Pure pop moment

Here's the middle part of Martin Crookall's original piece on 'Nobody's Perfect', while we wait for the (more competitively-priced) 'Parabolically Yours' set to be be re-born. 

Stop grumbling at the back! You've waited 35 years for it to be be reissued... what's a few more months? Anyway, Martin's piece below deals with Side One.

The Distractions: Nobody’s Perfect

Posted: October 20, 2013 in Soundtrack of a Lifetime

Tags: Adrian Wright, Alec Sidebottom, Factory Records, Mike Finney, Nobody's Perfect, Pip Nicholls, Steve Perrin, The Distractions, Time Goes By So Slow, You're Not Going Out Dressed Like That

...it’s “Nobody’s Perfect” that I’m concerned with now, the only album recorded by the original line-up. It’s very hard to get hold of, having never been released on CD (nor are there any plans that it should ever be), and copies of the LP being rare, and consequently expensive.

Nor is it a major album, a lost cultural (or even cult) masterpiece, though I’ve always contended that its sound, marrying the energy and melody of the Buzzcocks to a softer, more keyboard oriented sound, makes “Nobody’s Perfect” the missing link between the Buzzcocks and the Human League of “Dare”. But it’s still an album worth listening to, and there are at least three solid masterpieces, all from the Finney/Perrin team, that deserve to be known widely.

The album begins with jittery guitar, skittering into your hearing, before a solid riff, having its roots in the band’s punk origins, leads the band on a busy hustle. “Waiting for Lorraine” is a love song, but it’s a peculiarly Mancunian love song, with its feet set firmly upon the ground. Finney’s waiting for Lorraine: she’s his girlfriend, he’s sat by the phone because she’s supposed to be calling him back, but he’s not hearing from her. The longer he doesn’t hear from her, the more he starts to doubt her. He doesn’t want her to love him forever, just to stop her telling lies. Perrin rips in with a fast guitar solo and Finney shoots back, washing his hands of untrustworthy, heartbreaker Lorraine, until he’s now waiting for her to go drop dead.

It’s a love song of disillusion, set to a fast, melodic sound, guitar based, with little snippets of voices behind Finney’s upfront tones, yet it’s only his side of things. The twist is that we have absolutely no idea whether Lorraine is a cheater or if it’s Finney’s anger at being stood up (even if it’s only a non-returned call after a phone argument) that’s creating this image.

As I said, Mancunian.

It’s followed by “Something for the Weekend”, an equally up-tempo, energetic song, driven by sharp organ riffs and an underlying pounded piano. Musically, it wears it’s rock’n’roll roots pretty close to the surface, especially in Perrin’s trebly solo, but the busyness doesn’t disguise a certain thinness in the song. The chorus repeats insistently, as Finney pleads for something to stop the pain, ease the strain, numb his brain, make it real again (so, nothing to do with drugs then). It’s all to do with his mysteriously unexpressed behaviour, that makes him an outcast.

The song also features a technique that the Distractions increasingly used over what little was left of their career, that is that guitars and keyboards would drop out, leaving only drum and bass to support Finney’s voice. It works here, because the percussion keeps the rhythm of the song, but elsewhere it tends to render the song choppy, disrupting its integrity.

Track three is the album’s biggest mistake. It’s a full-sounding, swirl of guitar and organ cover of Eden Kane’s 1964 hit, “Boyscry” (though Kane sold it as two words). This was the only single to be pulled off the album (“Something for the Weekend” was re-recorded as a single) and though the sound was representative of the band in this album, the archaic nature of the song and the lack of confidence shown in the Distractions’ own music was a colossal own goal.

It slides into “Sick and Tired”, an uninspired retread of “Waiting for Lorraine”, heavily featuring synthesizers over a niggling rhythm that breaks out into a brief but vicious chorused title line. Once again, Finney’s waiting for someone who’s not showed, though this time he’s out in the rain, smoking a cigarette and trying to look cool. A vicious solo from Perrin overtakes the end of the song, but there’s a lack of conviction to the song, or perhaps the production doesn’t entirely believe in the rawer sound of the band’s origins.

It doesn’t matter because we now approach the first of the album’s three undoubtedly classic moments. “Leave you to Dream” is an airy confection, a pure pop moment, its lightness promised in its exuberant intro an confirmed in its first line, as Finney cut in, effortlessly, his voice floating over a beautifully smooth keyboard riff that frolics and gambols.

It’s again a love song, a hopeless and unrequited love. Finney’s found his girl, and she’s truly lovely. She’s asleep and dreaming: he holds back from waking her because he fears (knows?) that she’s too good for him, yet he dreams that in her dreams she dreams of him.

And yet… Though he’s stoical about it at first, accepting of his non-place in her affections, aware that his only recourse is to get pissed, but whilst he watches her and longs for her regard, he wishes for her the things she dreams of, and the hope remains in there that, in that unknown land behind her closed eyes, that maybe there is a place for him, by her side.

It’s a stunningly lovely, oddly hopeful song that should have been far better known.

It’s followed by “Louise”, a sharp-edged little song with another Mancunian take on the problems of love. Finney’s singing to his mate, who’s pissed off at the Louise of the title, who used to be his girlfriend, but they’ve broken up now. She’s with Finney now, and if this guy should blame anyone, it should be Finney, not the girl he never properly made his feelings known to, and whose name he’s been trying to blacken (you can just hear the sound of the unspoken words ‘slag’, ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’).

Finney’s stepped out of his own head now. Where, in “Waiting for Lorraine”, he could only see and blame the girl, now he’s looking at just such a guy, and telling him off.

“Paracetamol Paralysis”, which closes side one, is very much The Distractions in full-out punk mode, riffing ferociously, with hard-edged guitars and pumping drums, in the middle of a night out. Finney’s been down the disco since quarter to nine, getting into the groove, and he’s taken this handful of pills someone’s slipped him. Heaven knows what he thought they were but they were actually paracetamol, and everything’s bloody strange.

It’s an intense, nervy, but almost comical track – I mean, bloody paracetamol! – that is a draining experience. The brief pause whilst we turn over the record is quite welcome.

[to be continued]

(c) Martin Crookall