#1393: Supergrass – Tonight

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Writing about a song from Supergrass’ In It for the Money again. Only one more after this, but that’ll be sometime in the future. Can’t say enough times I how much I enjoy this album. I must have mentioned my liking for it in the other posts for all its other tracks on the blog. So I’ll leave my praise at that. ‘Tonight’ is the third song on there. I have a memory of listening to the album on my Playstation 2, it might have been the first-time listen, maybe not, it was a while back. When the guitar riff at the beginning started, I had a feeling I’d heard it before. Then the band started playing, and I thought “Okay, I’ve definitely heard this song before.” To this day, I still think I’d heard the song in an advert on the TV before getting the physical copy, on Cartoon Network or some children’s channel… just somewhere. But all those adverts from the early 2000s are lost in time, and I’ll never know for sure. Worth messaging one of the members nicely, I think. See if they’d know. They probably wouldn’t. Worth a shot, though.

‘Tonight’ hits another home run in what I consider the perfect opening moments of …Money. The track is a song about anticipation. Gaz Coombes takes on the voice of someone who’s going out for the night, and they’re gonna have a good time. They’re looking forward to the party, seeing the band “playing bish-bash-bosh” – a funny lyric that does the job – and embracing the lack of sleep they’re inevitably going to get. Coombes gets things underway with the aforementioned riff, the jumping between two notes within it kind of act as the melodic hook of the entire track, before Danny Goffey executes a rapid drum fill to bring everybody else in. Brass ensemble Hornography add a little pizzazz to the listening experience with their instruments, though they do seem to be buried in the centre of the mix. The initial monitor mix brings them further forward. You can hear the little subtleties in what they play. People are asking questions left and right, a girl asks “When?”, the narrator asks “Why?”, but it doesn’t matter when tonight’s about to go down. The whole thing’s a high-octane affair.

It’s known that a majority of the songs were written in-studio while the band were working on the album. With this in mind, I’ve always had the feeling that a lot of the lyrics were created to match the rhythm of the music, aiming for the feel rather than the substance. Take ‘Tonight’. I already made note of the “playing bish-bash-bosh” line. I don’t think any band could get away with that but Supergrass. And look at that amazing moment when the bridge comes in with that huge release of a key change. In that section Coombes sings: “Had his gun in his hand, and he’s looking at mine, and he’s two foot two.” and then “And he’s phoning his cab, and he’s seemingly fine, and he’s seen me too.” Doesn’t really have anything to do with what else goes on in the song. But the way Coombes sings them, sounds like they’re the most important lyrics in the song. Some could be confused. I’m all for it. When it comes to me, sure, music is meant to make you think, but it’s more important that it makes you feel. And I feel great every time I listen to this song. Just another highlight in an album full of them.

#1392: The Beatles – Tomorrow Never Knows

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I saw this song was next after writing the previous post, and it got me wondering. When and how did I listen to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’? The thought got me looking back on that final third of 2009 when I really started listening to The Beatles, and surprisingly, it unlocked a memory that hadn’t been in the mental plane for a while. When I was on my Beatles discovery, trying to find out anything about any kind of song, I came across this person’s video. Made in the golden age of YouTube when everything was made on Windows Movie Maker, the video was a bunch of facts about ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ laid over the music, with some pictures here and there. My introduction to the Beatles was through songs like ‘Penny Lane’, ‘The Night Before’, ‘One After 909’… Songs that sound like a band made them. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was not like one of those. It was unlike any song I’d heard before. I was only 14 then, so that’s no exaggeration. And I don’t think it was too long after that that I found it was on Revolver and listened through the whole album.

The Beatles were meant to spend the first four months of 1966 making a film, which would have been their third in the four-film contract they had with some company. They said no and took a break instead. In January, John Lennon bought a book, took LSD and followed the instructions as exactly stated within the pages. The opening lyrics, “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream”, are taken almost verbatim from it. April came around, it was time for the band to start recording a new album again, and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was the first song they worked on. Lennon wanted to translate the hallucinogenic experience into song, and the Beatles threw everything they had into it. They all brought in tape loops, which they manually overdubbed in a session, McCartney spurring up the idea. George Harrison played a sitar and tambura on the track, bringing his firmly established Indian inspirations into the mix. Lennon wanted to be hung upside-down and spun around a microphone while recording his vocal. New engineer Geoff Emerick tampered with a Leslie-speaker cabinet to get something to that effect. And in addition the banging drum take, Ringo Starr provided the song’s title. Not intentionally, but it was his words.

