It began, as I’m sure so many great musical journeys have, with Jive Bunny.
Christmas morning, 1989. Children up and down the land awoke in the traditional frenzy, tore into their stockings and were confronted (for there really is no other appropriate word) by a copy of the Jive Bunny album. Why our parents collectively decided that this was to be the must have Christmas gift of 1989, I cannot say. Perhaps the combination of a harmless looking cartoon rabbit with the opportunity to “educate” one’s progeny on the music of one’s own youth proved simply too compelling to resist. Regardless, the outcome was thousands upon thousands of impressionable kids finding themselves aurally ravaged by some of the worst mixing ever to emerge from human hand.
Not that we were too bothered at the time. I spent much of that day on headphones, listening to “classics” such as Swing The Mood and That’s What I Like. The records, taken in their sum, were clumsy and ill-advised, but they were also an opportunity to hear music by acts that might not otherwise have reached my ears: Glenn Miller, Little Richard, Dion, The Surfaris, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, and many more. Ok, you were generally only getting about 10 seconds of each song before a clodhopping leap to the next, but still: something of an education.
In amongst the melee there was one tune that properly grabbed my attention and fired my imagination. The short snippet of Get It On by T.Rex, featured on the unimaginatively entitled Do You Wanna Rock, in between Gary Glitter and The Sweet, was unlike anything I’d ever heard. That filthy guitar riff, the obvious sexuality of the lyric and – most of all – the curled lip of a vocal. I was fascinated: what sort of people could produce music that sounded so exotic and forbidden? So menacing? So nakedly, wantonly desirous? My mind raced, and quickly settled on a probable mental image of the responsible parties: T.Rex, a band dressed in biker jackets, fronted by a mean looking guy with slicked back hair, a toothpick in his mouth and regulation black sunglasses. Dangerous, dangerous dudes.
About six months later I managed to actually track down a real life photograph of T.Rex, and almost fell off my chair in shock. No leather jackets, no shades. No dangerous dudes. Just the prettiest looking man I’d ever seen, swathed in a great halo of curls, wrapped in feather boas and silk, pouting shamelessly. Whither the razor blade rockabillies of my mind’s eye? And who knew you could dress like this in public?
From that confounding moment on, I loved Marc Bolan. Loved the records. Loved the look and his seemingly unshakeable confidence. Loved the discovery that this tiny bopping pop elf had apparently ruled the country for a glorious 18 months before I’d been born. By Christmas 1990 I’d moved on from Jive Bunny – in my stocking that year was a compilation entitled Bolan Boogie, which introduced me to one pop gem after another: Raw Ramp, Jeepster, Beltane Walk, Jewel, Ride A White Swan and – last on the cassette tape but first in my heart – Hot Love.
There was virtually nothing about T.Rex that I didn’t immediately enjoy. I loved how effete some of the music sounded; I’d come in the door expecting machismo, but this was so much better and more interesting. I enjoyed the simplicity of the song structures, which lent them a childlike joy. Bolan’s strange way with words, which chimed with some peculiar inner sensibility I was already in the process of uncovering within myself (“Invaders from the true worlds” – what a fabulous line that is, a story waiting to be told). The way he sang about dragons and wizards and misty mountaintops, but without the need for any surrounding bombast or countervailing physicality.
In particular, I was fascinated by Bolan’s voice. I’d never heard anyone sing like that, and still never have. The odd phrasings, the way he swings his tone in an instant from purring and contented cat to serpentine menace. The curious and seemingly feminine vibration in his vocals. The sheer bravery that must have been required to sing that way in public, how exposing it must have been. The way he borrowed and stole and made it all his own. In a childhood spent seeking out Artful Dodger figures, he felt perhaps the most artful of them all.
Bolan was an emissary for an idea with which I was growing increasingly obsessed: that the self is not discovered, but created – that we can be whatever we want, if we only commit. That there is no aspect of you so indelible that it might not be washed away by a passing fancy, or eroded by force of will. What a fabulous get out of jail free card for all our failings. Marc Bolan was the perfect proof of concept: his dabblings with the Mods and Hippies, his willingness to jump from one scene to another without guilt or apparent inner conflict, and his painstaking construction of this magnificent and undeniable force of nature, seemingly capable of bending reality to his will. He was the work of art, and the art was glorious.
I came to convince myself of a deeper connection at play. I was born in Barnes, a short walk from the spot where Bolan had met his end, and I’d grown up watching the informal annual remembrance ceremony which developed on the Common to mark his passing. As a tiny kid, I’d asked my Mother who all those strange looking people were and what they were doing. Hell, I’d been born almost a year to the day after the car crash that killed him. To my mind, this was all the evidence that could ever be needed: fate had brought me to that Jive Bunny record, and this was my guy.
All of which is to say: Marc Bolan was the very first Pop star to properly fire my imagination. To do all the things that Pop stars are meant to do: make you believe in the impossible, suggest a life of glamour and collapsed boundaries, build a sense of affinity that makes you believe for a moment that these songs are you and you are these songs. I grew up, of course, and I don’t need some of these things the way I once did, but I still look upon Bolan as a sort of weird North Star, with whom my own life is entwined. Most weeks, I go for at least one long run on Wimbledon Common, and whenever I do, I invariably think of Marc, sleeping in his van somewhere beside those woods, full of heat and light, simmering away and waiting to explode. That galaxy of possibility that can emanate from a single individual with enough wattage. The self, created and at scale.
There are a thousand happy memories I can trace back to my love of T.Rex. The first time I ever heard The Wizard, a song so utterly preposterous that you can’t believe no one talked him out of it. The frankly unbeatable line “I drive a Rolls Royce/Cos it’s good for my voice”. A hundred happy afternoons spent listening to Electric Warrior. Discovering the completely barmy Zinc Alloy – the track names along would have been worth the purchase, but what an underrated record and what a pleasure to listen to someone take so many risks, stretch so far beyond his usual comfort zone (jesus, this one sounds like the Chi-Lites). Being sat in the back of a mate’s car, a teenager now, listening to Rip Off, and hearing said mate’s Dad splutter from behind the wheel “Did he just say rocking in the nude?!”. Does music get any better than that moment? I think not.
There was always going to be at least one T.Rex track on this list, because the band remain an abiding musical passion, and they’ve given me so much down the years. I could have picked from any number of songs across any number of albums. But ultimately, it has to be Hot Love, because Hot Love has the distinction of being one of the greatest Pop records ever recorded. The shameless pilfering from Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. The way it surfs in on that golden wave of guitar, handclaps and hummed voices, the utterly perfect lyrics (“I’m her two penny price and I give her hot love” – if ever you could pick a single line that tells you virtually everything you need to know about its author it’s that one), the completely undeniable chorus and the greatest audience singalong section of pretty much any song you’ll ever hear. The completely perfect guitar solo, which evokes a good time taken in retrospect. The ridiculous backing vocals from Flo and Eddie of The Turtles. The song is pure joy, and I will never get tired of it.
Four or five years ago I attended a party at the local rugby club. They run a big music event every year where acts come down and play in front of a few hundred well lubricated people. Some bloke gets up in the bar with a ukelele and plays Hot Love. The entire room sings along – and I mean the entire room, every man woman and child, drinks aloft, bellowing those “la la la la la la las” to the ceiling and beyond. Builders, students, stay at home Mums, corporate bods and six year olds. All of them.
I stood there and thought about Marc Bolan, this odd little man in his strange clothes with his funny voice, all perfect beauty and indomitable bravura, singing his songs about dragons and wizards and winning the heart of the British people. This strange country, that can be so uptight and prudish, so insistent on common sense, but which every now and then takes apparent leaves of its senses and clutches to its bosom a wild, dayglo eccentric or two, as if in penance. Marc Bolan, creating himself and burning a path for others to follow. And, really, what could possibly be more beautiful than that?
I was a little old, I thought, at 14, and/or a little too awkward to like T. Rex. A little too young for Tyranosaurus Rex, I have to say I liked the cut of their jib, as portrayed in MM and NME, but never actually got around to listening. I probably heard them first as I saw them first, on Top Of The Pops, the weekly ritual of need and embarrassment, sat watching with my parents on a Thursday night. As Bolan preened and primped through his performance, my Mother piped up, “Who is that”? Too afraid to say I knew, because my reading of the indies had primed me, I would feign ignorance, dreading any future appearance. Conditioned to dislike him, I then duly did, justifying my adult(ha!) appreciation of E.L.P as reason to have a loftier view on what was allowed to be enjoyed. (And as for the nightly Flo and Eddie, dredging the gutter by their collaboration, words failed me, it being a long while before I could admit their earlier employer, Mr Zappa, was more shite than substance, at least by the time they were brought on board, to widen his scatological cast.)
As the years went by, no, reader, no sudden Damascene conversion, I still finding his muse flaccid and derivative, but I at least got the idea he was peddling. And some of the songs, when done by others, polished up quite well, the Angel Headed Hipster tribute album a decent listen.
