Scottish band Del Amitri’s career can be best described as the consolidation of the success of their 1989 break-through single ‘Nothing Ever Happens’. Each successive album opened up their music to a moderately wider audience, culminating in an impressive US Top 10 chart position for single ‘Roll To Me’, achieved seemingly without effort in 1995, a time when British Bands found it notoriously hard to gain a foothold in that territory.

Then, in 1997 they released the album ‘Some Other Sucker’s Parade’ and… killed off their career.

However, Some Other Sucker’s Parade’ (SOSP hereafter) is Del Amitri’s finest album to date and the only truly great album they ever made.

Their previous long players, while undeniably accomplished, were generally rather immature and uneven affairs, especially compared to SOSP. They contained admittedly many highlights, but seemed strained, even contrived as a whole, as if the matter had been given just too much thought.

This strain can be attributed to self-consciousness, specifically: a constant awareness of their own extreme idiosyncrasy: they never managed to lose sight of the fact that they were attempting to do something extraordinary. I mean, seriously: how did a Scottish country rock band manage to score even one hit in the Nineties anyway, let alone a whole handful?

The continued success of Radiohead in particular (their polar opposites as regards aesthetic standards) must have been a constant source of worry for them. How did Radiohead, as well as Oasis and Blur, manage to have more successful careers with songs not half as good, they must have asked themselves. What are we overlooking? – Rather than blocking out their surroundings and creating music honestly, Del Amitri seemed sometimes too concerned with ensuring the wool remain pulled over the press and public’s eyes. Can you blame them?

The success of ‘Roll To Me’ must have come as a great relief. One would imagine they set to work on their next album with renewed confidence in the validity of their endeavour. And perhaps they really did. The ensuing work can be interpreted as a point for point refutation of the Radiohead ethos, rather than the work of a good band, capable of writing good songs, trying desperately to poach fans from more successful contemporaries.

Indeed, while they show themselves masters of everything at which Radiohead are hopelessly inept (writing, arranging and performing songs,) they demonstratively show disdain for everything at which Radiohead excel. What to make of that cover, for starters: Justin and Iain (founder members) look like a pair of homeless drunks. Iain in particular pushes hobo chic onto a whole new level. (As the Beach Boys also discovered to their mortification when they had themselves photographed feeding goats on the cover of ‘Pet Sounds’, the public does not habitually recognise masterpieces by their lack of glamour.) Besides this, the album sounds as if it was recorded live using only one microphone. It always makes me laugh to see a mixing engineer in the credit list. What did he do: push up the fader?

On SOSP, Del Amitri were finally playing to their strengths. They had reached the stage where they could comfortably write and perform 14 songs of similar scope and magnitude. And while there is nothing on SOSP so sublime as ‘Roll To Me’ (surely: the last ever great pop song), there is among the 14 songs not a single dud.

Justin inhabits throughout a role with which he is comfortable. He was, during their successful period, certainly the photogenic type, but had no real taste for cultivating his personality into marketable proportions, preferring instead to act onstage and in videos like an awkward goofball, charming, but ultimately too aloof for the masses. The unnerving sense, marring previous albums, that he is forcing himself to keep one eye on the kids and making the odd token concession is absent from SOSP, the lyrics expressing at all times only a mature and melancholy Romantic resignation.

Iain Harvie makes no further attempts to be a cutting edge guitar hero (something which he had tried with varying degrees of success on the previous album ‘Twisted’,) and instead remains stunningly tasteful and appropriate for the duration. The whole thing just sounds…well: relaxed.

Perhaps they were just too tired to continue competing with the likes of Radiohead, and decided simply to make a good record, without regard for fashion or trend. If the success of ‘Roll To Me’ is anything to go by, they must have reasoned, we might get lucky. They had not taken into account the measureless spite and bile that publications such as the execrable NME can muster for rock bands that achieve success without their sanction and for anything that can all too easily be recognised as a Radiohead anti-dote. When Del Amitri performed the first single from SOSP, ‘Not Where It’s At’, on TOTP, their performance involved jumping around and laughing.

