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THE DISTRACTIONS, The Nashville, their first London
gig. On before Joy Division, the place
is packed. I’m here to enjoy myself, not
to think of things to write about and consequentially am totally pissed. The Distractions don’t play their best but
neither is it their worst. The organ
fails to work when called upon so consequentially Adrian has to remember the second
guitar part. I try to dance but there
are tables in the way. The band seem a
bit less relaxed than usual, Mike and Steve are a bit less sure of their ground
than usual and are not as confident in their between song asides. So what, they sound good. The audience don’t quite know that to make,
about a third of them are getting into it but a few throw bottles (dodged most
stylishly by the band) in the second encore.
JOY DIVISION at the Nashville are great. The Nashville was firebombed by the National
Front not so long ago and looks similar to the black hole of Calcutta – not that
I’ve been there to check the truth of that.
Who thought The Factory was tatty you middle class posers. Joy Division, well I’m stood on a chair
talking to a friend I’ve not seen for a long time and watching the band about
two thirds of the way into their set I have to leap off the chair and start
dancing. This is what it’s all about,
involuntary excitement that compels participation and it’s just good, if you
know what I mean.
The last part of the interview by Dave Cantrell at Caught In The Carousel where the band further discuss the album and touch on future plans.
An Interview With The Distractions
By Dave Cantrell
INTERVIEW with Steve Perrin, Mike Finney & Nick Halliwell
CITC: Mike, your voice, obviously, is the
central instrument of the ‘Distractions sound,’ if we may call it that. It
sounds natural and unforced to me, intuitive. Was there every any training, and
if not, have you had to work much at it? At what age did you realize you had a
bit of a gift of a singing voice?
MIKE: I never had training and I think that
usually spoils the feeling, if you know what I mean.I can’t say as I worked on
it, just practising seems to improve a voice. I listened to Sam Cooke, Otis
Redding and all the Motown stuff growing up and tried to sing a bit like them.
Then I realised that to have that kind of feeling was more a matter of
believing what you sing rather than a technique (this was because Otis and Sam
did some bad stuff in the name of trends! Listen to Sam Cooke’s Gospel
recordings or Otis’s early love songs if you’re looking for an explanation of
soul music). Not forgetting another two of my favourite voices, Al
Bowley and especially Bing Crosby. Mix it in with a bit of Elvis and a
touch of Janis Joplin and that’s what I always tried to aim for. Failed of
course, but you shouldn’t stop trying because that’s what makes a unique sound.
I still don’t think I have a great
singing voice, possibly because I can’t sing Sam’s “Hem of His Garment” or
Jackie Wilson’s “Your Love is Lifting Me Higher” the way I would like to sing
it. But, neither can anybody else, I guess! However,I always loved to
sing pop songs, hymns, anything that made you feel better. I was also a shy
kid, so it was a way of expressing myself without people asking me to leave the
room. That came a bit later when I’d stopped singing.
I was chatting with Nicky Tesco (of the
Members) many years ago and we decided that however bad a voice was, it was
talent and not just holding down wires or hitting things. Nobody in either
band agreed…!
CITC: Steve, your lyrics have a precision to
them, a knack for nailing the emotional resonance of the song with both flow
and economy, often succeeding at that cherished quality of a three-and-a-half
pop song: resembling a short story (“Girl Of The Year,” for example). Do you
have to wrestle them into shape or do they emerge without too much struggle?
Plus, if you wouldn’t mind tackling the standard process question: Which comes
first, generally, lyrics, melody or an image/character?
STEVE: During the early days of the band I,
like many young men, believed that my own angst was interesting, so the lyrics
tended to come first followed by the tune. The End Of The Pier was written
after a period of almost 20 years, during which I had not written any songs and,
initially, I had no idea what I was going to write about so with most of the
stuff I started off with a musical idea, often adding lyrics which I knew to be
rubbish just so I’d have a song structure to work with. I would then ditch the
initial lyrics and start working on something which made more sense. Sometimes
the second set of lyrics worked and sometimes they also had to be rejected and
more work done.
