“It's a literary and
philosophical group,” says the voice of the late Edinburgh-based
poet Paul Reekie in a faux-radio interview at the start of this 2CD,
forty-four track retrospective from Vic Godard. As a
singer/songwriter, Godard's band Subway Sect may have been forged by
punk, but his adopted surname, taken from iconoclastic film-maker
Jean Luc Godard, revealed a far smarter talent who quickly and
quietly stepped aside from the melee to plough his own maverick
furrow. On this respect, Godard's low-key singularity has slowly but
surely cast him as an elder statesman reclaiming and refreshening his
past.
Reekie, like many
people on this album, first encountered Godard with his band Subway
Sect supporting The Clash at Edinburgh Playhouse on the 1977 White
Riot tour. Reekie went on to become president of the Scottish branch
of the Subway Sect fan club – the literary and philosophical group
he waxes lyrical about here. As Godard's online sleeve-notes relate,
the pair eventually became friends, with Reekie in attendance at
every Godard appearance in Scotland.
One suspects the Subway
Sect of the White Riot tour sounded not unlike the poundingly raw
trilogy of 'Don't Split It', 'Nobody's Scared' and 'Parallel Lines'
that kick off this joyride through Godard's back catalogue that
reveals Godard as craftsman, explorer and multi-faceted pop
song-writing genius.
While the period
clatter of this opening salvo can't disguise such ability, a more
obviously sophisticated sheen starts to peep through on the songs
which appeared on Godard's 1980 debut album, 'What's The Matter Boy?
'Double Negative', 'Vertical Integration', 'Empty Shell' and 'Make Me
Sad' reveal a writer who had already matured into a post-punk Tin Pan
Alley troubadour possessed with coffee-bar roots, a maverick way with
words and melodies to swoon to. This period culminated in the
kitchen-sink delights of 1981 single, 'Stop That Girl', possibly the
only Northern Soul tinged ditty to feature an unknown Turkish
accordionist accompanying a lyric that finds Godard warning a friend
to keep an eye on a potential Sapphic usurping of his amour.
Godard went even more
MOR when he donned dickie-bow and dinner jacket to become a full-on
swing-time crooner and headline act of Rhodes' Radio 2 friendly Club
Left revue in response to the redundant cartoonification of 'punk'.
Such pre-punk, post skiffle roots are acknowledged on the vintage
vinyl stylings of the CDs themselves here, with the Gnu label looking
like classic purveyors of 78RPM platters.
The results of Godard's
revolt into style, with a band made up of a jazz cabaret combo who
would soon jump ship to team up with American singer Dig Wayne as the
chart-bothering Jo Boxers, worked a treat. Whoever decided it would
be a good idea for this incarnation of Subway Sect to tour with
Bauhaus, however, which saw Godard playing to Goth-filled halls
sandwiched inbetween the head-liners and The Birthday Party fronted
by a manic Nick Cave, should probably have explained their motives to
the kohl-eyed monsters who bottled Godard offstage.
One has to go on to
Godard's website for full details of who played on what and when
here, but the notes that accompany them, penned by Godard's spouse
and creative factotum, The Gnu, make for a comprehensive primer and a
fascinating insight into Godard's peripatetic but prolific
anti-career. The cast of thousands involved could have stepped out of
an existential gangster flick filmed by Cecil B Demille.
These include one-off
collaborations with the likes of chamber-pop ensemble the Ravishing
Beauties vocalist, Virginia Astley, on the soulful, organ-led
Merseybeat of 'Spring Is Grey'. The cream of London's nouveau jazz
set, including Simon Booth and veteran sax player Larry Stabbins'
Working Week project, also appear most notably on thrilling car chase
instrumental, 'Stayin' Outta View'. More recently, Godard has teamed
up with the fantastically named Mates Mates, a Catalan band who, even
more fantastically, reside in a town called Vic.
It is Godard's
Caledonian connections, however, that prevail the most, with the
Edinburgh Playhouse White Riot date also attended by Edwyn Collins
and Alan Horne, who would go on to found Orange Juice and Postcard
Records, respectively. Orange Juice covered Godard's 'Holiday Hymn'
for a John Peel session years before Godard released it, though
neither version is here.
As producer of 1993's
'End Of The Surrey People' and 1998's 'Long-Term Side-Effect',
Collins trimmed the lounge-bar cheese, heightened the Northern Soul
leanings and gave the sound more depth with a band that included at
various points Felt/Primal Scream keyboardist, Martin Duffy and Sex
Pistols drummer Paul Cook.
While the cuts from
2002's 'Sansend' take a leap into electronic programming and dub on
'The Writer's Slumped' and a Latina shimmy on 'Americana On Fire',
it's back to basics for a gloriously ramshackle live take on Subway
Sect's seminal second single, 'Ambition'. With Godard backed by The
Bitter Springs, harmonica and slide guitar are to the fore in a way
that makes it sound like it could have been recorded at any point
since the early 1950s. So it goes too for the punkabilly demo of
'That Train' recorded with long-lost London thrash-beat quartet, Wet
Dog.
Which brings things
full circle, to five tracks from '1978 Now', which, released in 2007,
revisited the songs and spirit of the original Subway Sect's lost
debut album that featured rawer versions of material eventually heard
on 'What's The Matter Boy?'.
Godard took another
side-turn by way of 'Blackpool', a musical co-written with novelist
Irvine Welsh, and, to date, only ever seen once at Edinburgh's Queen
Margaret University, where drama students performed in a production
directed by Welsh's regular stage adaptor, Harry Gibson. It would be
a shame if this bucket-mouthed end-of-the-pier post-Thatcher era
romance never saw light of day again, because the show's two numbers
captured here showed more than ever Godard's old-time vaudevillian
roots.
Godard's entire canon,
in fact, could be said to be made up of show-tunes of sorts. The
off-kilter intelligence of Godard's melodies and lyrics reveal him as
a parallel universe Lionel Bart or Don Black, with a similarly sired
and quintessentially English common touch as both, but with a Penguin
Modern Classic and a frothy Cappuccino to keep him creative company.
This is as apparent on 2010's 'We Come as Aliens' as it was way back
on 'Nobody's Scared.'
It is apparent too on
the plethora of YouTube links peppered throughout the online
sleeve-notes. The live footage from every era they reveal act as a
visual appendix to an already comprehensive package.
It is the final song of
this collection, however, that joins the dots between Godard's past
and present. 'Johnny Thunders' was originally released by Godard in
1992 as part of Rough Trade's Singles Club. The version here was
recorded live with The Sexual Objects in 2012 at a gig in Glasgow.
The Sexual Objects, of course, are the latest and most driven vehicle
for Davy Henderson, one of those who first drew inspiration from
Godard at the Edinburgh Playhouse White Riot show.
Godard and the SOBs
first played together at a 2010 tribute night to Paul Reekie at
Edinburgh Book Festival. Since then they've frequently collaborated
frequently , most recently when the SOBs backed Godard on a
stormingly special live run through 'What's The Matter Boy?' in its
entirety. The final date of the joint Godard/SOBs tour was the Voodoo
Rooms in Edinburgh, in the same room where, more than a decade ago,
when the venue was still the far more basic Cafe Royal, Henderson's
previous band, The Nectarine No.9, headlined a show. The night ended
with a rip-roaring version of 'Johnny Thunders', with none other than
a kimono-sporting Reekie on lead vocals.
If any recording of
that performance exists, it isn't here. It is Reekie's voice,
however, that ends this exquisite package just as it began, with a
one-minute paean to Godard's legacy that helped shape pop music as we
should know it, in all its literary, philosophical glory.
The List, March 2014
ends
Comments