So I come not to mock your taste, more to unearth my distaste and why.
No worries – I can totally see how they’d be a marmite band, and if I’d encountered them at a different stage of life then, who knows, they might not have landed with me either.
I listened to the Angel Headed Hipster album a few times when it came out. My recollection is that it was striking how many of the artists seemed to slip into singing in Bolan’s natural cadence, most notably Nick Cave on Cosmic Dancer. I’m not all that convinced the songs work as covers: most of them are very simple and the magic is really all in the delivery. It’s the way he tells ’em.
I’ll give the album another listen – it’s been a while.
I was 12 when Hot Love came out, the perfect age, just I was starting to find my mind of music. T.Rex were a first love, Bowie, at times a brazen imitator, soon to follow. Black Country Rock proves that he had Bolan’s quirks down to a tee. The hit that made him, Starman, owes so much to Hot Love. “Cosmic jive” and “let all the children boogie” are blatant Bolanisms and the la-la coda is basically Hot Love.
But, I digress. Bolan was a superstar at a time I first started buying singles. The run from Ride A White Swan to The Groover all with superlative, bespoke B sides, is astonishing. The albums are full of quality, too, but nothing is as complete as Electric Warrior.
Fully agree on Electric Warrior being the best album.
The second best is the aforementioned compilation Bolan Boogie.
The Slider is third, and then it’s pick your way through as you see fit (although Futuristic Dragon is worthy of some attention)
1985s compilation Best of The 20th Century Boy was my route to discovery.
Seems an odd choice for a TV backed compilation from EMI as Marc Bolan had not really been in the public conscious since his passing in 77 – maybe EMI were just looking through their catalogue for something to exploit.
From there, I discovered that there was no huge market for Marc Bolan / T.Rex albums and the re-issues of Tyrannosaurus Rex and T.Rex Fly albums could be picked up for about £2.50 each.
The 1972 – 77 albums (on Marc On Wax with no original artwork *) could be got for less than a fiver.
* the Marc On Wax label bought the rights to the music, but forgot to purchase the artwork. When they went back to fix their error, the price had gone up and they couldn’t afford it.
I first cottoned on to Marc with Metal Guru – I heard it as Milliguru, still my preferred title and easily my fave by T. Rex. Bagged the 10 or so big hits for 10p each at Ilford Town Hall over several Saturday mornings. Cheap as chips.
Around 1985, a Record Collector poll, if I remember, had him higher than the Sainted Dave… if true, rightly so at the time, and still rightly so.
Got the 20th Century Boy compilation slap bang in the middle of the dire, and was definitely listening to it during Live Aid – what else was there to do? – and the four songs I most dug were by Tyrannosaurus Rex, not T. Rex… subsequently got the Rare Magic 12″ (the only 12″ single I own) for Pewter Suitor, and adore the guy… with no urgent desire to hear, aligned with no great disregard toward, his famous stuff.
LOVE the fact he was as sober as judge during the 60s, saddened he had to go the coke route… ‘spose there was no choice – again, what else was there to do? – Mod Marc, Psych Marc, Hippy Marc was better than that… Peel got that.
The Angel Headed Hipster film was brilliant and barely got a sniff on this website where I presumed it would have been hailed as essential.
It, like Marc, ‘is’ essential.
It’s a strange film/record release, because a whole load of people on the first one aren’t on the other one! I really quite liked the two versions of ‘The Slider’… especially the one done on the roof. That was pretty cool.
I will never entertain anything by Joan Cliche Jett as anything but a Joan Cliche Jett cliche, and obviously it was, and the U2 bit seemed a bit without energy.
But, you know what, anything that was on screen was soon destined not to be on screen, and the whole thing zipped along.
Macy Gray came on, doing her thing, and I’m thinking ‘”.. OK, do I need this?” The answer to my question was a resounding … “Yes” when she turned ‘Children of the Revolution’ into some sort of ‘Give Peace A Chance’ / ‘No Woman No Cry’ anthem.
“Erm… seriously good job Macy… she gets it!”
When we see at the end the children who have benefitted from ‘The Marc Bolan School of Music and Film’ in Sierra Leone singing the same song… wow… erm, what a legacy.
I absolutely love East End urchins who’ll ‘”.. look after your car, Mister, while you’re at the football?” That’s Marc Bolan that is.
I’ve been away for most of April to date, and missed the entire last set of these (all caught up now). Lovely writing as ever, Bingo. Keep it up, I can’t wait to see what number Star Trekkin’ by The Firm comes in at.
Not a fan of T Rex at the time. I am the same age as @retropath2. My brother is 3 years younger and loved them. Where I differ though is that in the fullness of time I do have a revisionist view. I heard ride a white swan on the radio a couple of months back and it sounded fantastic. Some of Bolan’s ideas were completely bonkers but occasionally he came out with an absolute gem.
First band I really remember seeing on television. Crackerjack probably. Loved Metal Guru, there were some great singles with mostly terrible lyrics. Never found an album to love unreservedly, Bowie won that and he later showed he could do so much else while Bolan disappeared into obscurity before his tragically early death.
Do you remember the music press? Those happy go lucky guys and occasional gals who would be sent free records by the barrowload, spill a load of sneering, petulant ink over them and in doing so tell us all what to listen to, what mattered when we did so and how to think about the whole thing? Those jokers.
I can’t remember where I got started with music journalism. It certainly wasn’t there in the room when I first made contact with music. But somewhere in my early teens it crept in through the window and made itself well and truly at home. Select magazine with its feet up on the furniture, Vox rifling through the kitchen cupboards, Spin leaving the toilet seat up and muddy footprints on the carpet. And, of course, at the centre of it all: the NME, pontificating while leaving its dirty handprints on the wallpaper.
For years, I drank it all in, absorbed the prose, digested the key concepts. This music good, that music bad. This artist leading to that and did you know that if you enjoy X you really do need to listen to Y, and furthermore if you’ve been listening to Z you need to take a good, hard look at yourself. The “artists” were geniuses, their backstories Arthurian epics, their lyrics sacred poetry. And it wasn’t enough to read the current stuff, I had to go backwards too: Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, Nick Kent. Each book I acquired, each article I read another stepping stone in my journey to really understand music, and – most importantly of all – to have good taste.
Good taste was important, and acquiring it was a battle. Your own record collection was your shield in that battle, your ability to curl a reproachful lip at the record collections of others was your sword, your grasp of rock history and its assorted factual ephemera your quiver of arrows. You needed to know which were the “correct” Velvet Underground albums to enjoy, which genres were strictly verboten, who played bass for Television, and how to listen to Captain Beefheart with a straight face.
I spent my teenage years saying my catechisms and steadily working my way through the classics. I built a healthy suspicion of catchy songs, or records that were not written by those who were singing them. I listened to Krautrock. I bought Mojo and took my monthly lessons on rock history. I absorbed pure, unrefined Rockism: the belief that there is a clear hierarchy to music, that there is a meaningful critical canon and that music is best understood via the medium of the written word. That songs are to be thought, not felt.
At the time, the snobbery was appealing. Like most teenagers, I was trying to figure out who I was, and what I meant. I wanted a world that was ordered, and readily understandable. And it felt good to think that my mates who had not served the same apprenticeship were a step behind, perhaps even defective.
There’s a scene in the immortal White Men Can’t Jump where Wesley Snipes explains to Woody Harrelson that he may very well “listen” to Jimi Hendrix, but he can’t “hear it”. “Y’all can’t hear Jimi…. You’re listening”. The perfect encapsulation of how I’d been trained to view this stuff: you might listen to Bob Dylan, but only I can actually hear it: because I have three (count ‘em) Clinton Heylin books on my shelf, and I know that the best version of Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright is on The Witmark Demos.
As with most false promises, the appeal eventually wore off. I grew up a little, and the bloom began its steady retreat from the rose. Difficult questions began to circle: were the troglodytes who listened to Oasis but not Suede having more fun that I was? Was I permitted to enjoy En Vogue? And why was I occasionally pretending to enjoy music I didn’t? Slowly but surely, Rockism’s cold, dead fingers were prised from my throat, and I began to listen with a gentler ear. The pressing question of “is this good” began to fade into the background, increasingly replaced by a new directive: “can I take anything from this”. Is it fun? Does it make me feel? Does it make me dance, or jump, or shout? Does it even matter if its garbage if I’m enjoying it? Is anyone even watching at all?
There were any number of records that helped me make this crossing. Songs that I would never have permitted to disgrace “the collection”, but in respect of which I could not shake a deep and guilty love, and which eventually pushed their way back to the fore. If I Could Turn Back Time. Set You Free. I Want It That Way. So much early Madonna. Spice Up Your Life. A thousand others. Leave (Get Out) by JoJo belongs squarely in this camp, and in some ways represents the archetypal song I could not bring myself to like.