“Girl Of The Year” was an exception,
however. First I had the title (partially ‘borrowed’ from Tom Wolfe’s essay on
Baby Jane Holzer) and, in the initial stage of wondering what I was going to
write about, I thought I might use the landscape around me. I don’t know if
you’ve even been to Wellington, New Zealand, but it looks a bit like a smaller
San Francisco – hills, white wooden houses, pickup trucks – and I had the beach
at the end of my road so decided to try and write something like the Beach
Boys. That’s why it has “endless summer” in the first line but by the end of
the line it’s gone cold and in the second line a pier has appeared and my
girl’s considering jumping off it. It was then I realized that, wherever I am
physically, my mental landscape is that of the North West of England and it’s
pretty much inescapable for me so that’s where the writing comes from.
CITC: Nick, I’m still amazed by the sound of
this record (even if I do say that about every Occultation release), given the
short preparation time as a band and how relatively brief the studio time was
(four, five days, I think you told me?). Factory Star’s Enter Castle Perilous
was recorded with similar speed but the goal there was maintaining a rawness of
sound appropriate to the spirit of that record – a resounding success by any
measure – and the short recording time was part of the design to capture that.
Yet here, under almost the exact time limitations, the sound is rather
luxuriously upholstered, round and full, which, as it happens, is exactly what this record
requires. Is it simply down to the different character of the two bands or have
you some magic elixir brewing behind the mixing desk?
NICK: If you’ve got strong material and the
right people the best method is to book a good studio and play the songs.
Factory Star were a tightly-drilled unit so Perilous was recorded in three days then
mixed the following weekend, with hardly any overdubs, even the lead vocals
were live. For Pier we
had four days in June 2011, no rehearsals, in fact we’d never all met before.
After that I set it aside for a few months, what with the Wild Swans album, financial
considerations, etc. When I came back to it I felt we already had all the
musical ideas we needed, so the rule was that overdubs should only bolster what
was there, and I only broke it a couple of times. Lead vocals are crucial and
astonishingly Mike’d done the whole album +1 outtake +3 acoustic versions in 6-7
hours at the original sessions. He came down to my place and we spent an
afternoon redoing just 3-4 songs.
At that point Steve and I agreed the
album didn’t need conventional mixing, where the producer zeroes the faders and
spends a week listening to the kick drum. I mix as I go along anyway, so it was
just a matter of getting the vocals to sit properly and everything else to gel
around them. John Dent and I mastered the whole album in an afternoon. It was
written, recorded, sequenced, mixed and mastered as a two-sided LP, so we
didn’t front-load it with the poppier songs at the start, and we also didn’t
use much compression on anything, so it does sound rather different to a lot of
modern records, which are mixed so that everything leaps out at you the first
time you hear it. The trouble with that is that it can get pretty tiring for
the ears so you’re into diminishing returns. I’d hope this is an LP that repays
repeated listening.
All in all, I’d estimate a couple of
weeks or so’s actual work went into making Pier, though it was spread over 9 months. Even so,
only four days of actual studio time, and that’s where the vast bulk of what
you hear on the record was done. On average each song you hear is approximately
the fourth time we’d ever played it. A couple of them maybe the third, and
there are two where we used take 6. I don’t think we recorded more than six
takes of anything.
CITC: As mentioned in my review, and
mentioned by many others as well, The Distractions, even during a 30+ year
absence, remained warmly embedded in listeners’ hearts and minds. A number of
bands back then made the one album and a handful of singles then disappeared,
but very few retained the interest The Distractions did. We all have our
theories as to why this is the case, what’s yours?
NICK: I’m least well-placed to answer this as
a member of The Distractions but can perhaps speak as a fan and with my label
hat on.
It’d be overstating the case to say
there’s a huge number of people who remember the band but what’s definitely
true is that those who care do so very deeply. My theory would be that the band
sprang from their audience and never forgot that. In fact they wrote about and
for their audience, so people identify those Distractions Mk I songs with their
own lives. Steve’ll correct me if I’m wrong but the way I see it, with Pier we set out to
do that again, i.e. to write about life in middle age. The other thing is that
when Mike sings a lyric you believe him. Take that combination, songs about
real life delivered with utter believability and that maybe goes some way
towards explaining it.
STEVE: Although there are undoubtedly some
women who enjoy our music the vast majority of the people you are referring to
who”kept the faith” are men. The End of the Pier strikes me as quite a
“male” album. There’s obviously stuff about male friendship and male-female
relations but if you dig under the surface there’s quite a lot of father-son
stuff (from both points of view).
