Sunday, March 10th, 2024

{ONE} A RAINY NIGHT IN SOHO
Crossing from a Mayfair private view into Soho, I put the airpods in and hit play, and DJ Shadow is thrown up by the randomiser that is Shuffle. It’s “Midnight in a Perfect World” and it is indeed perfect, for this moment, in this imperfect world. I find myself slouching along in time to its wonderful backbeat as I walk through St Anne’s Court to the Elizabeth Line Tottenham Court Road entrance — TfL missed a trick in not calling it TCR [Soho]. Walking in the rain in London at night never loses its appeal.

{TWO} THE RESISTANCE OF POP MUSIC, PT 1
I keep waiting for Pop to Eat Itself, as the most brilliantly named group of the Eighties would have it, but Pop doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, and it’s a driver or important component, in many of the new series and movies on Netflix or Apple or Terrestrial TV. For me, All of Us Strangers has the most evocative use of a single song. Nothing we’ve watched recently was as poignant, melancholy, and controlled as Andrew Haigh’s film. There’s no weakness, and the extraordinary performances of Claire Foy and Jamie Bell are so quiet and nuanced that you catch your breath as their story with their [now] adult son plays out. The film has its theme song, and it’s perfect — the Pet Shop Boys “West End Girls”* with its talk of “too many shadows, whispering voices”, and although it tracks club dancing, its melancholy is worn on its sleeve. And the original video had Tennant’s partner in PSB, Chris Lowe, as a ghostly figure in the street scenes…

* I’d forgotten the verse, “We’ve got no future / we’ve got no past / here today, built to last / In every city, in every nation / from Lake Geneva to the Finland Station.” (The Finland Station in Leningrad is the place where Lenin got off the train on the night of April 3, 1917, to take charge of the Russian revolution), but if anyone’s going to put that in a pure Pop hit it’d be Neil Tennant, no?

{THREE} FILM 2024
I had watched Claire Foy and Andrew Haigh talking about All of Us Strangers (if you’ve seen it, you’ll understand the difficulty) at Mark Kermode’s MK3D show at the BFI on the South Bank. As I had designed the slides for Mark’s show, I’d popped backstage to say hi. It was an interesting Green Room — Claire Foy and Andrew Haigh; Mahalia Belo (director) and Alice Birch (writer, from a novel by Megan Hunter) of The End We Start From, which features an excellent, panicky score by Anna Meredith and a standout performance from Jodie Comer; Jane Giles and Ali Catterall with their film, Scala!!!, about the King’s Cross Cinema and the extraordinarily diverse programming that inspired future generations of filmmakers and musicians; and Jerskin Fendrix, composer of the exceptional Poor Things soundtrack.

{FOUR} THE RESISTANCE OF POP MUSIC, PT 2
Mark Kermode: “Yorgos Lanthimos said he just knew from listening to your album (Winterreise — it came out in 2020, tagged as Indie Pop by Apple Music) that you could do the soundtrack. He said he played the album to Emma Stone and she said that when she heard it, it was like everything exploded, your head exploded into music, which I thought was a fabulous description. But it’s a really big thing to be asked to score a major motion picture straight out the gate. Did you know that you could do it?”
Jerskin: “I spend a lot of time not going to the cinema — I’m sure you might be more familiar with it, but it was an odd mental thing, just being in the studio by myself, already being isolated by lockdown, and thinking everything I’m doing right now is going to end up in a colossal environment in a lot of places in the world. The mental gymnastics of that was sort of impossible…”
Mark: “The score is right at the heart of the film — I think it would be quite easy for the film to be emotionally alienating and I talked to Yorgos and we agreed on this point — what you need is an emotional, visceral reaction. I’m just astonished that it’s your first film. It’s like you were always ready to do this.”
Jerskin: “I think it was very lucky that it was this exact film, this exact project, with this exact director, because my background up until that point had been pop music. I think there’s a level of emotion, and a level of hyper-exaggerated emotion that you can play with in pop song writing, which in most other art forms verges on the cloying.”
Mark: “What was the first pop record you ever bought?”
Jerskin: “The first pop record I remember listening to was The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle by Bruce Springsteen”.
Mark: “Wow! My first one was Alvin Stardust, “Jealous Mind!”

Jerskin then went on to detail his recent love for Carly Rae Jepson’s album Emotion — “Every song has this incredible core”. I checked — it does have all the elements that are present in Jerskin’s own album, and the Poor Things soundtrack — sparkling synth hooks, woozy atmospherics and all sorts of sounds used as beats and percussion without being drums, as well as on-the-nose pop melodies. I ended up talking to Jerskin after the show about Bruce, The Wild etc… and the song that he feels combined everything he loves about Pop Music in all its unabashed brilliance, “Jungleland” (from Born to Run). We also talked pitch-bending (you’ll know if you’ve seen Poor Things), and I ended by wishing him luck for the Oscars, for which his soundtrack has been nominated. How incredible is that? First Soundtrack, first Oscar Nom…

{FIVE} AND THE OSCAR GOES TO…
For Best Original Soundtrack, I think that the Academy will probably give it to Robbie Robertson for his work over four decades with Martin Scorsese. Killers of the Flower Moon is a really powerful soundtrack, full of bluesy foreboding, deep, rough sonics, heartbeats, and overdriven slide guitar. It also has one final send-off of a song, ”Still Standing”, poignant and moving as sung by an eighty-year-old Robertson, sounding as full of piss and vinegar as he did as a sixteen-year-old sending shards of guitar around Ronnie Hawkins as he sang “Who Do You Love.” [Update: I was wrong, Oppenheimer won, soundtrack by the brilliant Ludwig Göransson.]

{EXTRA} SHOALS’ SOUL
I was reminded of James & Bobby Purify’s wonderful track by a nice interview with Dan Penn in The Guardian this week by my friend Garth Cartwright. “I’m Your Puppet” was the only song cut at Muscle Shoals by James and Bobby (their record label sent them to Moman’s American Studio in Memphis for their follow-up), but I’ve always had a soft spot for the song, mainly for its rolling melody line, sitting atop a lovely chord progression. The Guardian piece was timed to the release of a great album that Dan cut on Bobby Purify in 2005 that is only now seeing the light of day: The Inside Track on Bobby Purify (The Last Music Company). It consists of Dan’s heartfelt demos, followed by the album itself. Find it, buy it, support real soul music. 

When we recorded half our first album in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Mark and I were in thrall to Southern Soul (our more Northern and Western influences being Prince, Ray Charles and Bobby Womack). The classic songs of Penn, Spooner Oldham, Chips Moman, Eddie Hinton, Donnie Fritts and others were really important to us, from “Dark End of the Street” to “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man”. The weeks we spent there were among our best musical memories, warmed by the fantastic hospitality and talent of all at Muscle Shoals Sound. 

A few years later, our career in the dumpster, I asked Mark to add piano and bass to a version I had started recording as a gift for a friend’s wedding [long story]. I can’t sing like the great Purify cousins, so I opted for a cooler, slightly swampier version with a dobro lick replacing the lovely xylophone on the original. I love Mark’s playing here — he has the South in his veins! — with his elegant take on Floyd Cramer’s country piano stylings. Enjoy…