I was in my early 20s when it released, still grappling with my own internalised Rockism. Let’s examine the components of the song: JoJo Leveque was 13 years old at the time of release (indeed, she’s still the youngest solo female artist to have a US number one). The song was written for her by Soulshock and Kenneth Karlin, who had done work in the past for Whitney Houston. The lyric detailed an incident from JoJo’s own fledgling romantic life: a tragic break up with a boyfriend who had thrown rocks at the geese when they’d gone for a walk together in the park. Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, this was not. And yet…
Leave is a legitimately brilliant Pop record. The strummed guitar loop, redolent of its moment (see also: Like I Love You), the off-beat cries of “who” and “why” which punctuate the end of lines, JoJo’s towering and melismatic vocal, and that absolute monster of a chorus. It’s a Motown record for an overwrought Primary School romance, sung by a literal child. And it slaps.
Hearing Leave for the first time was another moment for me. I loved the song immediately upon contact, but I could never have admitted it at the time, and that raised uncomfortable questions. Was I really going to go through the rest of my life engaged in this juvenile self-denial? For what purpose? Did anyone actually give a shit about my record collection? The dam was crumbling, and Leave took yet another enormous chunk out of it. Another huge step towards a life of gratifyingly terrible taste, of listening to whatever I want to because life is short and – jesus – who has time for all this utter nonsense.
A few months ago, I took down from the shelf my battered copy of Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, and leafed through it to Lester Bangs’ immortal eulogy to Elvis, written for The Village Voice in 1977. An article I’d read dozens of times, marvelling on each occasion at its seminal coda: “But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse; I will say good-bye to you.” I used to marvel at that writing; what a kiss off, what a glorious statement of cultural superiority. Reading it back in adulthood, it landed quite differently: what I once understood as style and bravado felt closer to intellectual insecurity and adolescent posturing. Really, Lester – who cares? Who cares what you like or don’t? And more specifically: who cares enough that you need to interrupt an obituary to bring your own tastes to the centre of discussion.
Some time shortly after Leave, I set about dismantling it all. I let go of the idea that Bob Dylan is a literal genius. I surrendered the notion that I actually knew anything about anything, or that it would even matter whether I did so or not. I opened my ears to other genres I’d dismissed, to artists I wouldn’t previously have been seen in the room with. These days, my record collection (such as it is) is somewhere up in the loft. I haven’t clapped eyes on it in a decade, and at some stage it will go to the tip and all those careful decisions I made – all those years of ostensible good taste – will go with it.
And as those records hit the compactor, it will be Leave that remains. A wonderful record that has brought huge joy to my life. I’ve played it at parties, I’ve sung along to it with mates, it’s been the soundtrack to happy afternoons at home. It’s a total sugar rush of virtually no real artistic merit and blessed with zero authenticity, except that all the merit and authenticity it will ever need is that it makes me happy. It’s shallow and daft and I bloody love it, because quite a lot of the time I’m shallow and daft too.
And that means I can write a list like this one, where I just honestly ask myself what are the 100 songs I like the most and then give my unfiltered answer, knowing that it really doesn’t matter, and that the only value of the exercise is in whatever fleeting enjoyment I may take from it. And that’s a liberation.
Every now and then in a life spent listening to music, a voice will come along that speaks to you so directly and immediately that you struggle to believe there was ever a time in your life when you’d not heard it. Often, that voice will be grand, and perhaps soulful. Sometimes, it will be a voice that sounds a little like your own, or the voice you imagine possessing in some other, frequently dreamed of life. Maybe it expresses something of yourself that you’ve otherwise struggled to articulate. But once you’ve heard it the first time, it never leaves you. For me, Mark Mulcahy has, thus far, proved to be that voice.
I first discovered Mulcahy via Uncut magazine, which gave an enthusiastic review to his 2001 sophomore outing, Smile Sunset. Mulcahy had a storied past as a member of Miracle Legion, an 80s college rock band out of New Haven Connecticut who drew early comparisons to R.E.M before sputtering out in comparative ignominy.
His second band, Polaris, achieved a sort of infamy in their recurring role as the house band for the early 90s cult classic Nickelodeon kids’ show “The Adventures of Pete & Pete”. The show provided TV exposure for a number of alternative acts of the period, including Luscious Jackson and The Magnetic Fields, but Miracle Legion enjoyed pride of place, and provided the Pete & Pete theme song: Hey Sandy, a gently careening number with the memorable opening couplet: “Hey smilin’ strange/you’re looking happily deranged”.
By the time of his solo career, Mulcahy had tapered away the college rock sound, moving towards slighter, prettier songs that often felt like demos, or parts of some larger work. A beautiful melody here, a striking lyric there. Lots of meandering and oblique imagery, but with no ambitions to real oomph, and all the better for it. Smile Sunset was an uneven record, but in its best moments (Resolution #1, I Just Shot Myself In The Foot Again) surprisingly touching, and the perfect showcase for the aspect that had grabbed me from the very first listen: Mulcahy’s voice.
I’d watched Pete & Pete a little as a kid, so perhaps the voice was familiar. Perhaps it reminded me of childhood in some way. But what struck me first was how unusually kind it sounded. A gentle voice, full of vulnerability but clear as a bell. Almost dainty. It sounded the way an interior monologue feels.
Intriguingly, as I explored further it became increasingly clear that Mulcahy’s entire career had been a kind of stripping back of elements to leave his vocals operating in near isolation. Take Love’s The Only Thing That Shuts Me Up, a mere 90 seconds long and with only the barest of keyboard lines for accompaniment. More a sketch than a song. Or any number of songs on Fathering, his debut album. Take Hey, Self Defeater, one of the warmest and most affirming songs I know, sung virtually acapella, with all the life breathed into it directly by the tenderness in the vocal.
Something in the voice was warm and familiar. It seemed to balance sorrow and hope like nothing else I’d ever heard, and the cryptic tendency in the lyrics meant that it felt virtually impossible to tell whether any single song was meant to be happy or sad. There was a depth at play that gave the feeling of a man opening a door to his bewildered inner self, and an unusual line of phrasing that rendered each performance distinct: take, for example, the cry of “I thought the case was closed/but now I see some doubt about your innocence” on Tempted; is this accusation? Remorse? Maybe both, and more besides.
In 2005, Mulcahy released the follow up to Smile Sunset, entitled In Pursuit Of Your Happiness. Another batch of pleasingly offbeat and occasionally half-baked tunes. And in amongst them all was Cookie Jar, a song that immediately won my heart and that I’ve been listening to in quiet happiness and contentment for nearly two decades now. A song that has been track 1 on half the mix tapes or playlists I’ve made in that period, and that has trotted by my side throughout like a loyal puppy, warming the cockles of my life.
Cookie Jar is my favourite Mulcahy vocal, and my favourite lyric too. It showcases all his boyish tenderness and grace, his disarmingly open heart. It’s gloriously slight and ephemeral, beautifully arranged and when I’m in its grip I feel the world’s a better place.
Even after all this time, I have absolutely no idea what the song’s about. There’s an odd lyrical through-line where it feels like Mulcahy is trying to work in as many of the contents of his kitchen cupboard as possible (macaroons, cookies, jelly, and marmalade all get a mention), a series of memorable couplets (“A lonely macaroon/inside your biscuit head”) and an off-kilter measure of critique and forgiveness, but not much in the way of clarity. And yet, as I listen to it, it makes a strange sense to me.
For reasons I might struggle to articulate, when I listen to Cookie Jar I hear a song about faltering friendship; about that moment where you realise your relationship with an old pal is crumbling away, and you’re wondering if they see it too (“I wonder if you know/I wonder if you’re bitter/and all that you consider/might marmalade your mind”). It’s about looking at someone you’ve loved forever, far longer than any romantic relationship, taking account of all of their faults and your own, and letting them go in peace. So sweetly lays the dream, in the cookie jar.
The song builds to a glorious denouement: an acknowledgement of the impasse (“what about the jam we’re in”), an acceptance of at least partial responsibility (“I kept my cookie jar/too high up on the shelf”) and then the most beautiful and soaring parting wish of peace and happiness (“here’s what I wish for you/here’s what you must do/preserve yourself/preserve yourself/preserve yourself”). Life has reached a cruel juncture; you’ll go this way, and I’ll go that, but I’ll love you forever and I want only good things for you.
Cookie Jar is this fragile, gorgeous nothing of a song with a handful of biscuit references on one side, and an iron fist waiting on the other. That “preserve yourself” and the odd scatting into which it degenerates gets me every time: what a beautiful sentiment, what a beautiful farewell.
When Cookie Jar first came out I played it often in the house share in which I was living with a dear old friend of mine. “What a beautiful little song that is” he exclaimed the first time he heard it. And now, 20 years later, it’s the song of our friendship – of a gentle drifting apart. No arguments, no acrimony, just two people who once helped make sense of one another’s lives now clearly borne along on two separate currents. So now when I listen to Cookie Jar I think of him, and that drifting friendship: all the love I feel towards him, all my hope that he finds peace and happiness wherever he’s swept along next, but the knowledge that our chapter is over, and that that’s OK too. So sweetly lays the dream. God, if that isn’t the truth.