If you add to that the fact that while Mike undoubtedly has a
strong voice there’s an underlying vulnerability to it, perhaps what we’re
doing is saying something about the male condition, or one version of it
anyway, at this age and this point in history, which chimes with a certain type
of man. Others, however, would be better qualified to answer this question than
me.
NICK: Steve’s right, it’s a very male album
but perhaps an unusual masculinity in that it looks inward and… I can’t
actually think of much music, or art in general, that deals with the subject of
male friendship in any real depth. As I’m sure I’ve said to you before, when I
got Steve’s first batch of around 5 songs, this was the first thing that leapt
out at me and so I wrote Wise in response, as I was able to kind of look in from the
outside in a strange kind of way. My other song on the album, Man of the Moment was
a deliberate attempt to bring Girl Of The Year into the overall pattern of the
thing. As we stood, it was the only third-person narrative song and didn’t
obviously tie in with the rest, but it was a very strong song which had to be
used. So I tried to write something that’d set it in context and link it in
with the rest. How well that succeeded isn’t up to me to say. The other lyric
that’s mostly mine is Boots,
although Steve wrote what we might consider the first draft of it.
The whole thing was a fascinating process and one I’m very keen
to repeat. I think Steve and I are just getting into our stride now.
CITC: Mike dropped a hint about one more album
and ‘oh boy!’ to that. I heard Nobody’s Perfect when I was 24 years old, End Of
The Pier shows up when I’m 56, so I have to ask, am I gonna have to wait until
I’m 88 to hear the next one?
STEVE: I suspect that there will be one last
Distractions album and while I like the idea of a deathbed confession record
written when I am in my late eighties I suspect that it will happen in the next
couple of years. I have a cutoff date of 2016 as Mike will be sixty then and
Kellie seventy. That will probably be time to say “goodbye”.
NICK: While there’d be something symmetrically
pleasing about three albums, one youthful, one middle-aged and one elderly,
there are certain logistical concerns – though by the early 2040s it may well
be that most recording studios cater primarily for geriatrics with walk-in
drumkits, amps built into comfy armchairs, monitoring via hearing aid loops,
etc. Mike, Steve and I have talked about doing another one as I hope I’m right
in saying that everyone enjoyed Pier and felt a sense of achievement – I know I
did. If we’re going to do it then, realistically, we probably need to get on
with it.
Further reading:
The penultimate part of the terrific piece over at Caught In The Carousel by Dave Cantrell. This is the first half the interview with key Distractions where they discuss the old days, touching on the sounds of the new album.
An Interview With The Distractions
By Dave Cantrell
INTERVIEW with Steve Perrin, Mike Finney & Nick Halliwell
CITC: Steve and Mike, I know the barebones,
Wiki version of the Distractions origin story – formed in ’75 at college, swept
up into the energy of punk – but could you flesh it out a little, including
why the short-lived stab at reuning in the late '90s didn’t take and
how you were able to come together this time?
Steve: To call what was happening in 1975 a
band is pushing things a little. Basically Mike and I and a revolving cast of
other people were making a noise in a primary school at the weekends. None of
the other people stayed very long as there was no chance of getting any gigs,
making any money or meeting any girls, which seem to be the main motivations of
a lot of people to get involved in bands. Mike and I would not have objected to
doing any of those things but were also compelled to carry on making this noise
as ‘normal’ life seemed to only have the potential to drive us crazy. The good
thing about punk was that it led to a number of small venues opening where
untried bands could get a chance to play. Also you didn’t have to be musically
competent if you were in some way ‘interesting’.
Our
first gigs were played with Pip Nicholls on bass (who we met through Pete
Shelley of Buzzcocks) and Tony Trappe on drums. Tony left soon after and Adrian
Wright came in on guitar and brought Alex Sidebottom with him to play drums.
That’s the lineup that made most of the records.
The mid 1990s
thing was interesting but it was hard to get people interested. It was before
the internet had become ubiquitous so it was difficult to let people know what
we were doing. Then personal stuff started to get in the way. Our then bass
player, Nick Garside, went to California to do some work, met a woman and never
came back. Our drummer, Bernard Van Den Berg, went to South Africa to do some
work, met a woman and did come back briefly but eventually decided to move to
South Africa permanently. Then I moved to New Zealand (I had already met a
woman so she came too).
