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A friend once decided on a whiskey drinking project as a new year’s resolution. She decided she would sample a different whiskey each week through the year. More a gift than a resolution for many, but for her it was an arduous task, given that she didn’t particularly like whiskey. 

Her thinking was far from skewed though. She knew that the drink was prized in our culture, and wanted to understand why - and the best way to do that was to work through the best whiskeys on offer.

I think I’d prefer the whiskey project rather than a weekly sampling of prog rock, with its keyboards on ice, mythic concept albums, and geekish knob-twiddling. In the interest of public service then, I’ll give you a short cut suggestion, to help you avoid the aural equivalent of cirrhosis. Jump straight to Marillion’s Clutching at Straws album if you want to hear the best in prog rock.

And if you want to hear the best song on the album, it is without doubt Warm Wet Circles.

It’s a song that can make me forgive them for their excessive use of keyboards, for their Tolkien inspired name,  for their inability to finish a song in less than 6 minutes, and even for the silk bearskin padded tracksuits that Fish was wont to wear at the time.

The chief problem with prog rock is that, while it may have a musical sophistication, it’s generally pig-thick. No amount of clever counterpoint, modulation, or shifting time signatures can disguise a man singing about goblins. Warm Wet Circles takes the complexity that is a pre-requisite for this type of music, and marries it with a lyrical vision that is equally complex. Each time you listen to the song you’ll hear something new.

Written, like the rest of the album, while touring Europe in an alcohol-fuelled daze, the song takes the image of a warm wet circle and runs with it. And it’s an image that has depth to mine.

She faithfully traces his name with quick bitten fingernails
Through the tears of condensation that’ll cry through the night
As the glancing headlights of the last bus kiss adolescence goodbye
In a warm wet circle

Like a mothers kiss on your first broken heart, a warm wet circle
Like a bullet hole in Central Park, a warm wet circle
And I’ll always surrender to the warm wet circles

The song moves through different moods, until, in a rare moment where guitarist Steve Rothery and Fish seem to be on exactly the same wavelength, it explodes into a bright, raging, climax. 

She nervously undressed in the dancing beams of the Fidra lighthouse
Giving it all away before it’s too late
She’ll let a lovers tongue move in a warm wet circle
Giving it all away and showing no shame
She’ll take a mother’s kiss on her first broken heart a warm wet circle
She’ll realise that she played her part in a warm wet circle

It’s epic, but not in the way that Rick Wakeman would imagine. It’s bold, passionate, and poetic - a six-foot-something crazed scottish poet riffing wildly on (presumably catholic) shame, sex, and alcohol. 

From a vast melting pot, its intensity so bewildering Fritz Lang may just be forced to gasp, a proud nightingale tired of the “Oh she’s Stevie Wonder’s lyricist isn’t she?” rhetoric rises, arms thurst wide, eyes glowing, messianic to the frickin’ hilt. This sleek slender Sappho like spectre hovers above sardine tin Northern Soul dancefloors, approving with her feline stare, she brings oxygen where life couldn’t possibly exist, while a voodoo tranced DJ gives an officer’s salute as he rocks in the swirling grooves, a Spanish galleon taming a perfect storm. Syreeta Wright observes her mission as completed. She returns with a heavy heart to the unpredictable netherworld, a genie at the beckon call of sloth like sample merchants or Eric Clapton assuming he has resurrected his R’n'B spirit which he sold to the M.O.R. devils in 1977. 

Ladies and gentlemen. Is this the way things must remain for Syreeta Wright? Merely a ghost trapped in the machine, a bricolage pattern for hustlers in Nehru coats who send their hounds out on tightropes to rape and pillage the reified grace she and her moonlit foot soldiers wreap in side street basement vinyl emporiums? To put it simply, before the Black Eyed Peabrains go on another skullfucking spree, before the Pussycat Dolls reusme their contract with Burke and Hare, please understand that it is the moral duty of all to liberate Syreeta and her R’n'B meets dirty funk kissed with sunshine pop masterpiece on her own terms. Spend one night in her company, preferably after digging through the vaults of a creepy second hand vinyl store. Understand what culture is about, pastiche and proliferation anger the gods of Motown, do not spit on their righteous path, the warning is clear, their angel is about to be subsumed by MTV bling. The battle starts here…

A couple of years ago I heard novelist Ian McEwan talking about his novel Saturday, lamenting the fact that work doesn’t crop up in novels these days. Characters do everything in the modern novel, other than work - or if they do, there’s no particular detail paid to the minutiae of their trade, unless, of course, they’re detectives in which case we get to hear too much.

Try looking for mentions of mortgages in the modern pop/rock song and you’ll hit the same brick wall. Foreclosures, or even dissapointing returns on pork bellies from the chicago market - something which one is sure that the investment minded songwriter, like M. Jagger, is probably more than a little aware of - are noticeably absent from the classics, so bear with me as we put together a tenuous play-list with which to confront the credit crunch.

R.E.M. It’s the end of the world as we know it
Best played over your morning coffee as you check to see whether the bank in which your savings are held has gone bust, or as you check to see how much your variable rate mortgage is going to cost you this month.