Perhaps SOSP was from the start conceived as a suicide attempt. Perhaps the very title ‘Some Other Sucker’s Parade’ represented an admission of defeat, calling time on a career that had largely run its course anyway, and abandoning the field to some other sucker, but leaving future Radiohead clones with one last untouchable blueprint for excellence, a magnificent last hurrah for a dying tendency. For make no mistake: when ‘Some Other Sucker’s Parade’ flopped, what essentially failed to connect with an audience was - Britain's last great songwriter.

I don’t have my finger on
The pulse of my generation
I just got my hand on my heart
Know no better location

From: ‘Not Where It’s At’, lyrics by Justin Currie.

A few more stray thoughts on the discussion that was held here.

In my early teens, I was deeply engrossed in bands like Foetus, Einsturzende Neubauten, Throbbing Gristle, Test Dept etc, when a friend played me the album ‘Cupid and Psyche 85’ by Sritti Politti and I found myself to my own surprise (if not to say mortification,) to be instantly hooked. Listening to it for the next few months the album’s deeper layers behind its whimsical, sugary pop exterior became slowly apparent to me. It was a master class in subversion, so I thought. Nowadays I know that it always pays to keep an open mind when an artist dons a cloak made of throwaway, whimsical, cheesy or melodramatic fabric: the youtube tags for Scritti’s song ‘Hypnotise’ include the words ‘Jacques’ and ‘Derrida’; their song ‘Oh Patty’ has a trumpet solo by Miles Davis, who himself asked to play on the record; he further endorsed them by covering their ‘Perfect Way’ (from ‘Cupid and Psyche 85’) on one of his own albums.

My taste tends towards pop with underground sensibilities. However, pop that refuses to admit it is pop, such as Radiohead – as I said: nothing but scorn. Watch the video for ‘Oh Patty’. Does anyone think, in light of the song, that Miles Davis would ever have endorsed Radiohead as the supremely relevant, avant-garde artists that half the music-listening world supposes them to be?

I posted some more comments on Andrew Dubber's excellent website www.newmusicstrategies.com, one of which is reprinted for your perusal below. Well, they were asking for it, were they not?

Aqua yes, Radiohead no

The genius of Radiohead lies in their ability to market their mainstream music as underground art. They are the Starbucks of the underground. They target music lovers who have never been able to get their heads round truly underground sounds and provide them with the opportunity to categorise themselves with the cool crowd. In analogy to this, people go into Starbucks and pay three pounds for a ‘latte’ so that they can feel middle-class. Now they drink ‘caffe latte’ instead of ‘milky coffee’ down the café. Both Radiohead and Starbucks are aspirational. The reason for their success is clever marketing. Art has as little to do with Radiohead as it has to do with Starbucks.

Many people, whether they are willing to admit to it or not, are today of the opinion that pop is rubbish. The open, as well as covert, snobbery in this blog alone is palpable. The irony is that nowadays Radiohead are infinitely more pop than Aqua. Everyone on this blog keeps asking where Aqua are now and proudly stating that Radiohead are one of the biggest bands in the world. It is the type of music that Aqua make (apparent bubble gum with a deeply disturbing and dark undercurrent) that is no longer understood by a mass audience, i.e. Radiohead fans. It is Aqua that requires repeat listens, a sophisticated sense of humour and an informed view of popular culture. Indie Rock, as it is played and propagated by Radiohead, appeals to the masses. Aqua is for the enlightened few.

Aqua is the new underground.

Of course, once a person has made the transition from milky coffee to cafe latte, he naturally distances himself from his former unenlightened ways. The more recent the switch, the more hysterical the denial. Radiohead is a brand, and one cannot pour sufficient scorn on people who, because they listen to said brand, think they are serious music lovers: you are being had. Just drink ya milky coffee, 90p from your nearest cafe.

Also, I must insist: over your next cup of latte, would you please give consideration to this question: what is fake plastic?

In response to a blog over at www.newmusicstrategies.com I innocently typed in the sentence:

In case anyone is still in doubt as to the confusion that is rife with regards to aesthetic standards: there is no doubt in my mind that the cultural significance of Aqua far outweighs that of Radiohead.