The problem with Beatles posts is that I don’t want to turn them into a casual rewrite of a Wikipedia page, and there’s a Wikipedia article for every Beatles track, I think. So any technical stuff or further insight you might want, it’s probably best you went over there. My personal take is hopefully what people are here for, so I’mma give it to you. I can’t imagine how people in 1966 reacted when this arrived as the final song on Revolver. To me, it feels like an intentional mark on the band’s part, showing that they were just on another level compared to their contemporaries. A lot of the public must have thought they’d gone insane or too weird. Or had been taking too many drugs, which isn’t wrong a judgement. This is a song that was worked on 60 years ago next week, and there are songs and bands today that solely exist to sound like it but pale in comparison. That pretty much sums up The Beatles too, honestly. A lot of people don’t want you to believe it these days, but those guys, they made some really good music.

#1391: Gorillaz – Tomorrow Comes Today

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‘Clint Eastwood’ is the official first single by Gorillaz. I’m sure it goes down as that. When it was released in 2001, I was but a small child, but I have a vague memory of watching The Box or something and seeing Noodle kicking a gorilla in the face, having no idea what was going on. Seemed weird seeing a cartoon set to music. That’s seen as the song that introduced the world to Gorillaz. But a few months before, the first batch of Gorillaz material was released in the form of the Tomorrow Comes Today EP. A very pivotal time in Damon Albarn’s life. Only a month before the EP was out, he was appearing on TV shows with Blur, doing promotional work for the band’s Best Of: compilation. But that work was over, it was a new millennium, and it was time to unveil this new project. Gorillaz, hell yeah. ‘Tomorrow Comes Today’ was really the first Gorillaz song to be unveiled, along with a music video that, according to the Bananaz documentary, was done in two weeks.

I… did not like this song a very long time. I heard Gorillaz for the first time in 2010. I may have heard ‘Tomorrow…’ here and there before then, but here it was in the context of the album. With its placement after ‘Re-Hash’ and ‘5/4’, ‘Tomorrow…’ felt like such a downer. Albarn melodically mumbling syllables over downcast music. It wasn’t for me. I didn’t get it. But then, I remember, I was on a train, more specifically the Underground, back home one day. Couldn’t say what year. I was looking at people’s faces, most of them blank, expressionless, tired. The song came to my head, and that was it. I feel I finally understood what the tune was going for. Even though I don’t think anyone really knows what Albarn’s saying apart from the man himself, I get the feeling it’s about being anywhere else than a place you’re currently in – whether that be physically or mentally too. It might have to do with the rapid development of technology or something as well. Albarn’s vocal’s perfect for it. The best part is probably when Miho Hatori, as Noodle, harmonises with him on the last line. Icing on the cake.

The song goes back as early as 1999. We know this because, in its demo form, it was released as a bonus track on Japanese releases of Blur’s 13. Check out Damon Albarn just messing around on his Casio. Obviously, he saw enough potential in the song he had to develop it into the fleshed-out composition it would become. In its album form, it’s led by a really deep bass guitar, sparse piano tinkles and the melodica, an instrumental you’ll find in many a Gorillaz song. I never realized how sample-assisted the track is too. The drum beat is taken from Allen Toussaint’s ‘Get Out of My Life, Woman’. And if I hadn’t looked at Genius, I would have never known there was a recording of a Gregorian chant during the introduction. Thinking that’s down to the involvement of producer Dan the Automator, who was also working on Deltron 3030 almost at the same time. That’s a whole other bag we don’t have to put our hands into. But to sum things up, ‘Tomorrow Comes Today’ is a song I like a lot now having disregarded it for many years. I can find a lot of solace in its gloom.

#1390: Bob Dylan – Tombstone Blues

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Highway 61 Revisited. When I found the album in the Best Ever Albums list on BestEverAlbums.com in, I want to say 2013 or something, it was the highest placed Dylan record on it. So I took that to mean, you know, it’s the classic, it’s essential, it’s the go-to Dylan album. Then I listened to more of the guy’s LPs and found that you could apply that mentality to at least five other works of his. My personal favourite is Blood on the Tracks. I don’t know what that says about me. But I do know Highway… as being that important statement signifying Dylan’s firm move to using electric instruments in his music, a move seen as sacrilege in the folk music community. People would go to his shows and boo him, it was a big deal. The album has its classics. ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, arguably one of the best songs ever. ‘Desolation Row’, maybe of one the best ever album closers. And I’ll give a nod to ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, just because.

