. A present for his 7th birthday, they’re being dismantled and gotten rid of after the best part of a dozen well-worn years. Or should that be seasons? They’ve been a feature of the back garden almost as much as the cluster of plant pots on the wall (sorry, shy line) and the shrubs that have since grown into trees. I haven’t felt this resigned and melancholy since the day we gave his big sister’s dolls house away to friends with younger girls. Like Andy in Toy Story 3, this seems momentous yet inevitable; the literal breaking up of childhood, the boy now a young man with a full driving licence and miles of foreign travel on his passport and miles of Edinburgh Marathon training in his legs and a place on a desirable course at Glasgow University and a healthy indulgence of the social life that goes with it…what does he want with a set of football goals these days?

It wasn’t always like this. I remember building them on a freezing cold November Sunday. My parents had taken the kids away for the afternoon and we had a couple of hours window in which to construct them in secret. I had, at best, one and a half built, with no nets yet attached, when I heard my dad arrive with the kids. The half-built goals were quickly and roughly shoved to the wall, just under the kitchen window and not finished, under torchlight, until the boy was in bed. The desired surprise effect the next morning was immediate and thrilling. Throwing open his curtains, the boy was out in his pyjamas and dressing gown before the kettle had fully boiled, booting his ball goalwards with an enthusiasm and determination that barely let up for a decade.

He’d pester me to play. “One more game! Just one more game!” Spring. Summer. Autumn. Winter. It didn’t matter. “Your tea’s out!” That didn’t matter either. It’d be dusk, then dark, then pitch black and he would still be reeling off excitable and breathy high-pitched commentary of imaginative matches where he, the wee guy, overcame the odds to defeat me, the big guy. “It’s through the legs…he leaves him dizzy…he rounds the keeper…it must be……GOAL!!!” and he’d run away, arms aloft like a million wee kids before him and since.

His pals would be round. Half a dozen wee boys getting torn into a properly competitive game. Yellow cards, defensive walls at free kicks, the lot. If I was lucky, there’d be an odd number and I’d be called into action like some ageing and doughy super-sub to make up the numbers. We had balls lost to the railway line over the fence. Balls lost to neighbours on both sides. Burst balls. Burst nets. Broken plant pots. Broken fences. Broken wrists. Broken hearts when it was bedtime.

He was football daft. He joined a team. He trained one night a week with them, and the other six nights he’d play with me; passing drills, turning and shooting, shielding the ball, tackling. Everyone  – everyone – was bigger than him (not now) and this informal training helped him to develop his game. It’s only in the last year or so that he’s stopped playing, by which time he was the best passer of the ball in the team, the designated corner taker where more often than not his crosses would be met full-on by the head of an aggressive team mate, and the most industrious and hard-working player in the squad, his envied and much talked-about close-control skills honed over hours on his wee pitch out the back door.

He still is football daft. We go to games together (Kilmarnock and Scotland) and I hope this never ends. I’m sure he’d like to travel with his pals to more games than he has done already, but there’s an unspoken rule that the football is our thing and our thing alone, and that’s just fine with me.

Before the breaking up of the goals, we had just one more game. The pitch (let’s not be pretentious any more, it’s a few metres of astroturf) suddenly seemed much smaller than before. The acres of space down both wings has been somewhat reduced. The ease it which both of us could turn one another inside out has greatly diminished (for one of us, at any rate). And don’t even think about scoring. Now I see what he’s seen for all those years – a big giant between the posts with nary an inch on either side to try and squeeze the ball into. No wonder he got good at the trick stuff, regularly wrong-footing me before wheeling away to celebrate with his mum at the kitchen window (sorry, the fans in the Directors’ Box).

I’d like to tell you I let him win that final game. That’s what dads do, after all. But, in something of a role-reversal, he went easy on me. He’s bigger, stronger, more skilful. And smart-arsed with it too. So he rainbow flicked and nutmegged and stepped-over and wrong-footed me until I was dizzy. Then, as he momentarily slept at his front post, the pair of us bent double with laughter, I slotted a fly back heel in for the winner. Competitive dad to the very end.

“Penalties!” I suggested, eking out the very last of this last match. I beat him 3-2 on that front too. So, I’m the winner…but more importantly, I’m the winner. Who wouldn’t want to still be kicking a ball about with their children when they’re 18?

After full time, with extra time added on, it’s game over for the goalposts. But not the father/son thing. That’s got many more years still to go.

Here’s Roy Harper’s wistful and ultra-melancholic When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease. Maybe it’s Harper’s resigned voice. Maybe its the stately brass band that carries him home. Or maybe it’s the realisation that I’ll never kick a ball with the boy in the same way again. Either way, I appear to have something in my eye.

Roy Harper –  When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease

https://plainorpan.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/roy-harper-when-an-old-cricketer-leaves-the-crease-remastered.mp3

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

https://plainorpan.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/morning-wonder.mp3

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

https://plainorpan.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/inspiral-carpets-i-want-you-ft-mark-e-smith.mp3

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

https://plainorpan.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/looking-back-i-should-have-been-home-more.mp3

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

https://plainorpan.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/ill-wind.mp3

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

https://plainorpan.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/radiohead-if-you-say-the-word.mp3

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.