For
a golden moment sometime around 1981, it seemed that pop music had
been reborn as something primitive and pure. In
a wilfully independent post-punk climate, anything and everything was
up for grabs. Jazz, funk and all hybrids inbetween were de rigeur.
www.jazzateers.com
Product, November 2016
In
Glasgow, care of Alan Horne's Postcard Records, this took the form of
a short-lived but world-changing musical response to the spit and
sawdust, razor gang machismo of the city’s unreconstructed pub
life. It looked to the past of the Velvet Underground's more
sensitive side, lounge bar jazz and Radio 2 for comfort. Orange Juice
may have added extra camp, Josef K more funk and Aztec Camera more
class to the template, but it was left to Postcard second-wavers
Jazzateers to add an essence that fell somewhere between shambolic
and chic.
With
a name that conjured up a one-for-all, all-for-one coffee bar gang
mentality, the original Jazzateers oeuvre was fragile, fey and
overwhelmingly pretty. Led by guitarist Ian Burgoyne and bass player
Keith Band, the songwriting mainstays who would appear in every
incarnation of the group, they played tastefully plucked Gretsch
guitars over Colin Auld's rim-shot sophisticated bossa nova drums.
It was Alison Gourlay's dreamy faraway vocals, however, that made
Jazzateers so sublime.
Postcard
had shut up shop before its planned release by Jazzateers could
happen, and the band's eponymous album released on Rough Trade
records in 1983, with future Hipsway vocalist Graham Skinner
replacing Gourlay, was an infinitely spikier piece of work. As Rough
46, also released by Creeping Bent in 2013, the record formed the
first fully formed chapter of a story that would see Jazzateers
eventually morph into the Paul Quinn fronted Bourgie Bourgie and
attempt to ride the glossy New Pop train.
This
Gourlay-fronted collection of unreleased gems from 1981 and 1982 can
be seen as a prequel to all that jazz, with its low-key swoon tapping
into a wave of artistes looking to the likes of Brazilian chanteuse
Astrud Gilberto, retro-cool licks and classic song-writing for
guidance. Think early Everything but the Girl doing Cole Porter and
Vic Godard crooning Tony Bennet numbers. Think too of Mancunian
cocktail poppers Dislocation Dance and Alison Statton's wispy vocals
with post-Young Marble Giants trio, Weekend.
As
pre-cursors to the Sades and Carmels of a few smooth years later, the
Jazzateers compiled here occupied a place where naïve pop and
nouvelle vague met for Cappuccino in one of the Glasgow west end
eateries they so studiedly plied their wares in, and where the
album's gloopy cover paintings by the late David Band wouldn't have
looked out of place.
The
opening Natural Progression starts off as wallflower shy as
the duskier side of all-female 1960s beat combo The Feminine
Complex, before Gourlay's croon gives way to an extended Velveteen
rifferama that wouldn't have sounded out of place on Live '69. Don't
Worry About A Thing is a pouty cocktail shaker of a song, and Say
Goodbye, I'm No Tarzan and When The Novelty Wears Off sound
like jangly dress rehearsals for C86 compilations to come.
With
the second side produced by Edwyn Collins, musical arrangements are
fleshed out by subtle percussive flourishes and little piano runs
that lend a wryness to Moon Over Hawaii. It's the quietly
audacious version of the Giorgio Moroder/Pete Bellotte-penned disco
nugget, Wasted, a number originally released by Donna summer,
that stands out. Scheduled to be the fourteenth Postcard release, but
which remained unaired following the label's closure (only eleven
singles and an album saw the light of day), the frantic guitars and
Gourlay's dreamy vocal on the song resembles a blueprint for Bite-era
Altered Images.
If history had worked out differently, Wasted
could have been a crossover smash hit, but instead remains the one
that got away. Such was the fate of Jazzateers themselves, who, on
Stop Me From Being Alone, the disco funk of Love Is Around
and the jaunty stroll of the closing Run Away are now
revealed as a crucial missing link in indiepop history.
A
CD version of Don't Let Your Son Grow Up To Be A Cowboy was
released by Cherry Red Records in 2014, and featured six extra tracks
from the post-Gourlay, pre-Skinner era, with future Sunset Gun
singers and This Mortal Coil collaborators Deirdre and Louise
Rutkowski on vocals. This vinyl version, however, captures the
Gourlay years in all their gossamer glory, and comes instead with a
free download of a 1981 live show at Deville's club in Manchester,
where Jazzateers formed a double bill with Aztec Camera as part of an
event styled as The Postcard Factory Sit-in.
Bootlegged
by an audience member on cassette, the band's six-track set lasts
barely twenty
minutes. Opening with a jazz-lite instrumental, the recording is
punctuated throughout with lo-fi audience chatter. This lends a
pseudo authentic atmosphere to an after-hours vibe of faux intrigues
played out by dressing up box rebels living out their own arthouse
movies in dimly lit rooms.
Captured
in the raw, Jazzateers soundtracked all this with a modest sense of
aspiration on what has become an essential hand-me-down objet d'art.
It remains a timeless blast from a monochrome past captured just
before the light they came blinking into turned technicolour.
www.jazzateers.com
Product, November 2016
ends
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