Here's the last part of Nick Halliwell's all-important blog piece which covers Nobody's Perfect. The Granite Shore and Occultation Recordings founder and now Distractions guitarist takes us through the album, track-by-track, side-by-side, with a final focus on the magnificent penultimate track, Looking For A Ghost.
Written in granite: Looking For A Ghost
As for
that album it is absolutely wonderful. It does rather sound as though most of
the budget was spent on trying to get a hit with Boys Cry, the only
cover version on the LP, which has a huge Spectoresque production although
we'll come to the one other big number in a moment. It opens with Waiting
For Lorraine, setting out the band's stall perfectly, picked guitars of a
kind that echoed later on in the playing of Johnny Marr, a great pop tune,
proper chorus, clever teenage angst lyric and that wonderfully perfect pop
voice of Finney's. That's followed by the LP version of Weekend, frankly
one of the weaker songs (although only relatively speaking) in the standard Friday
On My Mind vein and then the aforementioned Boys Cry.
Another short, upbeat pop song in Sick And Tired and then one
of the album's real high points, Leave You To Dream, a song of such
beautiful simplicity it still produces a bittersweet smile almost 30 years on.
Side one closes with Louise (see Lorraine) and the
amusing Paracetomol Paralysis, a song about... er... well, it's in
the title, really, delivered at breakneck pace.
If side
one is great, side two is even better. It starts with (Stuck In A)
Fantasy, another wonderful pop song and then a new version of Nothing,
from the first EP, a song well worth revisiting. Another achingly beautiful
bittersweet pop song (that's pretty much what The Distractions did, as
you'll've gathered by now) called Wonder Girl and yet another
called, ahem, Untitled.
That
brings us to my very favourite song on the album. As with so many of my
favourite songs, Looking For A Ghost incorporates elements of
both the sublime and the ridiculous. You can pretty much work out the lyric
from the title: "People wonder why I smile the way I do/They think I
should be sad now you're not around/People wonder why it is I don't miss
you/Perhaps they don't know what I've found" it begins. Finney delivers
his finest, subtlest vocal performance and, to his enormous credit, he does so
to the most over-the-top, preposterous backing vocals ever laid to tape (or any
other medium).
They
start off as silly "boo! I'm a ghost!" ooohs and ahs and then ramp it
up from there. By verse 2 you're giggling, the longer the song goes on, the
sillier the BVs get. Then we reach chorus 2, and suddenly we have a choir of
ghosts... They drop out for verse 3 and then the final chorus is both the
funniest and the most touching thing you'll ever hear as the orchestra brought
in for Boys Cry plays a few bars as the ghost chorus goes
absolutely berserk. It is utter genius. The first few times you hear it you
can't help laughing until you cry... But underneath the wondrous bombast
there's also pathos... Well, OK, there's also bathos (and, by the sound of the
choir, the rest of the Musketeers). It is truly wonderful.
They then make sure things end on an even sillier
note: as the phantasmal chorus disappears off into the fade-out, in comes a
piano, playing Satie-like chords for a few moments... And then in come the band
at full-pelt playing a daft song called Valerie at
Ramones-like speed. It's a truly great second side to a wonderful album. The
songwriting is superb throughout, there's wonderful ensemble playing (no
histrionics anywhere, barely a guitar solo), the songs are short and very, very
sweet. When I look at the sheer breadth of albums from this period that have
been reissued on CD over the last 15 years or so I just can't understand why
either Island haven't put it out or at least licensed it to some smaller label.
You could compile the entire Distractions catalogue (the EP, Factory single,
Island album, 3 singles and 'b' sides and Rough Trade EP) all onto a single CD.
Why on earth hasn't anybody done this?
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