Mark Mulcahy’s wife, Melissa Rich Mulcahy died unexpectedly in September 2008. She was 41 years old and left behind two daughters. Mark slowly withdrew from public life, performing a little less, recording ever more infrequently. The following year a tribute album was released, featuring covers of Mulcahy’s songs and with the clear intent of ensuring he remained solvent. As a cult favourite of the Alternative music world, contributors were not difficult to find: Thom Yorke, Frank Black, The National, Michael Stipe, Mercury Rev and Dinosaur Jr all appeared. Some of the covers were very good indeed, but none of them were sung as well as the originals.
While Mulcahy has continued to record, and still makes frequently beautiful records, the tribute album is in some ways the perfect capstone to his career: that strange, heady mix of kindness and vulnerability. When I listen to him, it reminds me of the first time I ever read Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. The sense that this is an individual in some spectacular disarray, a modicum of concern, but overwhelmingly a deep and abiding joy to find someone so apparently gentle at heart and able to convey that gentleness through their art. To celebrate that gentleness as it ought rightly to be celebrated.
I can’t remember where I was when I first heard Drum & Bass. I guess it would have been in the form of Jungle, probably emanating from a passing car, or playing on the radio in a shop. The quintessential sound of young London in the early 90s, the drums of Breaktbeat Hardcore spilling over and fusing with rhythmic elements of Hip Hop and Dancehall and the bass of Dub and House music to create something simultaneously familiar and alien. Inviting and threatening.
Jungle felt unusual, in that it formed part of the day to day tapestry of urban life long before it crossed over and went mainstream. You heard it everywhere, but it was largely faceless and nameless, traded on cassettes in the playground rather than over the counter at Our Price. Simon Reynolds captured the spirit well, if a little clinically: “Britain’s very own equivalent to US Hip-Hop. You could equally make the case that Jungle is a raved-up, digitised offshoot of Jamaican reggae. Musically, Jungle’s spatialised production, bass quake pressure and battery of extreme sonic effects, make it a sort of postmodern Dub music on steroids.”
By 1993, the genre was starting to splinter. Raggacore and Jump Up emerged to place greater focus on, respectively the Reggae influence and the bassline. Drum & Bass developed with greater focus on the beats. By 1994, Jungle started to breach the mainstream, featuring in Touch & Fresh adverts and crossing over with actual chart hits (shout out to Original Nuttah and The Burial, still incredible moments for 90s kids). In the teenage mind, whether consciously or otherwise, it was time to move on, and in my case it was time to move on to Drum & Bass, the music which ate my life for most of the next 3 years.
Looking back, it’s not difficult to see what the appeal was. Drum & Bass boasted a versatility I’m not sure I’ve properly seen in any other branch of EDM; you could dance to it, it sounded fantastic on headphones, it worked for club nights, you could chill to it – hell, you could even think to it. It also boasted a series of headline acts who were more readily identifiable than their Jungle counterparts, and each of whom came with their own distinct style. The icy minimalism of Photek, the dirty basslines of Dillinja, the Jazz leanings of Peshay, the soulfulness of 4 Hero. It made immediate sense to me, and the potential felt limitless.
The artist to whom I most immediately gravitated was Goldie. He’d produced the first D&B record I ever heard (the immortal Terminator), and his run from 1992 to 1996 was largely peerless, one absolute classic after another, culminating in the magnum opus that was Timeless. Timeless was a big moment in my life: I listened to it endlessly, puzzled over its peculiar airlessness, bought into its classical aspirations. This was “Intelligent” Drum & Bass – it seemed to take inspiration from every popular form of Black music over the preceding 30 years, combine the elements and flatten them out into something that was as taut and reflective as clingfilm under tension. It took the Amen Break and constructed a 100 ft tall monolith around it. It was street music you could intellectualise as much as you wanted to.
I was old enough by that stage to venture down to club nights, and would spend many a happy hour on sweaty dancefloors blissing out to this new and exciting music. And that’s almost certainly where I heard LTJ Bukem for the first time, and had my mind blown.
Bukem’s brand of D&B, so memorably immortalised in the Logical Progression compilation series, felt different from the off. It was Jazzier, more ambient than what had gone previously; the areas between beats and bass full of strange and unusual sounds. There was a spaciness, a tripiness I hadn’t heard previously, and it made for an energy I’d never experienced. Listening to Bukem was probably the first time I ever stood in a crowd of people and felt the music properly wash over me, took it in like it was part of me. Those dancefloors felt astral, simultaneously calm and emotional all at once. You went home exhausted and full of peace.
The original Logical Progression compilation was a huge eye opener when it arrived, capturing all that magic and preserving it forever. But it was the second outing that took things to another level; not so much because the tracks were any stronger, but because it came with a separate mix CD: every tune on the comp, with MC Conrad chatting over the top of them. MC Conrad, with that deep, biblical voice, your tour guide through the heavens. I listened to that mix CD until I practically wore it out – it was my perpetual soundtrack all throughout 1997, to the point where every beat, every bassline, every strangely ambient soundscape, became ingrained on my soul.
Logical Progression 2 was the apex of my Drum & Bass years, and the high point of the odd feeling of calm this music brings to me when at its best. The sense of a high energy momentarily frozen in motion somewhere up in the stratosphere, full of kinetic potential and yet completely at rest. It also reminds me of a seminal period in my life; the last few months of secondary school. Seven years waiting to escape, the end in sight and the growing feeling that no one could touch me, that I was going to get out scott free, escape that dingy, backwards little town and move on to better things. Logical Progression 2 felt limitless. I felt limitless.
The song I’ve chosen for this list is Atlantis. Partly because the hardness of the beat forms a neat bridge back to those early Jungle years, partly because I absolutely love the soundbed it runs on. The opening harps, the looped bleepings, the chamber orchestra vibes, and then that glorious sampled vocal: I need you, I want you. Atlantis was gothic – it reminded me of the Wu Tang and it showed me again that this music could go anywhere it wanted.
My abiding memory of this song is being 18 years old, sat on my bed revising for my A-levels, sun streaming through the windows, Logical Progression 2 on the stereo. Somewhere in the haze of revision, I nodded off and slipped into a brief and incredibly vivid dream, the precise details of which remain with me to this day.
A large group of us were outside a vast cathedral that seemed to extend up endlessly into the sky, imposing and yet serene. Music began to play and we sprinted inside, pounding through the building’s corridors, in search of something, crashing into walls, desperate to reach our goal. Eventually, we arrived in a vast open space, the cathedral’s nave, and before us on a raised podium stood a hooded man behind two sets of decks. We ran towards him, but the music abruptly stopped, freezing us in our tracks. We looked up again at the hooded figure. There was total silence, and in that silence we could hear the wind, and the sound of tree branches rustling, and it became apparent that there was an almighty crack in the building separating him from us: a chasm running along the floor, up the walls and cross the ceiling, as if the cathedral had been sliced open. And in that silence, in that chasm, it began to rain heavily – a wall of water suddenly separating us from the musician. The sound of rain hitting soil.
I woke with a start at that point to find Atlantis playing out. My dream had somehow coincided completely with the song on the stereo – the only time in my life anything of that kind has ever happened. The period outside the cathedral had been the song’s opening, the running through the corridors had been in time to its breakbeats, and the period of silence and rain had been aligned with the moment around five and a half minutes in when Atlantis goes completely silent. I had effectively dreamt a music video. It spooked me at the time, and I think about it whenever I listen to Atlantis, all the imagery remains with me. I can feel myself in that cathedral.
MC Conrad died the same week I’m writing this, a mere 52 years old. With him went a slice of my adolescence, because in that period there is arguably no one whose voice resonated with me harder or longer than that of Conrad. I was lucky enough to hear him perform live a couple of times, and his mastery of the crowd, his instinct for where we should go next, his skill in lifting the entire room, were just incomparable. In as much as any musicians have ever helped bring peace to my soul, it is Conrad and LTJ Bukem to whom I owe that debt, and I know I will continue to treasure their records for as long as I have ears with which to listen.
Bingo Little says
70. Hot Love – T.Rex
It began, as I’m sure so many great musical journeys have, with Jive Bunny.
Christmas morning, 1989. Children up and down the land awoke in the traditional frenzy, tore into their stockings and were confronted (for there really is no other appropriate word) by a copy of the Jive Bunny album. Why our parents collectively decided that this was to be the must have Christmas gift of 1989, I cannot say. Perhaps the combination of a harmless looking cartoon rabbit with the opportunity to “educate” one’s progeny on the music of one’s own youth proved simply too compelling to resist. Regardless, the outcome was thousands upon thousands of impressionable kids finding themselves aurally ravaged by some of the worst mixing ever to emerge from human hand.
