So here it finally is - THAT review. "These are the ten best songs Salvador Dali never wrote". Genius stuff. And check out the advert for the same LP in the following week's issue too.
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This photograph was sent to the Win webpage on MySpace by David Motion, and shows himself and Davey Henderson. He added the following descriptive and cryptic comment : "Davy and me while we were doing some co-writes post-Win. There is a broken chair involved". The 'post-Win' comment is an interesting one, in that (assuming that he didn't mean 'post-the-1st-album', as it was Zeus B Held that produced the second and final Win album) he might be refering to either the aborted third Win album or the Davey Henderson solo album.
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The following are some excerpts from an interview with the band in the NME dated 16th of March 1985, and give a possible clue as to how the band got together in the first place. However, this is completely at odds with another quote (whose origin I can't be sure of; it may have been Brian Hogg's book on Scottish music), which has it :
"Contrary to popular belief, Win did not form to provide the music to a play called "Confessions of a Justified Striker", having been in existence for several months before that". If I ever work out which statement is true, I'll alter this accordingly. Anyways, here's the NME excerpt :
Win were formed in May 1984 to perform the soundtrack to a political play "Confessions of a justified striker" that was to be premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in the autumn. The band spent 4 months working on songs for this play. Davey Henderson says : "We were confident enough not to need to rush things. Apart from the play we had no intention of playing live. There was a kind of pressure to come up with something absolutely brilliant because of what had gone before, but we weren't paranoid in the slightest".
The Confessions play made its debut in Edinburgh in August, moving south in October to complete three weeks on the London fringe circuit with Win providing a live soundtrack in the theatres. A directly political piece with a strong socialist bias, the play uses music, dialogue and a slide show to examine graphically the relationship between worker and boss. Proceeds went straight into the miners' strike fund. The play is not a new one, having first been presented in Scotland five years ago under the alternate title "Why doesn't the pope come to Glasgow?". The wording was changed in 1981 when His Holiness did finally set foot on Scottish soil. The musical accompaniment - to the original play, not the The Pope's visit - was then provided by none other than the Fire Engines.
On the Fire Engines politics, Russel Burn says : "We were never into wearing badges or making radical statements just for the sake of it. But we've always been involved in things like the play. When it was first done in the late 70s it was very bleak and heavy. Now that's been updated, it doesn't take such a gloomy view. It's more a celebration of the working classes. This time around its lighter and more humorous in the same way that our Win songs are brighter and more accessible than the Fire Engines. But the play is also a lot more relevant now in that it coincides with such an important strike".
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Life has its mysteries so it does. Will the Palestine issue ever be settled peacefully? How did Rowland Rivron end up with the career he has? If Catholic priests are not allowed to have children then why do biologists say we are all descended from Primates? The problemo that's occupied me today is hardly one worth keeping Edward De Bono up till the wee hours, hell its not even the intellectual equivalent of the Daz Doorstep Challenge, but its nevertheless one that I'd like answering : on the back of the Freaky Trigger album, which geezer is Simon Smeeton and which is Will Perry? The identification of the Holy Trinity of Henderson, Stoddart, and Burns is easy enough, as is that of Manny S, but t'other two? I've yet to come across any photographs from the music press that pick out which is which. Any of you lot that could help me out in this regard? I thought I was onto a winner when I first read the sleeve liner of the Saint Jack album, but trying to pick out the Smeester from that line-up of miscreants* by comparing the various mugshots with the reverse of the Freaky Trigger album proved impossible. The hombre sitting on Davey's left on the Freaky Trigger reverse bears a small resemblence to one of the NN9 members. And the chap on Davey's right in the Coca-Cola T-shirt sports a very 80s Scottish haircut, not too disimiliar to the I sported back in the day - you could imagine him playing rythym guitar in Texas or summat - whoever it is, I bet when he hits 60 he'll look like Paulie Walnuts off the Sopranos!**
* seriously, have you ever seen such a bunch of stone cold characters in all your puff?! Now, there's certain groups that pride themselves on their hardness - Oasis and specifically monobrowed and fellow plastic paddy Liam G have commented on their enjoyment of the odd tussle; INXS have boasted of honing their pugilistic prowess playing in all manner of Ocker boozers from Perth to Alice Springs; I've read on a few occasions that UB40 were not characters whose pints you should ever spill - but I'd give poor odds of any of these outfits in a dust-up with the 9! In fact, I've had to revise my list of social groups to avoid crossing at all costs :
1. Roofers
2. Scaffolders
3. The Nectarine Number 9
4. Glaswegians
5. Dockers
** There was a great line on the Sopranos t'other week. Talking about a rival mobster's portly missus, Paulie offers up the gem : "She's so fat, when she goes into the forest, the bears hide their food!"
