Hounds of Love (Kate Bush, 1985)

Some songs evoke memories of a special evening. Some conjure particular shades of joy or sorrow. In the case of Kate Bush’s extraordinary album Hounds of Love, one line from the title track transports me instantly to a very specific place and time. “Take my shoes off, and THROW them in the lake …”

Between my two spells as a DJ I had a fourteen-year career in theatrical stage management. It was like DJ-ing in that it was a backstage, supporting role. Most of that time was spent in small-scale tours around Scotland, a country with perhaps only half a dozen major centres of population. For a tour to reach all the corners of the nation it must perform in rural schools and village halls and on the many archipelagos detached from the Scottish mainland.

I was a Kate Bush fan from the start and saw her show in Edinburgh's Usher Hall in 1979 during her only UK tour. I bought the cassette of Hounds of Love in the Fort William branch of WH Smiths (along with John Martyn’s album Piece by Piece) in the autumn of 1985 while on tour with Communicado Theatre Company’s production of Hunchback of Notre Dame.

The album remains in my view the single most innovative recording in the history of popular music – my own personal Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The depth of sound foreshadowed in Bush’s previous LP The Dreaming, the rawness of emotion evident since her first releases – these things combined with a completely unexpected unleashing of musical creativity which entirely envelope the listener. Four out the five tracks on the original Side 1 were hit singles. The original Side 2, subtitled The Ninth Wave, is an evocation of a dream state which still leaves me breathless.

It was my first proper freelance job as a stage manager after three years with my first employer, TAG Theatre Co in Glasgow. Communicado had a strong reputation for innovative theatre on a shoestring, and I was pleased as punch to be working for them. But I was woefully under-experienced for the responsibility of this, my first national tour, and had rather bluffed my way into the post. "I'm the man you're looking for," I told the company's director, although I was very insecure in that belief.

On such tours of mostly one-night stands, the cast all helped out with the fit-up and the strike (the dismantling of the set and loading back into the tour van). But I felt keenly the responsibility of being the only fulltime technician on the tour, with a director – the inspirational and inventive Gerry Mulgrew - who often requested big production changes in mid-tour with minimal resources. I had to come up with a new lighting effect in the tiny outpost of Ullapool with only the local crofters’ hardware store to supply me. In Craigmillar I was asked to create the scenery for an entirely new dramatic location (a prison) from wooden pallets which were already serving as the walls of the orchestra pit.

In Portree on the Isle of Skye I left my luggage with that of the rest of the cast in the hotel lobby while I collected the tour van for the next leg, and sat at the wheel while the cast loaded all their bags into the back – but not mine. We did not discover the error until we arrived at the next stop, Stornoway on the island of Lewis, where the opportunities for clothes shopping were limited. Already insecure, I began to feel unconsidered by and isolated from the performing members of the company, and the long sea journey from Stornoway back to the Scottish mainland was the closest I’ve ever come to throwing myself overboard. Years later one of the cast confided that they had all been very worried about me.

The tour concluded in the island community of Shetland and in the dark of a November evening before a show in one waterside village hall I wandered down to the water’s edge with Hounds of Love in my Walkman and that line ringing in my ears. The song is about being afraid of love, a fear represented by the hounds of love in pursuit; but I suppose what I heard were the hounds of responsibility chasing me to the water’s edge until I had nowhere else to run. I wanted to take my shoes off, throw them in the sea and follow them.

The next day I did. We had an afternoon off while we waited to board the overnight ferry back to Aberdeen. We celebrated the end of a critically successful tour with a beach barbecue and (bearing in mind that this was mid-November in the most northerly part of the United Kingdom) some of us took off not only our shoes but everything else except our underpants and ran into the north Atlantic Ocean. It was unimaginably cold, like being suddenly clamped between two huge blocks of ice. I came out of the water immediately, glad to be alive.

 

Tennis (Chris Rea, 1980)

There aren’t many pop songs about sport, especially if you discount the mostly excruciating football anthems by national and local football teams. We’re on the March wi’ Ally’s Army sticks particularly in my mind – the embarrassing England-bashing effort by comedian Andy Cameron on behalf of Scotland’s World Cup team for Argentina 1978.

We're representin’ Britain
And we're gaunny do or die
England cannae dae it
‘Cos they didnae qualify

A masterpiece.

So when my mobile disco Blame It On The Boogie! got a booking for a Kirkby Stephen Tennis Club function in the village’s King’s Arms Hotel in 1999, I was delighted to be able to tailor my playlist for them, to the extent of Chris Rea’s 1980 single Tennis.