Mike: It’s correct that Steve and I met at
college, but the original drummer was the son of one of Steve’s colleagues and
the other guitar was a colleague of mine. We practised in a church school hall
for a while until we decided that my mate’s love of the Stones was too much for
Steve and me (nor conducive to writing our own songs!) so Lawrence left and we
finally got hold of a bass player through Pete Shelley, with whom we shared
many a glass of bitter ale. Pete gave us Pip’s number and we practised
with Steve, me, Pip and Tony, the drummer. We played our first four gigs at the
Ranch Bar in Manchester, the haunt of most of that city’s ‘New Wave’ and ‘Punk’
artists and a few clubs in Liverpool as well. It soon became clear that to
improve and play the kind of stuff Steve and I were writing (“Still it Doesn’t
Ring” and “Valerie” were the two that stayed with us), we needed a better
drummer and another guitar or keyboards. Most of our songs at that point were
written walking to the beer shop, bottles or cans then taken back to Steve’s
mum’s for further inspiration. We advertised in NME and Sounds ‘Free
pages’ (Steve always said you get what you pay for…) and got Alec for drums and
an old mate of his Adrian, who could play guitar well and some rudimentary
keyboards. The practice room in the church in Wythenshawe (a large council
estate in Manchester) was a bit too distant for Alec and Ade, so we started
practising in a pub, first in Mossley, a town just outside Manchester, then in
a pub in the centre of Manchester.
In late 1978, we
got a practice room in Tony Davidson’s place (TJM), along with Joy Division,
Buzzcocks and an assortment of other Manchester bands. It was there we
met Brandon Leon, who supplied us with recording time for both You’re Not
Going Out Dressed Like That and “Time Goes By So Slow”.
As for the '94/'95
reunion stuff, it started because we had studio time in Nick Garside’s ‘Out of
the Blue’ studio in central Manchester. He was a fairly well known
producer from the ‘Madchester’ scene and asked if we would record some tunes
with him playing bass. This became 6 songs, three of which became the Black
Velvet EP that Nick Halliwell released, one was used by Factory magazine [Scream City by Cerysmatic] and
the other two are awaiting extra further treatment some time in the
future. In 1995 we booked a session in Joe Meek’s studio in London and
recorded one track on all-valve equipment (the same as used for Telstar and My
Generation!). The drummer was Bernard Van Den Berg who was originally in the
Secret Seven with me, but also in the 1994 Distractions. The bass player this time
was Kevin Durkin, who was in the Escape Committee with Steve and originally in
the Direct Hits, another TJM band. We didn’t fold, we just sort of
‘fizzled-out’.
In 2009, I saw a
mention of The Distractions on the website for Granite Shore, Nick Halliwell’s
band, which was very complimentary of us and I sent a ‘Thank You’ note to Nick.
A few weeks later, I noticed on the same website a note from Nick asking me to
get in touch. I did and Nick asked if I would like to record some more
tunes. I was happy to do so, but only if Steve was involved – now in New
Zealand. Nick somehow got the whole thing together and we recorded the Come Home EP in
Liverpool. We all enjoyed it so much, and Nick being a really Top Guy, we
started talk of an album. That was recorded in 2011 in Exeter. It
seems to be doing very well and now there’s talk of another (and final)
album…Love it!
CITC: Steve, Nick, you’re both playing
guitar throughout the record but instead of the standard roles such a set-up
suggests – one’s primarily lead, one’s rhythm, maybe some switching up – the
two of you seem to intertwine, overlap, etc, to the extent it sometimes seems a
single guitarist overdubbed. Was that the intention or is it just a naturally
occurring dynamic between the two of you?
Steve: I think it’s because we’re both
songwriters who play the guitar rather than guitarists who write songs so the
main thing that’s going through our heads is “what does the song need?”. The
only bit of conventional lead guitar on the record is on “I Don’t Have Time”
but that’s only there to reflect the lyric and what Mike’s doing with the
vocal.