Not that we were too bothered at the time. I spent much of that day on headphones, listening to “classics” such as Swing The Mood and That’s What I Like. The records, taken in their sum, were clumsy and ill-advised, but they were also an opportunity to hear music by acts that might not otherwise have reached my ears: Glenn Miller, Little Richard, Dion, The Surfaris, Eddie Cochran, Chuck Berry, and many more. Ok, you were generally only getting about 10 seconds of each song before a clodhopping leap to the next, but still: something of an education.
In amongst the melee there was one tune that properly grabbed my attention and fired my imagination. The short snippet of Get It On by T.Rex, featured on the unimaginatively entitled Do You Wanna Rock, in between Gary Glitter and The Sweet, was unlike anything I’d ever heard. That filthy guitar riff, the obvious sexuality of the lyric and – most of all – the curled lip of a vocal. I was fascinated: what sort of people could produce music that sounded so exotic and forbidden? So menacing? So nakedly, wantonly desirous? My mind raced, and quickly settled on a probable mental image of the responsible parties: T.Rex, a band dressed in biker jackets, fronted by a mean looking guy with slicked back hair, a toothpick in his mouth and regulation black sunglasses. Dangerous, dangerous dudes.
About six months later I managed to actually track down a real life photograph of T.Rex, and almost fell off my chair in shock. No leather jackets, no shades. No dangerous dudes. Just the prettiest looking man I’d ever seen, swathed in a great halo of curls, wrapped in feather boas and silk, pouting shamelessly. Whither the razor blade rockabillies of my mind’s eye? And who knew you could dress like this in public?
From that confounding moment on, I loved Marc Bolan. Loved the records. Loved the look and his seemingly unshakeable confidence. Loved the discovery that this tiny bopping pop elf had apparently ruled the country for a glorious 18 months before I’d been born. By Christmas 1990 I’d moved on from Jive Bunny – in my stocking that year was a compilation entitled Bolan Boogie, which introduced me to one pop gem after another: Raw Ramp, Jeepster, Beltane Walk, Jewel, Ride A White Swan and – last on the cassette tape but first in my heart – Hot Love.
There was virtually nothing about T.Rex that I didn’t immediately enjoy. I loved how effete some of the music sounded; I’d come in the door expecting machismo, but this was so much better and more interesting. I enjoyed the simplicity of the song structures, which lent them a childlike joy. Bolan’s strange way with words, which chimed with some peculiar inner sensibility I was already in the process of uncovering within myself (“Invaders from the true worlds” – what a fabulous line that is, a story waiting to be told). The way he sang about dragons and wizards and misty mountaintops, but without the need for any surrounding bombast or countervailing physicality.
In particular, I was fascinated by Bolan’s voice. I’d never heard anyone sing like that, and still never have. The odd phrasings, the way he swings his tone in an instant from purring and contented cat to serpentine menace. The curious and seemingly feminine vibration in his vocals. The sheer bravery that must have been required to sing that way in public, how exposing it must have been. The way he borrowed and stole and made it all his own. In a childhood spent seeking out Artful Dodger figures, he felt perhaps the most artful of them all.
Bolan was an emissary for an idea with which I was growing increasingly obsessed: that the self is not discovered, but created – that we can be whatever we want, if we only commit. That there is no aspect of you so indelible that it might not be washed away by a passing fancy, or eroded by force of will. What a fabulous get out of jail free card for all our failings. Marc Bolan was the perfect proof of concept: his dabblings with the Mods and Hippies, his willingness to jump from one scene to another without guilt or apparent inner conflict, and his painstaking construction of this magnificent and undeniable force of nature, seemingly capable of bending reality to his will. He was the work of art, and the art was glorious.
I came to convince myself of a deeper connection at play. I was born in Barnes, a short walk from the spot where Bolan had met his end, and I’d grown up watching the informal annual remembrance ceremony which developed on the Common to mark his passing. As a tiny kid, I’d asked my Mother who all those strange looking people were and what they were doing. Hell, I’d been born almost a year to the day after the car crash that killed him. To my mind, this was all the evidence that could ever be needed: fate had brought me to that Jive Bunny record, and this was my guy.
All of which is to say: Marc Bolan was the very first Pop star to properly fire my imagination. To do all the things that Pop stars are meant to do: make you believe in the impossible, suggest a life of glamour and collapsed boundaries, build a sense of affinity that makes you believe for a moment that these songs are you and you are these songs. I grew up, of course, and I don’t need some of these things the way I once did, but I still look upon Bolan as a sort of weird North Star, with whom my own life is entwined. Most weeks, I go for at least one long run on Wimbledon Common, and whenever I do, I invariably think of Marc, sleeping in his van somewhere beside those woods, full of heat and light, simmering away and waiting to explode. That galaxy of possibility that can emanate from a single individual with enough wattage. The self, created and at scale.
There are a thousand happy memories I can trace back to my love of T.Rex. The first time I ever heard The Wizard, a song so utterly preposterous that you can’t believe no one talked him out of it. The frankly unbeatable line “I drive a Rolls Royce/Cos it’s good for my voice”. A hundred happy afternoons spent listening to Electric Warrior. Discovering the completely barmy Zinc Alloy – the track names along would have been worth the purchase, but what an underrated record and what a pleasure to listen to someone take so many risks, stretch so far beyond his usual comfort zone (jesus, this one sounds like the Chi-Lites). Being sat in the back of a mate’s car, a teenager now, listening to Rip Off, and hearing said mate’s Dad splutter from behind the wheel “Did he just say rocking in the nude?!”. Does music get any better than that moment? I think not.
There was always going to be at least one T.Rex track on this list, because the band remain an abiding musical passion, and they’ve given me so much down the years. I could have picked from any number of songs across any number of albums. But ultimately, it has to be Hot Love, because Hot Love has the distinction of being one of the greatest Pop records ever recorded. The shameless pilfering from Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. The way it surfs in on that golden wave of guitar, handclaps and hummed voices, the utterly perfect lyrics (“I’m her two penny price and I give her hot love” – if ever you could pick a single line that tells you virtually everything you need to know about its author it’s that one), the completely undeniable chorus and the greatest audience singalong section of pretty much any song you’ll ever hear. The completely perfect guitar solo, which evokes a good time taken in retrospect. The ridiculous backing vocals from Flo and Eddie of The Turtles. The song is pure joy, and I will never get tired of it.
Four or five years ago I attended a party at the local rugby club. They run a big music event every year where acts come down and play in front of a few hundred well lubricated people. Some bloke gets up in the bar with a ukelele and plays Hot Love. The entire room sings along – and I mean the entire room, every man woman and child, drinks aloft, bellowing those “la la la la la la las” to the ceiling and beyond. Builders, students, stay at home Mums, corporate bods and six year olds. All of them.
I stood there and thought about Marc Bolan, this odd little man in his strange clothes with his funny voice, all perfect beauty and indomitable bravura, singing his songs about dragons and wizards and winning the heart of the British people. This strange country, that can be so uptight and prudish, so insistent on common sense, but which every now and then takes apparent leaves of its senses and clutches to its bosom a wild, dayglo eccentric or two, as if in penance. Marc Bolan, creating himself and burning a path for others to follow. And, really, what could possibly be more beautiful than that?
retropath2 says
I was a little old, I thought, at 14, and/or a little too awkward to like T. Rex. A little too young for Tyranosaurus Rex, I have to say I liked the cut of their jib, as portrayed in MM and NME, but never actually got around to listening. I probably heard them first as I saw them first, on Top Of The Pops, the weekly ritual of need and embarrassment, sat watching with my parents on a Thursday night. As Bolan preened and primped through his performance, my Mother piped up, “Who is that”? Too afraid to say I knew, because my reading of the indies had primed me, I would feign ignorance, dreading any future appearance. Conditioned to dislike him, I then duly did, justifying my adult(ha!) appreciation of E.L.P as reason to have a loftier view on what was allowed to be enjoyed. (And as for the nightly Flo and Eddie, dredging the gutter by their collaboration, words failed me, it being a long while before I could admit their earlier employer, Mr Zappa, was more shite than substance, at least by the time they were brought on board, to widen his scatological cast.)
As the years went by, no, reader, no sudden Damascene conversion, I still finding his muse flaccid and derivative, but I at least got the idea he was peddling. And some of the songs, when done by others, polished up quite well, the Angel Headed Hipster tribute album a decent listen.
So I come not to mock your taste, more to unearth my distaste and why.
Bingo Little says
No worries – I can totally see how they’d be a marmite band, and if I’d encountered them at a different stage of life then, who knows, they might not have landed with me either.
I listened to the Angel Headed Hipster album a few times when it came out. My recollection is that it was striking how many of the artists seemed to slip into singing in Bolan’s natural cadence, most notably Nick Cave on Cosmic Dancer. I’m not all that convinced the songs work as covers: most of them are very simple and the magic is really all in the delivery. It’s the way he tells ’em.