Jenny Owen Youngs’ What the Fuck was I thinking
With a slight modification, it could work as a soundtrack when you’re trying to think exactly why you signed up to a particular mortgage.

Jimmy Eat World Futures
Perhaps the only song in the list to fit the tag without adjustment, Futures hits a hard-rock nerve on the Bush administration zeitgeist which has helped create the conditions to change to cost of living for millions worldwide

“Hey now, you can’t keeping saying endlessly
My darling, how long until this affects me?
Say hello to good times
Trade up for the fast ride
We close our eyes while the nickel and dime take the streets completely”

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Brother my cup is empty
Let’s get melodramatic, and imagine that things really do go over the edge. Cave’s begging song is no shrinking-violet, but filled with indignation and menace. Best played, at ear-shattering volume, to any banker you may know.

O brother, my cup is empty
And I havent got a penny
For to buy no more whiskey
I have to go home [...]

O my friend, my only brother
Do not let the party grieve
So throw a dollar onto the bar
Now kiss my ass and leave

And finally, for a glimmer of hope, Cake’s version of Gloria Gaynor’s I will Survive, for the main because, unlike Gaynor’s version, there’s no doubt in the cake version that the subject of the song will indeed survive, and is completely over the object of his misplaced affections. Hopefully an anthem to be adopted by economists in their droves abandoning the neo-liberal ship.

How many albums have Oasis released since What’s the Story Morning Glory? The correct answer here is ‘ who cares? they’ve all been shit’. Alan McGee, founder of creation records and the man who pushed Oasis into the spotlight in the first place is convinced that their latest album is (finally) worth listening to - and more

“Musically, it’s a return to the grander ambitions and excess of before, with Noel stating: “But I kind of like fancy! I’d like to make an absolutely fucking colossal album. You know? Like literally two orchestras, stuff like that.” Dig Out Your Soul is Oasis at their most baroque and Noel’s pure pop ambition sits easily with his experimental side. The album oozes with confidence, and great songs.”

Maybe it is their the lucky seventh album? The Beatles and the Stones released Revolver and Beggar’s Banquet respectively, both were album number seven, and Dig Out Your Soul is on a par of with both in terms of classic songwriting. Or maybe it was his musical peer Paul Weller who inspired Noel to turn his back on Britpop and take a more eclectic direction after Weller’s own opus of 22 Dreams? Noel Gallagher has said that Shock of the Lightning was the only song that had “Oasis single status” as the rest is far removed from the sound of Oasis.

Utter shite, or simply pr-self-promoting bullshit (depending upon how charitable you feel) from a man who has long since lost what little ability he had to spot talent.  Stretching your artistic horizons to putting two orchestras on an album hardly constitutes ‘baroque’ (try listening to Elbow’s sumptuous new album if that’s what you’re after). If Gallagher is one of the masters of ‘classic songwriting’, Spinal Tap’s Nigel is presumably up there with Bob Dylan.

Elsewhere McGee handily tells the casual reader what music is o.k to like at the moment

 I understand that openly admitting to liking Oasis is inviting confrontation, but you know what? Being an Oasis fan is never having to say I’m sorry. And I’m not. Leave saying sorry to the Coldplay imitators as their era of bedwetter music is over. It’s only Glasvegas and Oasis for competition in this country. If you are in a band and are not artistically competing with the creative rock’n'roll genius of Oasis or Glasvegas, it’s time to just stop and get off the treadmill. This is how rock’n'roll should be done in the United Kingdom today.

He could have extended that end line to include ‘ , the same way it’s always been done’.

What’s peculiar about all of this is that McGee manages to mention, in passing, probably the most inventive, and exciting rock band that the UK has produced in years,  Biffy Clyro. Blinded by the quiffs of Glasgow’s latest trendsetters Glasvegas, he relegates the best Scottish band of the moment to mere drinking partners with Oasis.

I’ll be penning more about Biffy Clyro in the near future, but in the meantime enjoy the brilliance that is ‘Folding Stars’ from their latest album ‘Puzzle’ - it’ll help take your mind of McGee’s wickedness.

Imagine the scene: The revolutionary court stands to order as its three women judges enter. There’s a tension in the air, the atmosphere is electric, as the accused stands in all his fuzzy-faced glory. There was a time in the mid-eighties when all you could hear on the radio had his reverbed vocals, and now he stands up to face judgement on his past.

This is the man who managed to take George Harrison, Bob Dylan, and Roy Orbison and make them all sound like Dave Edmunds. A man whose production footprint brooked no opposition, taking genius and cramming it into his own particular grinder.

A verdict is expected - given the harsh sentences handed out by the same court respectively to Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange and Timothy Z. ‘Timbaland’ Mosley, it’s not looking good for the British born songwriter/producer.

The judge stands

“Jeffrey Lynne, this court has listened to persuasive arguments that you should be banned, under section 2.5 of the revolutionary code (crimes against culture), for ever more from the act of playing or recording music, in particular for your work on Free as a Bird, the Travelling Wilburys, and that solo single by the blonde from ABBA. Do you have anything to say in  your defence?”

“I wrote Mr Blue Sky”

“Fair Enough. Case dismissed”.