A debate opened up in which the following is a contribution of mine. It explains my position in the concisest way I could manage on such a profound subject:

Cultural Significance

‘Barbie Girl’ by Aqua is a remarkable pop masterpiece. Its immediate tradition can be traced back through Pixar, Abba, Disney, ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ all the way to Lewis Carol’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’. The thing these artistic expressions have in common is that they appear to be harmless fun for kids, whilst carrying a profound, highly subversive, adult message. It is this ambiguity that lends them their aesthetic power, their cultural significance. It is in any case only the symbolic aspect of a work of art that truly resonates with audiences: not the real people in the narrative, but the archetypes they represent.

Barbie is furthermore in the mainline of Western femme fatales of the fluid, malleable kind, such as Hitchcock’s Marnie and Carlotta Valdes, from ‘Marnie’ and ‘Vertigo’ respectively, Eliza Dolittle from ‘My Fair Lady’ (and by extension: Shaw’s as well as Ovid’s ‘Pygmalion’,) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Christine, from ‘Phantom of the Opera’, even the Marquis de Sade’s Eugenie and my own Rhiannon from ‘Ridinghood’, all heroines whose ‘owners’, in a sense, create them: dress them, make them sit up, sing, dance, speak properly etc, in short: treat them like dolls. The owners always pay for their authorship with their souls. In that sense finally, Barbie is Robert Graves’s ‘White Goddess’ and Coleridge’s ‘Nightmare Life in Death’, dicing with Death for the soul of Ken. She contributes to an ancient tradition whose cultural significance will endure for millennia to come: she is archetypal.

Thom Yorke is a geek (creep) and while there is a flimsy case to be made that the modern figure of the ‘smart but disintegrated youth’ is taking on archetypal proportions, Thom Yorke does not represent him, he is him. Thom Yorke represents nothing. Even the Beatles understood the importance of inhabiting a role and promptly turned themselves into a cheesy cabaret act called Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the silliness of which might even rival that of Aqua’s ‘Barbie’. Aqua are more Beatle-esque than Radiohead, for there is no art in Radiohead.

It may have been misleading to state in my previous post that the cultural significance of Aqua outweighs that of Radiohead. From a historical perspective (the only relevant one in aesthetic matters) Radiohead are not culturally significant at all. I cannot denigrate Radiohead’s collective achievement as businessmen: they make a lot of money. However, to grant them cultural significance on account of the fact that millions of people buy their albums is ludicrous. To say it again: there is no art in Radiohead, they contribute to no vibrant ancient tradition; they can achieve exactly nothing on a cultural level.

Long after Radiohead will be mercifully forgotten, poets will still be invoking the eternal Goddess, singing songs in her honour, keeping alive the legacy of the ancient muse, who, for the shortest moment, thanks to the magnificent Aqua, came in our time to look a little like Barbie.

One last thing: What is fake plastic?

Here, There and Everywhere

‘Here, There and Everywhere’ is in every sense a more ambitious song than ‘You Can’t Do That’. ‘You Can’t Do That’ is a fairly straightforward rocker with a limited melodic range, simple chords and an awesome, slightly Latin groove, courtesy of the best drummer in the world: Ringo Starr. The simple fill he plays just before each time John sings: “O, you can’t do that,” is one of the songs main hooks. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it symbolizes the singer’s right hook: At the precise moment when John sings: “Because I told you before,” Ringo’s percussion mimics the sound of a man’s fists knocking a woman to the floor.

‘Here, There and Everywhere’ is ostensibly a different kettle of fish. It is a rather more complex composition with a number of elegant melodic surprises. McCartney himself has often referred to it as his finest effort.

Lyrically, however, the two songs cover the same territory.

You Can’t Do That

In ‘You Can’t Do That’, we encounter the couple of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ a little further down the line. The woman has fallen foul of the man’s strict boundaries, as, one senses, she was bound to do, and the man’s possessiveness, which was dormant in the latter song, is now on the surface, causing a strain on the relationship. The song opens with: “I’ve got something to say that might cause you pain.” Even more unequivocally than in the opening line of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, we feel, mainly through the use of the word ‘pain’, that the woman is about to receive a black eye, rather than a mere telling-off.

The woman has transgressed: she has let go of her man’s hand (broken the chain) and gone to talk to another man. She knew it was against the rules: “Because I told you before, you can’t do that,” and it is, in any case, already the second time it has happened: “Well, it’s the second time I caught you talking to him.” The black eye from the first time will no doubt barely have healed. The line: “I think I’ll let you down and leave you flat,” despite indicating the man’s intention to escape, has distinctly hostile and aggressive undertones. Personally, I am always tempted to sing: “I think I’ll beat you down and lay you flat.” In any case, it sounds to me more like a threat than an admission of defeat.