Nick: I don’t think either of us has ever
had any interest in becoming a guitar hero, although Steve’s lead break on I Don’t Have Time suggests
he’s the better qualified of the two of us. As he says, we’re both thinking
about what the song needs, so on any given song you’ve generally got one of us
underpinning the rhythm and the other the melody of the song rather than
attempting to embellish and there’s a certain amount of switching back and forth,
sometimes during the same song - 100 Times on the new album is a good example,
initially I’m playing the rhythm and Steve the melody, then we swap – I didn’t
even realise we’d done this until I came to try and work out what I’d done so I
could play it live! Essentially, when you’ve got a vocalist as good as Mike
Finney you’ve got to leave him enough room to do his stuff. Essentially The
Distractions' recipe is that if the material’s strong enough you’ve just got
to let Mike put it across and anything that detracts from that is an – if
you’ll excuse the pun – unwanted distraction.
Steve: The relationship does seem to have
evolved naturally and, organically, our sense of timing is very close but I
remember liking the fact that on early Rolling Stones records you couldn’t tell
which guitarist was doing what: it just sounded like one big guitar. Maybe
that’s an unconscious influence, I don’t know. Certainly, when it was time to
prepare for the live shows and I was listening back to the recordings I quite
often couldn’t work out which part was Nick and which was me.
Nick: Not just naturally but almost tacitly
– Steve and I have only ever met in recording studios and on stage. The first
time, on the first morning of the Come Home EP sessions, the only discussion was
about which of us would plug into which amp and having resolved that I don’t
remember us ever talking about anything guitar-related again. Steve sends me
demos of his songs, with him playing the guitar, so if he’s carrying the rhythm
I’ll usually go for the melody and vice versa. I can’t remember us ever
actually talking about any of this though… When Steve and I said goodbye, in
the bar of The King’s Arms in Salford on the evening of Saturday 1st September,
his parting words were “one day we must actually sit down and have a
conversation…”. I rather imagine this with the two of us as gnarled old men.
It’ll be fairly soon then.
When I came to
mix the record, I was struck by how tight the guitars were, even though Steve
and I had only played together once before when we recorded the album, and the
obvious thing seemed to be to use that. So neither guitar is mixed as “lead”,
they’re each placed consistently in one speaker throughout the album at pretty
much identical levels, I think mine’s on the left and Steve’s on the right but
it might be the other way around. I did use one or two little production tricks
to reinforce this but it was merely a matter of capitalising on something
naturally occurring.
[to be continued - final part to come]
Here's the next installment of the truly great article from Caught In The Carousel. Side two of the album is dissected here.
An Interview With The Distractions
By Dave Cantrell
Flip the record over and whattaya know, another gloaming gem (does get to be a bit routine on this album, in truth), this one, “Too Late To Change, ” built on the not unclever trope of a fading tattoo migrating on aging skin. Aside from its obvious musical merits, single-ready and all, buoyed with a Wrecking Crew level of unobtrusive excellence, it’s the words that wrap around your brain like clinging ivy. Perrin’s lyrics can sometimes tend to leap – or, rather, step gingerly – over the barriers of scansion with an acrobatic, gliding precision, scattering feints throughout the album that are at once both concise and unexpected. One’s reminded of slightly less-literary Leonard Cohen, words that flow with the impression of being effortless when their creation almost certainly was not (though I think we can safely assume the process was nowhere near as painstaking as Mr Cohen’s). More than proving the point, the opening stanza from “Too Late To Change”: The name on my arm isn’t where it once was/the skin starts to age it/starts moving because of/a process that’s slowing the/blood in my veins but/I’d go through the/ whole thing again and again” and yes note the oh-so-subtle shifts in the line breaks. It is exactly this emotive slyness – the purposeful slip of the tongue, an anxious hiccup made smooth – that, beyond the band’s basic pop penchant, has marked The Distractions out from the start and had as much to do with hooking us all in the first place as anything in their sound.
But oh my that sound. Whether it’s the tumbling skip-along of “The Summer I Met You” with June Bride Arash Torabi’s jumpy, pugnacious bass and the crashing, articulate punch of Mike Kellie’s drums (yes, that Mike Kellie, he with the Only Ones and Spooky Tooth in his CV), the racing restraint of “Boots, ” the exquisite melding of elements on “I Don’t Have Time” or the mournful churn of album closer “The Last Song, ” the band here is simply magnificent, tight as the devil’s own hand-rolled cheroot and twice as smooth. Not bad for a band whose two principle members live over 11,000 miles apart (Perrin’s in New Zealand these days) and who played these songs at most three times before nailing the take. The whole recording took five days and, really, why should it take more when you’re this good?