I’ll give the album another listen – it’s been a while.
Tiggerlion says
I was 12 when Hot Love came out, the perfect age, just I was starting to find my mind of music. T.Rex were a first love, Bowie, at times a brazen imitator, soon to follow. Black Country Rock proves that he had Bolan’s quirks down to a tee. The hit that made him, Starman, owes so much to Hot Love. “Cosmic jive” and “let all the children boogie” are blatant Bolanisms and the la-la coda is basically Hot Love.
But, I digress. Bolan was a superstar at a time I first started buying singles. The run from Ride A White Swan to The Groover all with superlative, bespoke B sides, is astonishing. The albums are full of quality, too, but nothing is as complete as Electric Warrior.
Rigid Digit says
Fully agree on Electric Warrior being the best album.
The second best is the aforementioned compilation Bolan Boogie.
The Slider is third, and then it’s pick your way through as you see fit (although Futuristic Dragon is worthy of some attention)
Bingo Little says
Very few albums by anyone, ever, are as complete as Electric Warrior.
What’s the worst song on it? Maybe Girl? And it’s still pretty great.
Rigid Digit says
1985s compilation Best of The 20th Century Boy was my route to discovery.
Seems an odd choice for a TV backed compilation from EMI as Marc Bolan had not really been in the public conscious since his passing in 77 – maybe EMI were just looking through their catalogue for something to exploit.
From there, I discovered that there was no huge market for Marc Bolan / T.Rex albums and the re-issues of Tyrannosaurus Rex and T.Rex Fly albums could be picked up for about £2.50 each.
The 1972 – 77 albums (on Marc On Wax with no original artwork *) could be got for less than a fiver.
* the Marc On Wax label bought the rights to the music, but forgot to purchase the artwork. When they went back to fix their error, the price had gone up and they couldn’t afford it.
deramdaze says
I first cottoned on to Marc with Metal Guru – I heard it as Milliguru, still my preferred title and easily my fave by T. Rex. Bagged the 10 or so big hits for 10p each at Ilford Town Hall over several Saturday mornings. Cheap as chips.
Around 1985, a Record Collector poll, if I remember, had him higher than the Sainted Dave… if true, rightly so at the time, and still rightly so.
Got the 20th Century Boy compilation slap bang in the middle of the dire, and was definitely listening to it during Live Aid – what else was there to do? – and the four songs I most dug were by Tyrannosaurus Rex, not T. Rex… subsequently got the Rare Magic 12″ (the only 12″ single I own) for Pewter Suitor, and adore the guy… with no urgent desire to hear, aligned with no great disregard toward, his famous stuff.
LOVE the fact he was as sober as judge during the 60s, saddened he had to go the coke route… ‘spose there was no choice – again, what else was there to do? – Mod Marc, Psych Marc, Hippy Marc was better than that… Peel got that.
The Angel Headed Hipster film was brilliant and barely got a sniff on this website where I presumed it would have been hailed as essential.
It, like Marc, ‘is’ essential.
Rigid Digit says
From Angel Headed Hipster, Nick Cav’s version of Cosmic Dancer was the pick of a fine bunch for me.
deramdaze says
It’s a strange film/record release, because a whole load of people on the first one aren’t on the other one! I really quite liked the two versions of ‘The Slider’… especially the one done on the roof. That was pretty cool.
I will never entertain anything by Joan Cliche Jett as anything but a Joan Cliche Jett cliche, and obviously it was, and the U2 bit seemed a bit without energy.
But, you know what, anything that was on screen was soon destined not to be on screen, and the whole thing zipped along.
Macy Gray came on, doing her thing, and I’m thinking ‘”.. OK, do I need this?” The answer to my question was a resounding … “Yes” when she turned ‘Children of the Revolution’ into some sort of ‘Give Peace A Chance’ / ‘No Woman No Cry’ anthem.
“Erm… seriously good job Macy… she gets it!”
When we see at the end the children who have benefitted from ‘The Marc Bolan School of Music and Film’ in Sierra Leone singing the same song… wow… erm, what a legacy.
I absolutely love East End urchins who’ll ‘”.. look after your car, Mister, while you’re at the football?” That’s Marc Bolan that is.
Kid Dynamite says
I’ve been away for most of April to date, and missed the entire last set of these (all caught up now). Lovely writing as ever, Bingo. Keep it up, I can’t wait to see what number Star Trekkin’ by The Firm comes in at.
Bingo Little says
Cheers, KD.
Rest assured, Star Trekkin’ will feature in the upper reaches, nestled snugly between Arvo Part’s Spiegel Im Spiegel and Loco by Coal Chamber.
SteveT says
Not a fan of T Rex at the time. I am the same age as @retropath2. My brother is 3 years younger and loved them. Where I differ though is that in the fullness of time I do have a revisionist view. I heard ride a white swan on the radio a couple of months back and it sounded fantastic. Some of Bolan’s ideas were completely bonkers but occasionally he came out with an absolute gem.
dai says
First band I really remember seeing on television. Crackerjack probably. Loved Metal Guru, there were some great singles with mostly terrible lyrics. Never found an album to love unreservedly, Bowie won that and he later showed he could do so much else while Bolan disappeared into obscurity before his tragically early death.
Bingo Little says
69. Leave (Get Out) – JoJo
Do you remember the music press? Those happy go lucky guys and occasional gals who would be sent free records by the barrowload, spill a load of sneering, petulant ink over them and in doing so tell us all what to listen to, what mattered when we did so and how to think about the whole thing? Those jokers.
I can’t remember where I got started with music journalism. It certainly wasn’t there in the room when I first made contact with music. But somewhere in my early teens it crept in through the window and made itself well and truly at home. Select magazine with its feet up on the furniture, Vox rifling through the kitchen cupboards, Spin leaving the toilet seat up and muddy footprints on the carpet. And, of course, at the centre of it all: the NME, pontificating while leaving its dirty handprints on the wallpaper.
For years, I drank it all in, absorbed the prose, digested the key concepts. This music good, that music bad. This artist leading to that and did you know that if you enjoy X you really do need to listen to Y, and furthermore if you’ve been listening to Z you need to take a good, hard look at yourself. The “artists” were geniuses, their backstories Arthurian epics, their lyrics sacred poetry. And it wasn’t enough to read the current stuff, I had to go backwards too: Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, Nick Kent. Each book I acquired, each article I read another stepping stone in my journey to really understand music, and – most importantly of all – to have good taste.
Good taste was important, and acquiring it was a battle. Your own record collection was your shield in that battle, your ability to curl a reproachful lip at the record collections of others was your sword, your grasp of rock history and its assorted factual ephemera your quiver of arrows. You needed to know which were the “correct” Velvet Underground albums to enjoy, which genres were strictly verboten, who played bass for Television, and how to listen to Captain Beefheart with a straight face.
I spent my teenage years saying my catechisms and steadily working my way through the classics. I built a healthy suspicion of catchy songs, or records that were not written by those who were singing them. I listened to Krautrock. I bought Mojo and took my monthly lessons on rock history. I absorbed pure, unrefined Rockism: the belief that there is a clear hierarchy to music, that there is a meaningful critical canon and that music is best understood via the medium of the written word. That songs are to be thought, not felt.
At the time, the snobbery was appealing. Like most teenagers, I was trying to figure out who I was, and what I meant. I wanted a world that was ordered, and readily understandable. And it felt good to think that my mates who had not served the same apprenticeship were a step behind, perhaps even defective.
There’s a scene in the immortal White Men Can’t Jump where Wesley Snipes explains to Woody Harrelson that he may very well “listen” to Jimi Hendrix, but he can’t “hear it”. “Y’all can’t hear Jimi…. You’re listening”. The perfect encapsulation of how I’d been trained to view this stuff: you might listen to Bob Dylan, but only I can actually hear it: because I have three (count ‘em) Clinton Heylin books on my shelf, and I know that the best version of Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright is on The Witmark Demos.
As with most false promises, the appeal eventually wore off. I grew up a little, and the bloom began its steady retreat from the rose. Difficult questions began to circle: were the troglodytes who listened to Oasis but not Suede having more fun that I was? Was I permitted to enjoy En Vogue? And why was I occasionally pretending to enjoy music I didn’t? Slowly but surely, Rockism’s cold, dead fingers were prised from my throat, and I began to listen with a gentler ear. The pressing question of “is this good” began to fade into the background, increasingly replaced by a new directive: “can I take anything from this”. Is it fun? Does it make me feel? Does it make me dance, or jump, or shout? Does it even matter if its garbage if I’m enjoying it? Is anyone even watching at all?