Tennis peaked at #88 in the Australian Top 100, the only chart in which it made any impression at all. I always liked it. I had first come across Chris Rea in, I think, 1979 when, as the college DJ at Queen Margaret College in Edinburgh I got to go on a jolly to the NUS Student Entertainment Conference in Reading. Chris Rea, then being touted by Magnet Records as the Next Big Thing^TM in British singer-songwriters, was the headline act for the conference, in a very sweaty hall in Reading’s Student Union.

I and my companion, our Student Union president, were of course much more interested in drinking and showing off to girls than in watching the band. We were both drama students and hoped to impress with demonstrations of the stage-fighting techniques we had learned. I would throw Dai against a wall, then he would throw me. Look! No pain! No impressed women falling at our feet either.

The wall was a folding one with hinges and, numbed by alcohol, I didn’t realise that I had cut my forearm badly on a protruding hinge. I wiped what I thought was sweat from it, then wiped the sweat from my brow, unwittingly face-painting myself blood-red. The staff at the chip shop on the way back to our hotel gave us funny looks, but it was dark and the street lighting was sodium; and I only realised why when we got back to our room and I saw my face in the en-suite mirror.

Although Rea had had a minor pop hit with Fool If You Think It’ Over in 1978 (#30 UK, #12 US), he is a bluesman through and through whom Magnet were trying to make into something else. In 1979 he was still trying to be what they wanted and I was not especially impressed with his Reading gig. With punk and disco music both in the ascendency it was a bad time to be launching a singer-song-writer with blues chops. It would be another ten years of hard graft before he made his only entry into the UK Top Ten with The Road to Hell.  

Tennis came from the album of the same name, Rea’s third. Having started out playing in local bands in his home town of Middlesbrough in North Yorkshire, he recorded the album with fellow musicians from the town. There is, to my ears, a sense of camaraderie in the playing which comes across. It’s particularly evident in the extended choruses at the end of the single.

Like any good bluesman Rea has remained true to his Middlesbrough roots. In 1997, when MIddlesbrough FC reached the finals of both the English League and FA Cup finals, he re-recorded a 1988 track, Let’s Dance with new lyrics by another local lad made good, comedian Bob Mortimer. Neither Mortimer nor the Middlesbrough team proved adept at becoming pop video stars, but musically Let’s Dance is a cut above most football anthems and streets ahead of Ally’s Army.

Perhaps the football anthem is just something that everyone has to get out of their system at some point in their lives. Along with everyone else, even I sang along with Andy Cameron. As for tennis anthems, Tennis cleared the floor when I played it for the Kirkby Stephen Tennis Club. 

 (Ally, by the way, was Scotland manager Ally MacLeod. Scotland went out in the first round. Middlesbrough lost both finals.)

I Will Survive (Gloria Gaynor, 1978)

I like a mash-up. There are only so many ways of throwing chords together in a way that is pleasant to listen to, and after seventy years of rock’n’roll, not to mention the fifty years of jazz and gospel music from which it emerged, there’s not much that is genuinely new. Technology changes, but not the blues. A lot of songs sound the same.

George Harrison was famously taken to court in 1976 when his first post-Beatles hit (My Sweet Lord, released in 1971) was considered to sound uncomfortably close to the Chiffons’ 1963 song He’s So Fine. Although Harrison claimed to have based his composition on the old hymn Oh Happy Day, he was found to have unconsciously plagiarised the Chiffons' hit.

Perhaps if he’d stuck in a verse of He’s So Fine, or quoted the Chiffons’ instantly recognisable “doo-lang, doo-lang-doo-lang” introduction, My Sweet Lord would have been considered a tribute and not a rip-off. There’s no shame in sounding familiar. When I was working for touring theatre company TAG in Glasgow we had a motto which covered even accidental plagiarism: “all art is synthesis”. It was usually followed by another, “if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.” In pop music, it’s almost a given that your next hit should sound a little like your previous one, or somebody else’s previous one.

For example, take Gloria Gaynor’s empowerment classic I Will Survive. It's incredible to think that the song was originally a B-side. It’s instantly recognisable both in her version and in the heartfelt singalong from all women at every disco where I played it. I can’t think of any song since which has tried to emulate its distinctive arrangement and defiant mood. Shania Twain’s That Don’t Impress Me Much  perhaps comes close on the latter count.