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This was the semi-famous question put to Simple Minds when they offered up the master tapes for their second album to Arista Records way back when in 1979 (the year that Thatcher was summoned from the ninth circle of Hades for a stint in No.10). The first record "Life In A Day" had sold not a few copies and had included a minor league hit with the single "Chelsea Girl". So imagine Arista's surprise when the followup didn't plough a similar accessible furrow to the sophomore effort but rather took its cue from the polyrythmic noodling of esoteric Krautrock and the bang and the clatter of industrial music. "Reel To Real Cacophony" was dark and very very impenetrable, hence the titular question above from Arista's marketing manager.
A very similar interrogation has often been voiced by afficionados of Win since 1991 when they've discovered that former Fire Engine and Win frontman Davey Henderson had formed a new oufit named the Nectarine No.9. Maybe such an experience was luckily with the relatively immediate "C*** (Sea With Three Stars)" at the beginning of it all, or maybe somewhat unfortunately with the "Real To Real Cacophony" equivalency of "Saint Jack". Either way, usually by the end of respectively "Chocolate Swastika" and "Tape Your head On", the same Q is offered up to no-one in particular : "Jesus Jones, it ain't very Winny. Where's the fecking "You've Got The Power"?!"
But fans of Henderson's 80s lineup shouldn't be dismissive of his subsequent group. The humour's still there - the ice cream van presaging "Pop's Young Thing" is in the same tradition of the Speak And Spell on "Unamerican Broadcasting", and the chorus of "Hanging Around (Oct. 1903)" starts off like a Daily Mail headline before pulling it back together. "The End Of Definition" and "Couldn't Phone Potatoes" are as poppy and joyous as anything on "Freaky Trigger", and the former would finely soundtrack any scene from a Tarantino movie that involved some postmodern rug-cuttage. "I Love Total Destruction" is a glossalic Beefheartian take on Ian Dury's chart-topping "Reasons To Be Cheerful Part 3", with the '... smile of a parrot, the juice of a carrot, a little drop of claret' replaced with 'sunstops with doorstops ....... I'm a soldier of love'. And then there's the psychotic gonzo poetry of Jock Scott, which is beamed in from another planet altogether. S'all groovy, so it is.
I was surprised to discover out of the 5000 tracks on my iPod the second most listened to album after "Uh! Tears Baby (A Trash Icon)" was not "Lexicon Of Love", "New Gold Dream", nor "Low", but was actually the last 9 outing of "I Love Total Destruction". Best enjoyed after a couple of bottles of brew, its fuzzy, funky and yet strangely melodic in a way that previous N9 efforts haven't been. The Nine are like the Fall - you have to persevere with their work, giving each track a few listens, maybe even being repulsed by some of 'em, but at some point it will just click and you'll have the same Saulian epiphany as I did halfway through "The End Of Definition" when it just hit me that I was singing along with the chorus - "I get my info in pencil, baby!" - and thinking, crikey Charlie, this is brilliant.
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A random thought occured to me a while back of the numerous similarities between "Uh! Tears Baby (A Trash Icon)" and ABC's 1982 classic album "The Lexicon Of Love". Both used the trappings of pop - anthemic choruses, glossy production values and the like - to sneak subversive lyrics onto the music systems of the great unwashed. In ABC's case, this was underpinning tracks such as "Poison Arrow" and "Valentines Day" with ruminations of heartbreak and loss at odds with the shiny sheen of Trevor Horn's production, as well as the damning indicement of Thatcher's Britain in "4 Ever 2 Gether" (a title apparently clocked as graffiti by vocalist Martin Fry).
Both albums also had four singles taken off them (Fry once commenting that "Date Stamp" was very nearly issued as a fifth, and you could argue that "Hollywood Baby" was also strong enough to have been released too), and in both cases the first single ("Unamerican Broadcasting" and "Tears Are Not Enough") were rerecorded for the final album and were all the better for it. Both efforts also included a reprise of another track on the album - "Charms Of Powerful Trouble" and "The Look Of Love".
One interesting factoid that has stuck with me down the year's is that "Lexicon Of Love" is the only album in history to get to number 1 on the album charts and share it jointly with another exactomundo equally-selling title. And the other album was ...... ? The soundtrack to the film Fame.