Inevitably, however, any discussion regarding what this band sounds like has to return to the quavering baritone singing at the center of it. Finney’s voice never sounds anything less than almost unspeakably natural as it limns the boundaries of fatalism, yearning, and regret, and make no mistake, there’s a fair amount of regret admitted to here. Not the sad, sorry-for-itself kind, but more resigned and accepting, the ‘Hey that’s life and take it as it lays’ kind. It’s his voice’s natural habitat. Distractions songs inhabit a place where a character and his or her motives are indistinguishable, it’s what makes them so endearing, so enduring, what makes them settle in your marrow, and it’s the uncanny mix of buoyancy and gravitas in the singer’s voice that makes this happen so convincingly. It is also, as it turns out, the ideal instrument for both the pimply longings of a post-teenage romantic and the ruminative surveys of a man in his fifty-sixth year. Sepia-toned and clear-eyed in equal measure, the voice, along with the songs and the marinated tone of this record have all merged into a wistful though vitally living document of pre-internet, pre-Instagram reminiscence.
There is, for me, a constant undercurrent, listening to this record. Yes, in some respects, time goes by so slow but, truly, it doesn’t. Those thirty-two years have, by any measure, whipped by in a blur. Certainly each of us can break down constituent parts, compile a list of specifics and a mind full of images sufficient enough to bulge a scrapbook, but as an arc of experience it’s flashed past. Not only that, our own private nostalgia is not in any sense sequential or linear. That day on the plane at the fag-end of 1979, idly, dreamily flipping through singles, is as much a part of what gets carried through my daily life as when my daughter’s next performance is, where or if my wife and I are going to buy a house, what I’m working on next for CITC or, indeed, some randomly generated memory of an event from fourteen years ago. Viewed this way, as an agglomeration, undelineated, it would all be naught but a jumble, just a shapeless mélange of living, our minds – and therefore our lives – simply some ragged game of recollection pinball were it not for the emotions with which each is imbedded. Which is one of the reasons we love, and need, records so much.
The End Of The Pier, as befits an album by a band of this vintage, succeeds via a rather aching palimpsest effect, the matured, more umber strokes painted with a hazy, opaque transparency over those less seasoned characters with the brighter, more naïve colors that first appeared on the canvas three-plus decades ago. And like the best of such records (Pete Astor’s Songbox is another), that effect gets transferred across our own lives by the very act of listening to it, it soaks into us, there’s something of a spell involved.
Without a doubt there is some aspect of irony here, an album hammering away on themes of time and remembrance being made by a band that is itself timeless, but that’s The Distractions all over again. They were, in essence, a band out of time in 1980 and remain so in 2012 and in fact there’s their epitaph should it ever be written: The Distractions, a band deliriously out of time.
On the small promotional poster for The End Of The Pier that came inside the package from Occultation, above the same album cover shot of a lonely Blackpool Pier resplendent in rainy grays and salt air, the tag line, lifted from side one earworm “Boots, ” is “Who’d’ve thought that coming back would be so hard?” Quite germane, certainly, but for this writer two other lines from the album speak just as well and perhaps more succinctly to the relief and joy of having The Distractions back on my turntable: Too long in anonymity from “I Don’t Have Time” and, from “The Summer I Met You, ” trying to forget you didn’t seem logical,” to which I’d have to add ‘nor possible.’
[to be continued]
Second part of the fantastic piece at Caught In The Carousel. This deals with the first half of the new album...
The Distractions Interview
By Dave Cantrell
The most oft-quoted factoid about The End Of The Pier is the gap between the 1980 debut and this follow-up. As a marketing meme it has the advantage of being both winkingly amusing and utterly true. But in truth, all the basic math of that particular detail succeeds at underlining, and with some emphasis, is the remarkable extent to which …Pier feels, in almost every effortless way, like nothing so much as simply the logical next step, the album that was meant to follow no matter the year.