However –

When in the mid-1980s I was working for the socialist 7:84 (Scotland) Theatre Company (“7% of the population own 84% of the wealth”), we took a play called The Albannach to a festival in Toronto. Our leading lady was fabulous force of nature that is Alyxis Daly. The festival club was a bar called the Silver Dollar, to which we repaired every night after our performance. It had a small stage and festival performers were encouraged to get up and do a turn.

Wild horses could not have held Alyxis back. Unaccompanied she launched into the slow introduction and foot-stomping, clap-along verses and choruses of … Those Were The Days, the second release on the Beatles’ Apple label in 1968 and a hit then for Mary Hopkins. Alyxis owned the song and the stage and the entire Silver Dollar and repeated her performance by popular request on every night of our visit to Toronto.

We were so proud. But after the second or third night I found myself thinking, “this reminds me of something.” The chord progression of Those Were The Days is almost exactly the same as that of I Will Survive and with a bit of concentration you can sing one song to the chords of the other as a sort of descant.

Twenty years later I was in an acoustic duo playing the pubs of East Cumbria and we did just that – a mash-up of the two songs, which go together surprisingly well not only musically but thematically. Both look back to happier times. Both reached #1 in countries all around the world including the UK and the US. I have to admit that our version did not have the vitality of Alyxis’s, Gloria’s or even Mary’s; but our audiences did enjoy the meeting of the two songs.

If you sometimes think you can hear a hint of balalaika in Those Were The Days, it’s because the song was originally called Dorogoi Dlinnoyu (Дорогой длинною, literally By the Long Road), written by the Russian romanticist Boris Fomin with lyrics by poet Konstantin Podrevsky, and first recorded in 1925 by Georgian contralto Tamara Tsereteli. There really is nothing new in popular music.

The Monster Mash (Bobby "Boris" Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers, 1962)

There are now triple-CD Halloween compilations for the discerning DJ who wants to make a good impression at bookings in late October. But when I got a fright-night booking in 2003 I had to rake through my old vinyl and do some primitive conversions to MP3 for the gig.

Cumbria is bounded by the sea on three sides, all them a long way from my base in the east near the boundary with Yorkshire. When you say you’re from Cumbria, everyone says “Oh, the Lake District!” But there’s far more to it than that. It stretches from the Badlands near the Scottish border in the north to Barrow in Furness in the south; from the rural and well-named paradise of the Eden Valley in the east to Whitehaven on the Atlantic coast.

The county has struggled economically and welcomes a lot of state investment – ship-building and weaponry for the Royal Navy in Barrow, and Europe’s largest nuclear power site at Sellafield near Whitehaven. My booking was in the village of Gosforth, halfway between the two and 76 miles from my home near Kirkby Stephen.

Construction of the venue, Gosforth Hall, began in 1658 so its architecture lent itself well to a spooky party. Surely there were real ghosts here? The manager had done a fantastic job of decoration for the evening – cobwebs everywhere, candles galore, and a giant TV screen showing horror movie The Crow on a loop. The Goths of west Cumbria who made up the audience had made a big effort with their fancy dress.

My contributions were obvious things like the Specials’ Ghost Town, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and R Dean Taylor’s There’s a Ghost in the House. Spooky has always been a favourite of mine, either as recorded by the inimitable Dusty Springfield in 1970 or in the Atlanta Rhythm Section cover version of 1979. And of course there’s always The Monster Mash by Bobby “Boris” Pickett.

It’s hard not to like The Monster Mash. It was a cheesy novelty record from the outset, but it has some good jokes told over a classic rock’n’roll chord sequence. You can dance and smile to it, and if the mood is right the DJ may even persuade you to sing along with its female backing group. It was that sort of a night in Gosforth and I think I played it two or three times.

I saw The Crow two or three times that night too, and so did most of the customers; it was a smallish crowd and the big screen kept them away from the dance floor. But the whole evening was very good natured. It can be quite liberating, when people don’t need the insistent beat of dance music, to be able to play something different for a change. You become more of a radio DJ and in Gosforth I was more than happy to play requests which would normally have cleared the dance floor for me.

The Monster Mash was a fixture elsewhere, in my repertoire as a guitarist. A year earlier I had joined forces with another musician who wanted to launch a monthly open mic night. We made an unlikely duo, about twenty years apart in age and with a very eclectic range of instruments between us: Linnhe played banjo and acoustic guitar, and I contributed various guitars, percussion, bouzouki and vocals. We played everything from folk music to heavy metal, and our bouzouki/banjo rendition of Smoke on the Water was … innovative.

