Jackie DeShannon was one of the first key female singer-songwriters and amongst the Beatles covers she made some great records. However, by 1972 her style was getting a little glitzy and a little pat and her self-titled album from that year is something of a disappointment. There are some decent covers of songs by, amongst others, John Prine, Van Morrison and Neil Young, but it's DeShannon's four originals that are the most interesting songs here. It's all a little controlled and a little flat and as a result it isn't as engaging an album as it could or should be with the material on it. Going back a bit, the brief compilation album Classic Masters (2002) covers the singles that she released between 1963 and 1970 and there is some wonderful stuff here. It basically covers the biggest hits that she had in that period and it is woefully short of material that would give a proper overview of just how wide-ranging her approach and how wonderful her voice was. Nonetheless the 12 songs included are all top-notch. Her versions of 'Needles and Pins', and unexpectedly the Band's 'The Weight' are great but it's her Bacharach & David songs that are the definitive versions. 'What the World Needs Now is Love', 'Come and Get Me' and 'A Lifetime of Loneliness' are simply wonderful. The real glory though is in DeShannon's talent as a songwriter which was shown in this early material - 'When You Walk in the Room', 'Put a Little Love in Your Heart' and 'Love Will Find a Way' are truly classics of 60's pop music.
Can anybody explain to me why I thought that Destiny's Child were anything other than abject garbage? Whatever the reason, listening to The Writing's On the Wall (2000) helps only to further prove that most pop music is shit, even half decent pop music. I suppose I quite liked the big singles 'Jumpin Jumpin' and 'Say My Name' but it turns out they're appalling. I mean, this is a terrible album and it's one that demonstrates how easy it is to be wrong footed by pop and also what a remarkably short lifespan most of it has. The Writing's On the Wall sounds terrible: tinny, sharp and processed to the nth degree. Hollow and vacuous both musically and intellectually, it's utterly bereft of charm, grace or style and it's a mystery what it's doing in my collection. And the damn thing goes on for almost an hour and a half. Oh, and incidentally, if the lyrics to '8 Days of Christmas' aren't the most egregiously offensive ever written then I'll be most surprised.
Belgian indie outfit dEUS have had their moments over the years and early single 'Via' (1994) is a good example. It and B-side 'Violins and Happy Endings' are both decent bits of slightly dated lively and angular indie rock but which point towards more than simply Pavement rip-offs. A single from a couple of years later, 'Little Arithmetics' (1996) shows just how quickly the band were developing. A delicate and graceful, unshowy and charmingly low-key song, 'Little Arithmetics' is leagues ahead of what many indie rock bands were capable of at this point. The other three songs included are not as good by any means, but they are a decent bunch of indie B-sides. There's a big gap then to the only dEUS album I've got, which is 2008's Vantage Point. Vantage Point is interesting in that it highlights that weird disjunction between UK, American and European indie music. There's something that feels faintly naff in even the best European indie rock and it's hard to define exactly what it is, but I think it's mostly in the minds of a UK audience. Vantage Point is a great album, pretty much every song is a brilliant example of how a fairly typically 90's indie band should have developed into the 2000's but there's still something that feels not quite right. It may simply be that the production concentrates just slightly too heavily on keyboards and noises to let the songs really breathe, but whatever, it's all minor quibbles because Vantage Point really is a fine record. It's bold and alive to the fact that you don't need to compromise just because you've been at it forever (a lesson REM would have been wise to have learned for instance) and there are some interesting guest spots from Karin Deijer Andersson and Guy Garvey (who has been something of an evangelist for dEUS for some years now), and in 'Smokers Reflect' it has the song that shit bands like Coldplay and Keane have been trying and utterly failing to write for years, a great work that demonstrates that writing and playing "emotional" songs involves so much more than pretending.
DRRRRRRR, it's Kevin Rowland his Dexy's Midnight Runners, starting with the superb Searching for the Young Soul Rebels (1980). What a great record, eh? This is the stuff. If punk was to have any valuable legacy, it was that people could try out all kinds of stuff without having to fear failure, and one of the earliest bands to benefit was northern soul revivalists Dexy's. A bizarre and unpredictable amalgam of punk, soul, old-fashioned R&B and white soul, Dexy's were an absolute tour de force, an unstoppable ball of confidence and unshakeable self-belief. Searching for the Young Soul Rebels is a bold and unapologetic record with an old-fashioned sound delivered in a new ideology and with it's formalist arrangements and horn section, allied with Rowland's fantastic songs, it's one of the iconic and key albums of the early 1980's. It may have the smash hit 'Geno' but there's so much more going on here, from the swooning 'Keep It' to the propulsive 'Tell Me When My Light Turns Green', it's all great.
True to his notoriously whimsical nature, Rowland sacked pretty much the whole band and recruited a new outfit and designed a whole new look for follow-up album Too-Rye-Ay (1982). In many ways it's a better album, and the addition of a kind of mythological folkishness (those dungarees!) to the soul and R&B foundation creates a kind of new kind of neverland Englishness. The songs are fantastic, from the obvious ('Come on Eileen') to the less so ('Let's Make This Precious', 'Liars A to E'), and the whole album feels bright and alive, and absolutely bursting with an almost arrogant self-confidence. Rowland's transparent debt to Van Morrison is repaid with a legendary cover of 'Jackie Wilson Said' (we all remember the superb edition of Top of the Pops when Dexy's performed the song with a huge picture of darts player Jocky Wilson in the background). But as Rowland was so determined to make clear, the whole album is all about rising above influences and creating an almost self-contained mythology, and for the second time in three years, he completely succeeded.
By the time it came to record third album Don't Stand Me Down (1985) the band was reduced to essentially Rowland and two other members of the Too-Rye-Ay line-up. Once again, there was a wholesale change of image and style. The look was suits and neat hair, the sound was a very staid and sanitised version of the folk/soul of Too-Rye-Ay. That's not to say that Don't Stand Me Down is a bad record, it's far from it, but it's a very different proposition to what had gone before. This isn't lively, livewire stuff, this is endless hours in the recording studio pinning down perfection and losing the exuberance as a result. It's a very clean record, a very considered and orederly one, but it's a grower. The songs may unwind themselves over the course of ten minutes or so on occasion and first listen might leave you wondering where the melodies went, but repeated listens reveals a fantastically well structured and written album and if you approach it in more "adult" terms than the earlier album, it's very rewarding indeed. The public in 1985 weren't having it though, it bombed and that was the end for Dexy's. (Incidentally, listen out for 'One of Those Things''s ironic riffing on Warren Zevon's iconic piano motif from 'Werewolves of London'.)
Another curse of being born in 1973, Neil Diamond's soundtrack to the terrible movie of the terrible book Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which is his usual overblown nonsense, but this time with added pretentious pomposity thanks to the ghastly post-hippy crap of the book. It's awful. There's nothing else I need to say. Now, I know that sticking it to the Diamond won't go down well with my lovely friend Vicky, but I cannot understand the rennaisance of the man, which occurred in 2005 with the release of his 12 Songs album. It's just more of the same singer-songwriter come music hall barker by way of second rate street poet that he's always traded in and it's as naff as it ever was. I don't get it I'm afraid. I'll accept that 'Cracklin Rosie' is a fantastic tune and there have been a few others over the years, but honestly, he really isn't any good.
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