But I’m here to talk about the track on the album that I return to the most. Its second, ‘Tombstone Blues’. I think I kind of liked it when I went through the whole initially in ’13. Funnily enough or not, depending on how your sense of humour is, it was a Classic Review of the album by Antony Fantano in 2015 that made me consider it some more. He made a comment on the track’s “whacked-out beat” and called it “more proto-punk than anything The Kinks ever did in the mid-’60s”. He was very enthusiastic about ‘Tombstone Blues’ in general. I listened back to the song, and yeah, the drums were indeed slapping. That cymbal and snare are thwacking away with the booming kick underneath, really packs a punch underneath the music. He also referred to the tune as “the most cleanly assembled track”, but there are definitely moments where players don’t change chords in time or kind of lose where they are in the song, either ’cause Dylan will play a few measures before going into a verse or goes into the chorus a bit earlier than anticipated. But I like the song even more ’cause of those moments. Gives it a lot of character. It is essentially a live take too, gotta take that into account.

So many interpretations are to be found online as to what Bob Dylan is on about in this song. Something that seems to be agreed upon is that it references the Vietnam War. I’m not sure I could arrive at a solid conclusion myself. I’m not prepared to write a whole thesis here. I simply see ‘Tombstone…’ as a kind of ‘state of affairs’, this-is-where-America’s-at-right-now kind of deal. The verses are wordy, filled with references, turns of phrases, irony and dry humour, with AAABCCCB rhyme schemes, detailing these almost absurd situations involving a range of different characters. And while these situations are going on, the familial unit detailed in the choruses are going through very real problems. The mom’s working in the factory with no shoes, the father’s scrounging around for food in the alley, and Dylan – or the narrator – is thinking about death. The tombstone. I guess it’s a metaphor for the ridiculous nature of the goings-on in political establishments when compared to the heavy, relatable issues people are going through at home. I’ll take that as a conclusion, actually.

#1389: The BPA ft. David Byrne & Dizzee Rascal – Toe Jam

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So, Norman Cook, AKA Fatboy Slim. He hasn’t released an official studio album for some time. Doesn’t look like he’ll be releasing another one any time soon. I feel like he’s always touring or doing a show somewhere, though. And the royalty checks from commercial use of his songs must be endless. He’s probably doing just fine. Officially, it’s in the books that Fatboy Slim’s final album is Palookaville in 2004. If anything, it’s really I Think We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat from 2009, but because it wasn’t released under the Fatboy Slim name it doesn’t get counted. Co-producing the album with his mate Simon Thornton, who I feel is the distinguishing factor that separates it from a sole ‘Fatboy Slim’ record, Cook predominantly collaborates with a selection of mid-2000s independent artists that I’m thinking he must have simply admired and wanted to work with, releasing the results under the alias of ‘The Brighton Port Authority’, or ‘The BPA’ for short.

But there are a couple of collaborations with absolute legends of the game. The first track is a cover of ‘He’s Frank’ by the Monochrome Set, with Iggy Pop on vocals, and near the album’s end comes ‘Toe Jam’. You see who it features in the blog’s title. The track is how I came to know of the whole BPA project. The music video for it played on MTV2, I think on a show of Gonzo – Zane Lowe hosted this long before he got all big and started working for Apple – and it was one that certainly got me interested in more ways than one, back when I was 13 years old. There is no uncensored version of it. At least, not publicly released. But the placement of the censor bars is the whole point of its concept. It’s censorship that makes sense, and it leads to comical results. Seems to me like it was probably a David Byrne / Fatboy Slim collaboration initially, with Dizzee Rascal being asked to write a verse for it some way down the line. However it came to be, it’s a bop and then some.

First of all, gotta appreciate the double-meaning in the title. The shit that collects in between your toes if you don’t clean there, that’s usually referred to as ‘toe jam’. “In between my toes” is a phrase sung at various points. But then, the whole song is a jam about toes. It’s clever. Byrne mixes the real with the nonsensical throughout the track, singing about walking down a road and talking into a tape recorder and a girl galloping in his toe spaces. He inserts his standard vocal hiccups along the way. Dizzee Rascal comes in with a verse about a successful pull on a night out. The theme that both guests however share in their sections is the power of dancing and the enjoyment that comes out of it. That’s what the entire track comes to when getting to the point. I’ve also got to shout-out the line, “Every day is fuckin’ perfect, it’s a paradise”. I think whoever’s point of view it’s meant to be taken from really believes the sentiment, but it’s a great one to use in a sarcastic manner too. I’m all about that kind of stuff.