The event, The Mostly Acoustic Jam Night, ran for at least five years in various formats and venues. It started at the White Lion pub in Kirkby Stephen (now called the Taggy Man). Linnhe and I introduced each evening with a short set of two or three numbers. We made an effort to be seasonal and at Halloween our selection usually included Ghost Town and The Monster Mash.

The latter follows a very conventional chord progression shared by many rock’n’roll hits including Neil Sedaka’s Oh Carol and Elton John’s Crocodile Rock; and as well as getting our audience to sing along with the backing vocals of The Monster Mash we inserted the falsetto “LA-A-A, la-la-la-la LA-A-A” from the Sedaka and Elton songs, to the delight of those present. You could say it was a mash-up.

You’re the First, the Last, my Everything (Barry White, 1974)

Chastened by my first booking at the George in Penrith, when I was told in no uncertain terms to smarten myself up, I made extra efforts to impress for my second, five years later. It was a wedding reception in the handsome ballroom of the hotel and I wore a sober jacket and tie in an effort to pour oil on once troubled waters. If only the wedding guests had made the same effort.

Oh, they were well turned out: the George is an up-market venue. The women wore plenty of gold lamé meringue and the men were in ill-fitting suits of many pastel shades. It was a cross-border affair. The bride – let’s call her Juliet – was from Cumbria in northwest England, the groom – Romeo – from Northumbria in the northeast. Their families were, like their namesakes’, worlds apart.

The set up was hurried – I wasn’t allowed to set up before the wedding breakfast, and I was put not in the ballroom itself but on a tiny minstrel’s gallery overlooking it. There was only six feet of headroom (I am 6’3”) and it was about ten feet above the dance floor. I felt very detached from proceedings down below, which as it turned out was probably just as well.

The couple were of course a lot younger than I, and mercifully they were organised enough to have made up a CD of favourites. Although a DJ’s pride bristles at such interventions – surely he or she is the expert at sensing what a crowd want? – I was grateful for some pointers. It included the couple’s unconventional First Dance, a track by Ben Folds Five, and a rather touching Second Dance, a surprise from the bride to her father: Barry White’s You’re the First, the Last, my Everything.

Do DJs still play Barry White? The track was already an oldie by the time of my first stint as a DJ in the late 1970s, but still a popular request. Although it’s something of a soul-disco classic, the hit started life as a country and western song, You’re my First, my Last, my In-Between, written by Peter Radcliffe, a friend of Barry’s. It went unrecorded for two decades before White rewrote the lyrics, taking it to #1 in the UK and the US.

It had the advantage of working both as a dance track and as a more intimate declaration of love. White’s substantial girth, rich bass voice and luxuriant tusk-like moustache earned him the less-than-kind epithet “the walrus of love”. He died in 2003, two years before Juliet’s affectionate choice for a last dance with her father.

Juliet’s wedding disco began more or less as these things do. It was a little hard to gauge the mood from my eyrie but there was a steady flow of dancers on the floor. Two of the guests were from South America and asked me to play a track from a salsa CD they had brought. We were then treated to a thrilling, vibrant demonstration of Latin dancing by the pair. It made the usual plodding disco shuffle of the rest of the guests even duller by comparison.

As the evening wore on, I became aware of fewer and fewer people dancing. This happens at weddings: it’s a long day for the couple and their friends, some of whom have travelled quite long distances, even if not from Latin America. I played everything I could to entice people away from their tables or the bar, but as we approached midnight the ballroom was all but empty. The bar was in a neighbouring lounge.

Then one of the guests – let’s call him Mercurio – stumbled back into the room. His jacket was off, his tie loosened, his cuffs undone and his white shirt spattered with blood. I was playing the Scissor Sisters’ Filthy/Gorgeous at that moment, and in one of the breaks in the music before the chorus, I heard an angry voice bellowing from off-stage: “I didn’t drive two hundred miles to be insulted …” The rest was lost in the track’s triumphant “You’re filthy! and I’m gorgeous! You’re disgusting, and you’re nasty!”

I must have played a hundred weddings over the years and on behalf of romantics everywhere I’m happy to say that this is the only one which ended in rancour. I hope Romeo and Juliet had already left on their honeymoon by then. As I write they should be celebrating their sixteenth wedding anniversary.