There were any number of records that helped me make this crossing. Songs that I would never have permitted to disgrace “the collection”, but in respect of which I could not shake a deep and guilty love, and which eventually pushed their way back to the fore. If I Could Turn Back Time. Set You Free. I Want It That Way. So much early Madonna. Spice Up Your Life. A thousand others. Leave (Get Out) by JoJo belongs squarely in this camp, and in some ways represents the archetypal song I could not bring myself to like.
I was in my early 20s when it released, still grappling with my own internalised Rockism. Let’s examine the components of the song: JoJo Leveque was 13 years old at the time of release (indeed, she’s still the youngest solo female artist to have a US number one). The song was written for her by Soulshock and Kenneth Karlin, who had done work in the past for Whitney Houston. The lyric detailed an incident from JoJo’s own fledgling romantic life: a tragic break up with a boyfriend who had thrown rocks at the geese when they’d gone for a walk together in the park. Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, this was not. And yet…
Leave is a legitimately brilliant Pop record. The strummed guitar loop, redolent of its moment (see also: Like I Love You), the off-beat cries of “who” and “why” which punctuate the end of lines, JoJo’s towering and melismatic vocal, and that absolute monster of a chorus. It’s a Motown record for an overwrought Primary School romance, sung by a literal child. And it slaps.
Hearing Leave for the first time was another moment for me. I loved the song immediately upon contact, but I could never have admitted it at the time, and that raised uncomfortable questions. Was I really going to go through the rest of my life engaged in this juvenile self-denial? For what purpose? Did anyone actually give a shit about my record collection? The dam was crumbling, and Leave took yet another enormous chunk out of it. Another huge step towards a life of gratifyingly terrible taste, of listening to whatever I want to because life is short and – jesus – who has time for all this utter nonsense.
A few months ago, I took down from the shelf my battered copy of Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, and leafed through it to Lester Bangs’ immortal eulogy to Elvis, written for The Village Voice in 1977. An article I’d read dozens of times, marvelling on each occasion at its seminal coda: “But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse; I will say good-bye to you.” I used to marvel at that writing; what a kiss off, what a glorious statement of cultural superiority. Reading it back in adulthood, it landed quite differently: what I once understood as style and bravado felt closer to intellectual insecurity and adolescent posturing. Really, Lester – who cares? Who cares what you like or don’t? And more specifically: who cares enough that you need to interrupt an obituary to bring your own tastes to the centre of discussion.
Some time shortly after Leave, I set about dismantling it all. I let go of the idea that Bob Dylan is a literal genius. I surrendered the notion that I actually knew anything about anything, or that it would even matter whether I did so or not. I opened my ears to other genres I’d dismissed, to artists I wouldn’t previously have been seen in the room with. These days, my record collection (such as it is) is somewhere up in the loft. I haven’t clapped eyes on it in a decade, and at some stage it will go to the tip and all those careful decisions I made – all those years of ostensible good taste – will go with it.
And as those records hit the compactor, it will be Leave that remains. A wonderful record that has brought huge joy to my life. I’ve played it at parties, I’ve sung along to it with mates, it’s been the soundtrack to happy afternoons at home. It’s a total sugar rush of virtually no real artistic merit and blessed with zero authenticity, except that all the merit and authenticity it will ever need is that it makes me happy. It’s shallow and daft and I bloody love it, because quite a lot of the time I’m shallow and daft too.
And that means I can write a list like this one, where I just honestly ask myself what are the 100 songs I like the most and then give my unfiltered answer, knowing that it really doesn’t matter, and that the only value of the exercise is in whatever fleeting enjoyment I may take from it. And that’s a liberation.
MC Escher says
Tune. Bob Dylan never wrote a song with a proper bridge in it like this has.
*misses entire point of review*
retropath2 says
Judas!
retropath2 says
Ink as a theology, discuss.
Bingo Little says
68. Cookie Jar – Mark Mulcahy
Every now and then in a life spent listening to music, a voice will come along that speaks to you so directly and immediately that you struggle to believe there was ever a time in your life when you’d not heard it. Often, that voice will be grand, and perhaps soulful. Sometimes, it will be a voice that sounds a little like your own, or the voice you imagine possessing in some other, frequently dreamed of life. Maybe it expresses something of yourself that you’ve otherwise struggled to articulate. But once you’ve heard it the first time, it never leaves you. For me, Mark Mulcahy has, thus far, proved to be that voice.
I first discovered Mulcahy via Uncut magazine, which gave an enthusiastic review to his 2001 sophomore outing, Smile Sunset. Mulcahy had a storied past as a member of Miracle Legion, an 80s college rock band out of New Haven Connecticut who drew early comparisons to R.E.M before sputtering out in comparative ignominy.
His second band, Polaris, achieved a sort of infamy in their recurring role as the house band for the early 90s cult classic Nickelodeon kids’ show “The Adventures of Pete & Pete”. The show provided TV exposure for a number of alternative acts of the period, including Luscious Jackson and The Magnetic Fields, but Miracle Legion enjoyed pride of place, and provided the Pete & Pete theme song: Hey Sandy, a gently careening number with the memorable opening couplet: “Hey smilin’ strange/you’re looking happily deranged”.
By the time of his solo career, Mulcahy had tapered away the college rock sound, moving towards slighter, prettier songs that often felt like demos, or parts of some larger work. A beautiful melody here, a striking lyric there. Lots of meandering and oblique imagery, but with no ambitions to real oomph, and all the better for it. Smile Sunset was an uneven record, but in its best moments (Resolution #1, I Just Shot Myself In The Foot Again) surprisingly touching, and the perfect showcase for the aspect that had grabbed me from the very first listen: Mulcahy’s voice.
I’d watched Pete & Pete a little as a kid, so perhaps the voice was familiar. Perhaps it reminded me of childhood in some way. But what struck me first was how unusually kind it sounded. A gentle voice, full of vulnerability but clear as a bell. Almost dainty. It sounded the way an interior monologue feels.
Intriguingly, as I explored further it became increasingly clear that Mulcahy’s entire career had been a kind of stripping back of elements to leave his vocals operating in near isolation. Take Love’s The Only Thing That Shuts Me Up, a mere 90 seconds long and with only the barest of keyboard lines for accompaniment. More a sketch than a song. Or any number of songs on Fathering, his debut album. Take Hey, Self Defeater, one of the warmest and most affirming songs I know, sung virtually acapella, with all the life breathed into it directly by the tenderness in the vocal.
Something in the voice was warm and familiar. It seemed to balance sorrow and hope like nothing else I’d ever heard, and the cryptic tendency in the lyrics meant that it felt virtually impossible to tell whether any single song was meant to be happy or sad. There was a depth at play that gave the feeling of a man opening a door to his bewildered inner self, and an unusual line of phrasing that rendered each performance distinct: take, for example, the cry of “I thought the case was closed/but now I see some doubt about your innocence” on Tempted; is this accusation? Remorse? Maybe both, and more besides.
In 2005, Mulcahy released the follow up to Smile Sunset, entitled In Pursuit Of Your Happiness. Another batch of pleasingly offbeat and occasionally half-baked tunes. And in amongst them all was Cookie Jar, a song that immediately won my heart and that I’ve been listening to in quiet happiness and contentment for nearly two decades now. A song that has been track 1 on half the mix tapes or playlists I’ve made in that period, and that has trotted by my side throughout like a loyal puppy, warming the cockles of my life.
Cookie Jar is my favourite Mulcahy vocal, and my favourite lyric too. It showcases all his boyish tenderness and grace, his disarmingly open heart. It’s gloriously slight and ephemeral, beautifully arranged and when I’m in its grip I feel the world’s a better place.
Even after all this time, I have absolutely no idea what the song’s about. There’s an odd lyrical through-line where it feels like Mulcahy is trying to work in as many of the contents of his kitchen cupboard as possible (macaroons, cookies, jelly, and marmalade all get a mention), a series of memorable couplets (“A lonely macaroon/inside your biscuit head”) and an off-kilter measure of critique and forgiveness, but not much in the way of clarity. And yet, as I listen to it, it makes a strange sense to me.
For reasons I might struggle to articulate, when I listen to Cookie Jar I hear a song about faltering friendship; about that moment where you realise your relationship with an old pal is crumbling away, and you’re wondering if they see it too (“I wonder if you know/I wonder if you’re bitter/and all that you consider/might marmalade your mind”). It’s about looking at someone you’ve loved forever, far longer than any romantic relationship, taking account of all of their faults and your own, and letting them go in peace. So sweetly lays the dream, in the cookie jar.
The song builds to a glorious denouement: an acknowledgement of the impasse (“what about the jam we’re in”), an acceptance of at least partial responsibility (“I kept my cookie jar/too high up on the shelf”) and then the most beautiful and soaring parting wish of peace and happiness (“here’s what I wish for you/here’s what you must do/preserve yourself/preserve yourself/preserve yourself”). Life has reached a cruel juncture; you’ll go this way, and I’ll go that, but I’ll love you forever and I want only good things for you.