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Accidental objectivity

Objectivity is now in such disrepute that its occurrences in modern songwriting are largely accidental. The only example of deliberate objectivity can be found in Brian Wilson’s decision to use his younger brother Dennis’s experience of teenage life in California as the central concept for his band. Brian named his group ‘The Beach Boys’ and single-handedly created the soundtrack to the California experience as a consequence of his astute observation of his fun-loving, original surfer-dude brother.

However, whereas Brian carefully chose his perspective, other songwriters are sometimes forced into a similarly high level of conceptuality by mere virtue of being in a band. As a band member, i.e. part of a rather insular unit, a songwriter might be forgiven for unknowingly colouring his songs with what he observes of his fellow band members’ behaviour. Many of the greatest bands have within their ranks one member who embodies the spirit of the band, and another who is able (however unintentionally) to give artistic expression to that spirit. The former lives the band, while the latter conceptualises the band.

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Subjective versus objective

Some songwriters succeed for a while in lending weight to their subjective musings through the power of their music, as in the case of Stevie Wonder. In the early Seventies, he began writing songs from the point of view of a blind, black man (something which he had managed to resist throughout the Sixties) and consequently became very short sighted. Stevie has said in interviews that he likes to write a song while still feeling the emotion that the song is meant to express, so as to make it easier to achieve the right musical mood, or something. Whatever: this is the primary conceit of subjectivity: a subjective artist will take his heartache (for instance) and try to write a song about it right there and then, without regard for thousands of years of poetical tradition. Starting from scratch in such a way might strike one as rather arrogant, if it were not rather palpably indicative of deep insecurity: by setting a personal experience to music, a subjective songwriter means to convince us of the profundity of his emotional response. He (ab)uses music to give credence to his feelings, as if to say: “My personal experience engendered this beautiful (sad, angry, depressed, violent) musical mood. How profound my feelings are!” The modern songwriter is a vain man. Who is he trying to kid: surely everyone knows that you have to be an emotional cripple to be a songwriter.

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The subjective pop artist

Indeed: queried on the subject, contemporary songwriters freely admit to writing from personal experience. One would think subjectivity were a kind of artistic valediction, the way artists from all genres fall over themselves to cite their own life as their inspiration. Even modern songwriters’ strained insistence on the importance of originality does not prevent them from echoing each other over and over on this issue. It is of course rather hard to resist making precisely this answer since in effect it constitutes an easy boast: my life is sufficiently eventful and the events are sufficiently extraordinary to feed my creativity. The fact that songwriters now regard it pretty much as their duty to point to their lives when asked about their aesthetics is yet another indication of our age’s artistic poverty.

Songwriters who write from personal experience find themselves, as their career progresses, writing either increasingly socio-political, or increasingly obscure songs, the latter, no doubt, because personal experiences tend to be a little boring and benefit hugely from a vague rendering. You can identify artists who allow subjectivity to impact upon their art by the increasingly long intervals between their successive albums. I’m not kidding: they have to wait for interesting events to take place in their lives before they can write.

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Dessert-island discs

Songs are extremely suited to being put in a meaningful sequence centred on a single idea. It is nigh-on impossible to find a set of songs that would not gain in aesthetic significance merely by virtue of being put on the same album together: The whole will always miraculously outstrip in meaning the sum of its parts. Audiences have been conditioned through centuries of opera and musicals to listen out for a uniting principle in even the most seemingly random of song collections.

When compiling a list of ‘dessert-island discs’ one ought, as indicated by the term, rightly to give no thought to the world at large. However even if the list is not meant for broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s eponymous programme, most of us will keep the world firmly in mind and attempt with a witty and surprising choice of, by turns, wonderfully sensitive and noisily alienating music to demonstrate the profundity of our character. Who can resist impressing even an imaginary audience? Anyone who has ever gone on actually to make a tape or CD of such a compilation will undoubtedly have been struck by the significance of the play-list as a whole. Listening to it years later, one might find the mood of a particular phase of one’s life perfectly captured.

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