Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

Imagine yourself in the anonymous looking high-street of any home-counties English town, on a tuesday morning. As you stroll, minding your own business, a man in a bowler hat brushes accidentally into you. The likelihood - in our admittedly contrived scene - is that he’ll akwardly issue an embarassed apology, perhaps going so far as to lift his hat in a well-practiced gesture to indicate he is no buffoon or braggart but rather an upstanding citizen who has unintentionally invaded your ’space’.

Take a hop, skip, and a jump out of your Anglo-Saxon surroundings, walk down the streets of Rome/Athens/Barcelona or Buenos Aires and you can spot the Englishman at a hundred yards - he’s the one wasting his time every two paces with unsearched for ‘excuse me’s .  ’Personal space’ is a very vague concept here, as people hustle and bustle, open to the sights, smells, and sounds around them.

In the 1980s synthesiser is the musical equivalent of the British Empire - dominant, disliked, and dull. Drop the Pilot, by the immensely talented Joan Armatrading, gives a perfect example of why. The song, a distinct departure from her acoustic guitar dominated sound (think of Love and Affection, or Down to Zero), boasts a memorable riff played on the then obligatory synthesiser. Each note is played clearly, all present in their own clearly defined and self-enclosed space. Play it on a guitar and there’s the danger of the notes bumping fluidly into each other - god forbid! 

Let’s be clear - manners and respect for the rules might be an admirable thing for the footpath, but they make your average song sterile.

That misplaced keyboard riff, coupled with the energetically unimaginative chord progression that the <em>actual</em> guitar plays on this song, should be enough to ban it from any of my playlists - and yet, it seems to often make its way back in. Close a door on it, and this brash, self-confident bruiser of a song will climb in the window without apologies (well, the keyboard riff would probably like to say sorry, but is running with the wrong crowd).

And marshalling all this together is Armatrading’s profound and steady voice, ready to sing any amount of foolishness - ‘Animal, Mineral, Spiritual, Physical, I’m the one you need’ - to get your attention focussed on her rich tones (foolish it may be, but ‘Drop the mahout, I’m the easy rider’ is one of the fineset ‘what is she on about?’ moments in pop history).

Even bastards get to lament and when they do, this song is for them.

Those of a certain age always look down on the new generations and wonder, in a pitiful way, whether they’ll get to experience music just as they did when they were younger. The answer is usually yes of course they will. But when you get to an age where any young kid in a tracksuit becomes such a threat to your own imagined safety that you effectively spend the time it takes until you get near to them, plotting your ninja-like slaughtering of them if they try anything, any small issue you can belittle them with is important.

So there is a question whether the yoof of today will ever have those moments in the bedroom when for about four minutes the world stops. Those moments where you’re busying yourself and have on the alternative music radio programme on in the background and then occasionally a new song comes on that just makes you drop everything. I remember well when Dollar Bill did that when it got its first radio airing and it wasn’t just me, there was serious talk about that one song in school the next day.

Now of course, not only would we have heard it, we’d have downloaded it and we’d be posting messages, texting friends and have it as our ring tone sung by a toddler in the space of thirty seconds and by the end of the song we’d already be sick of it. This isn’t to say that things are worse today, just that some aspects of the romance have gone: the discovery, the long wait to discuss it with fellow discoverers, the long wait for it to be released, the trip into town to purchase it, the long bus ride home reading each and every word and credit before you get to listen to it.

Why is all that important? Because at its heart Dollar Bill is one of the most romantic and fragile songs written in the last twenty years. Romance is important and not just the rose-tinted romance of discovery it’s also one of the reasons why the Screaming Trees never quite became as successful as they deserved.

At the time when Sweet Oblivion was released, the Screaming Trees had been around for a while. Sweet Oblivion came at the time of the huge interest in all things Seattle and guitar based, but they had been around in various formats since the mid eighties. The main problem is that they were possibly too good, at least Mark Lanegan was.

At a time when the kids reclaimed music, as it were, the original rock and roll and punk spirit was very much alive. By that, it meant music that you could do yourself. That you could get together with a few friends and have just enough talent amongst you to play something that was largely in tune. There was no need for serious vocals or vocal ability. There was no need for huge guitar talent, it was nice for sure, but as long as you’d mastered power chords and could tune the guitar down half an octave you were in. The widdly widdly solos of Eighties hair rock no longer applied, it could just be noise or fuzz of screech. That was where the connection was.

Place into that not only guitarists with more than enough talent to play proper chords, but also a singer with a voice that had more soul and heartbreak in it than the combined talents of most of old  Motown.  While impressive, there was no way your average acne-marked teenager was ever going to replicate a Screaming Trees song. Musically and lyrically, they were superb without ever sounding over produced, but that was half the problem.

The other issue was that while they could rock, as was the law at the time, Lanegan was never better than on quieter and more soulful songs. He could belt out the rock songs, but it was when the acoustic guitars came out that you really felt the full force of his vocals. It was only natural that at the end of the Trees’ lifetime Lanegan would gravitate towards a more folky, blues and country style.

The upshot is that this song was just so out of place in the time that it became an instant classic. It would never date, it wasn’t grounded in the sound of the early Nineties and had none of the that overly fuzzed production or the Albini influenced stripped down and amateur for the sake of sounding stripped down and amateur. The song was produced exactly as it should sound.

While describing it as a bastard’s lament may be a bit harsh, there’s far more introspection to it than that, it isn’t your typical “she up and left me” number. Lou Barlow was perfecting the art of producing “why don’t girls like me” material for all college boys considered themselves as “sensitive” and “thinkers” mainly because they hadn’t figured out that obsessing over Barlow’s lyrics, lack of sunlight and poor personal hygiene were probably the main reasons why they weren’t getting girlfriends. But here was Lanegan letting us know exactly why he’s left on his own, he did the damage, he knows that and he knew it while he was doing the damage, he just can’t help himself messing everything up. The aspect of a self-destructive protagonist with nobody to blame but himself just works. It works in film, it works in literature and here it works in music. We know he’s a dickhead and he deserves what he got, but we can’t help liking him and feeling sorry for him.

If you’ve never heard any Screaming Trees or Mark Lanegan, then start here. Wait for the casual, melodic two chord intro (that owes much to Lennon’s Imagine) to wash over you as Lanegan quietly hums over the intro. It’s certainly a great hook to start a song, but for Lanegan virgins, it’s what happens after twenty four seconds when this gruff, lamentful voice comes in with “Torn like and old Dollar Bill.”

Right there in that one line you have more imagery than anything anyone else was writing at the time. It typifies the sheer superiority of Americana over anything that could be produced elsewhere. “Torn like and old pound note” just wouldn’t work, “Torn like a fiver”? Like American town and place names just work in songs, you could imagine quite clearly a battered old dollar bill, ripped and torn through years of passing through hands, wallets, pockets, bags and tills. What better way to state just how much you’ve messed up?

As Lanegan goes through the list of thinks he did, but didn’t mean to, but couldn’t help himself, so the song gradually picks up and the guitars get heavier. The bass and the drums become more pronounced to the point where the break reaches the perfect rock tone for beating the wall and reaching for the whiskey as you wallow in self-pity and self-hatred.  Lanegan picks up the intensity with his vocals yelling, “I don’t wanna hurt ya, that’s all I seem to do. Don’t wanna desert ya, that’s all I seem to do.” And just as the whiskey runs out, so does the self-loathing and the song brings us back down to the gentleness of the intro and Lanegan signing off with that same line “Torn like an old Dollar Bill.”

And after just over four minutes, so are you.

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.