Cookie Jar is this fragile, gorgeous nothing of a song with a handful of biscuit references on one side, and an iron fist waiting on the other. That “preserve yourself” and the odd scatting into which it degenerates gets me every time: what a beautiful sentiment, what a beautiful farewell.
When Cookie Jar first came out I played it often in the house share in which I was living with a dear old friend of mine. “What a beautiful little song that is” he exclaimed the first time he heard it. And now, 20 years later, it’s the song of our friendship – of a gentle drifting apart. No arguments, no acrimony, just two people who once helped make sense of one another’s lives now clearly borne along on two separate currents. So now when I listen to Cookie Jar I think of him, and that drifting friendship: all the love I feel towards him, all my hope that he finds peace and happiness wherever he’s swept along next, but the knowledge that our chapter is over, and that that’s OK too. So sweetly lays the dream. God, if that isn’t the truth.
Mark Mulcahy’s wife, Melissa Rich Mulcahy died unexpectedly in September 2008. She was 41 years old and left behind two daughters. Mark slowly withdrew from public life, performing a little less, recording ever more infrequently. The following year a tribute album was released, featuring covers of Mulcahy’s songs and with the clear intent of ensuring he remained solvent. As a cult favourite of the Alternative music world, contributors were not difficult to find: Thom Yorke, Frank Black, The National, Michael Stipe, Mercury Rev and Dinosaur Jr all appeared. Some of the covers were very good indeed, but none of them were sung as well as the originals.
While Mulcahy has continued to record, and still makes frequently beautiful records, the tribute album is in some ways the perfect capstone to his career: that strange, heady mix of kindness and vulnerability. When I listen to him, it reminds me of the first time I ever read Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. The sense that this is an individual in some spectacular disarray, a modicum of concern, but overwhelmingly a deep and abiding joy to find someone so apparently gentle at heart and able to convey that gentleness through their art. To celebrate that gentleness as it ought rightly to be celebrated.
Bingo Little says
67. Atlantis (I Need You) – LTJ Bukem
I can’t remember where I was when I first heard Drum & Bass. I guess it would have been in the form of Jungle, probably emanating from a passing car, or playing on the radio in a shop. The quintessential sound of young London in the early 90s, the drums of Breaktbeat Hardcore spilling over and fusing with rhythmic elements of Hip Hop and Dancehall and the bass of Dub and House music to create something simultaneously familiar and alien. Inviting and threatening.
Jungle felt unusual, in that it formed part of the day to day tapestry of urban life long before it crossed over and went mainstream. You heard it everywhere, but it was largely faceless and nameless, traded on cassettes in the playground rather than over the counter at Our Price. Simon Reynolds captured the spirit well, if a little clinically: “Britain’s very own equivalent to US Hip-Hop. You could equally make the case that Jungle is a raved-up, digitised offshoot of Jamaican reggae. Musically, Jungle’s spatialised production, bass quake pressure and battery of extreme sonic effects, make it a sort of postmodern Dub music on steroids.”
By 1993, the genre was starting to splinter. Raggacore and Jump Up emerged to place greater focus on, respectively the Reggae influence and the bassline. Drum & Bass developed with greater focus on the beats. By 1994, Jungle started to breach the mainstream, featuring in Touch & Fresh adverts and crossing over with actual chart hits (shout out to Original Nuttah and The Burial, still incredible moments for 90s kids). In the teenage mind, whether consciously or otherwise, it was time to move on, and in my case it was time to move on to Drum & Bass, the music which ate my life for most of the next 3 years.
Looking back, it’s not difficult to see what the appeal was. Drum & Bass boasted a versatility I’m not sure I’ve properly seen in any other branch of EDM; you could dance to it, it sounded fantastic on headphones, it worked for club nights, you could chill to it – hell, you could even think to it. It also boasted a series of headline acts who were more readily identifiable than their Jungle counterparts, and each of whom came with their own distinct style. The icy minimalism of Photek, the dirty basslines of Dillinja, the Jazz leanings of Peshay, the soulfulness of 4 Hero. It made immediate sense to me, and the potential felt limitless.
The artist to whom I most immediately gravitated was Goldie. He’d produced the first D&B record I ever heard (the immortal Terminator), and his run from 1992 to 1996 was largely peerless, one absolute classic after another, culminating in the magnum opus that was Timeless. Timeless was a big moment in my life: I listened to it endlessly, puzzled over its peculiar airlessness, bought into its classical aspirations. This was “Intelligent” Drum & Bass – it seemed to take inspiration from every popular form of Black music over the preceding 30 years, combine the elements and flatten them out into something that was as taut and reflective as clingfilm under tension. It took the Amen Break and constructed a 100 ft tall monolith around it. It was street music you could intellectualise as much as you wanted to.
I was old enough by that stage to venture down to club nights, and would spend many a happy hour on sweaty dancefloors blissing out to this new and exciting music. And that’s almost certainly where I heard LTJ Bukem for the first time, and had my mind blown.
Bukem’s brand of D&B, so memorably immortalised in the Logical Progression compilation series, felt different from the off. It was Jazzier, more ambient than what had gone previously; the areas between beats and bass full of strange and unusual sounds. There was a spaciness, a tripiness I hadn’t heard previously, and it made for an energy I’d never experienced. Listening to Bukem was probably the first time I ever stood in a crowd of people and felt the music properly wash over me, took it in like it was part of me. Those dancefloors felt astral, simultaneously calm and emotional all at once. You went home exhausted and full of peace.
The original Logical Progression compilation was a huge eye opener when it arrived, capturing all that magic and preserving it forever. But it was the second outing that took things to another level; not so much because the tracks were any stronger, but because it came with a separate mix CD: every tune on the comp, with MC Conrad chatting over the top of them. MC Conrad, with that deep, biblical voice, your tour guide through the heavens. I listened to that mix CD until I practically wore it out – it was my perpetual soundtrack all throughout 1997, to the point where every beat, every bassline, every strangely ambient soundscape, became ingrained on my soul.
Logical Progression 2 was the apex of my Drum & Bass years, and the high point of the odd feeling of calm this music brings to me when at its best. The sense of a high energy momentarily frozen in motion somewhere up in the stratosphere, full of kinetic potential and yet completely at rest. It also reminds me of a seminal period in my life; the last few months of secondary school. Seven years waiting to escape, the end in sight and the growing feeling that no one could touch me, that I was going to get out scott free, escape that dingy, backwards little town and move on to better things. Logical Progression 2 felt limitless. I felt limitless.
The song I’ve chosen for this list is Atlantis. Partly because the hardness of the beat forms a neat bridge back to those early Jungle years, partly because I absolutely love the soundbed it runs on. The opening harps, the looped bleepings, the chamber orchestra vibes, and then that glorious sampled vocal: I need you, I want you. Atlantis was gothic – it reminded me of the Wu Tang and it showed me again that this music could go anywhere it wanted.
My abiding memory of this song is being 18 years old, sat on my bed revising for my A-levels, sun streaming through the windows, Logical Progression 2 on the stereo. Somewhere in the haze of revision, I nodded off and slipped into a brief and incredibly vivid dream, the precise details of which remain with me to this day.
A large group of us were outside a vast cathedral that seemed to extend up endlessly into the sky, imposing and yet serene. Music began to play and we sprinted inside, pounding through the building’s corridors, in search of something, crashing into walls, desperate to reach our goal. Eventually, we arrived in a vast open space, the cathedral’s nave, and before us on a raised podium stood a hooded man behind two sets of decks. We ran towards him, but the music abruptly stopped, freezing us in our tracks. We looked up again at the hooded figure. There was total silence, and in that silence we could hear the wind, and the sound of tree branches rustling, and it became apparent that there was an almighty crack in the building separating him from us: a chasm running along the floor, up the walls and cross the ceiling, as if the cathedral had been sliced open. And in that silence, in that chasm, it began to rain heavily – a wall of water suddenly separating us from the musician. The sound of rain hitting soil.
I woke with a start at that point to find Atlantis playing out. My dream had somehow coincided completely with the song on the stereo – the only time in my life anything of that kind has ever happened. The period outside the cathedral had been the song’s opening, the running through the corridors had been in time to its breakbeats, and the period of silence and rain had been aligned with the moment around five and a half minutes in when Atlantis goes completely silent. I had effectively dreamt a music video. It spooked me at the time, and I think about it whenever I listen to Atlantis, all the imagery remains with me. I can feel myself in that cathedral.
MC Conrad died the same week I’m writing this, a mere 52 years old. With him went a slice of my adolescence, because in that period there is arguably no one whose voice resonated with me harder or longer than that of Conrad. I was lucky enough to hear him perform live a couple of times, and his mastery of the crowd, his instinct for where we should go next, his skill in lifting the entire room, were just incomparable. In as much as any musicians have ever helped bring peace to my soul, it is Conrad and LTJ Bukem to whom I owe that debt, and I know I will continue to treasure their records for as long as I have ears with which to listen.