The gap, in effect, melts, and melts immediately. There could scarcely be a more ringingly appropriate choice to act as a thirty-two year segue than “I Don’t Have Time.” Chimed in by a strummed electric layered on a subtle bed of Nick Garside’s B-3 organ, by the time those are joined a couple measured steps later by an acoustic, by Perrin’s melody lead and then the rhythm section literally blooming into being, it’s instant pop magic in that inimitable Distractions way of creeping under your skin with a warm saline shiver. This is human music, human pop, a notion only seconded by the soulful vulnerability and defiance of Finney’s voice. It’s rather hard to quantify, that voice. There’s a kind of raspy shimmer to it and it seems to magnify every word it touches. There’s a sizable clutch of slow songs on this album, each quite beautiful in its own right, but it’s Finney’s voice that transforms that ‘slow’ into mesmerizing, the ‘beautiful’ into sublime. By the end of “I Don’t Have Time” it’s risen to a delicate roar, putting the final, clarion flourish on a song that, in the aggregate, is every bit the unabashed classic as “Time Goes By So Slow” – to which is seems a fitting and brilliant bookend – and “Lost” off last year’s Come Home EP. Smitten from the off then, who’s surprised?
Clearly not me but at the same time, the more I listen to …Pier, the more this notion of gaplessness begins to seem a tad facile, oversimplified. Sonically, structurally, in terms of hooks and craft, it is indeed the case that the only factor that argues against a seamless leap over three-plus decades is the production, almost impossibly lush with the studio and mastering possibilities of the 21st century. And again, the quality of the songwriting, the concise charm of the arrangements, well, those are nothing new and will shock exactly no one. However, spend enough time inside this record, letting the songs soak in good and deep and you’ll find ample evidence of an album well aware of its graying profile. No matter where you drop the needle, you’ll find yourself barely more than a groove or two away from a reflection, a regret, some wry observation steeped in acknowledgment that, yes, a fair passel of seasons have fallen off the calendar since last we met.
Second song “Wise,” aside from sharing its title with the one adjective that rises to the rescue as a sort of consolation prize for those of us whose primes keep passing further behind us – a built-in ‘life achievement award,’ if you will – eases in with a couple of doleful minor-key chords that in themselves have the flavor of the advancing autumn outside my window as I write this, a quiet Sunday morning amid the fallen leaves. One of two tracks here credited solely to Nick Halliwell (bit of a relief, that; would have been awkward had Perrin asked Finney to sing a song addressed to the front man of a glory-days band that includes lines like “Time has been gentle to me/ you have not fared so well”), it’s as cast in the amber glow of recollection as anything on this record and in that sense somewhat sets the mood. The tone rather glistening with resignation, the sound sumptuous, “Wise” tackles the long simmer of resentment with the gentlest of hands, imbues it with the utmost tenderness. The key to the song’s luminous melancholia may well be the deftly picked acoustic running in and out and underneath much of the track like some errant madrigal plucked from a leftover pocket of Elizabethan air, but whether it’s that or the pop chorale background vox cosseting the chorus, when Finney’s forcefully quiet croon [actually a rare Perrin lead vocal] lets slip the line “I think we’d best get back to our wives,” the effect is such you want to offer not just the singer but the song itself a warm coat and a fresh cup of tea.
This is what The Distractions do as well as anyone, rivet you with what might best be described as a vivid murmur of emotion. Nothing flagrant, never too florid, mind, but over and over again the band manages to strike that magic balance between the maudlin and the cynical (nuanced, I believe is the word). In a sense, The Distractions produce not just songs but quick, revealing snapshots strung along the spectrum of human dalliance and folly. If your heart were an eye these flashes of emotion would be burned – subtly, glancingly – on its retina. As odd as it sounds and debatable as the syntax might normally be, these are songs complex with simplicity.
It is, of course, the case that such a teasing oxymoron, spot on as it is, couldn’t stand but on the strengths of the arrangements – mature, classic, drawn from the canon – and how intuitively produced/mixed this record is, as sympathetic to the pathos at work here as, say, Tony Richardson was to that of Alan Sillitoe. There’s a humble grandeur to the sound, meticulous but in no way fussy. No matter the tempo, Nick Halliwell’s production ensures an LP that’s of a piece, encasing every track in a kind of solid liquid warmth (Oh will the paradoxes never end, you’re asking; well, no, probably not, since all the best pop records inspire them). Such is the wholeness of this record you could extract any one song as a single – and really, any one will do, …Pier is chock full of them – and, once its run was done, it would be absorbed seamlessly back into the fold as if it never left. ‘Nothing stands out’ is as true as ‘The whole thing stands out,’ surely the definition of a complete, true and proper long-playing album.
The quality of the mix – and the fidelity of the vinyl may very well make you cry – gets re-emphasized here to lead us back to the autumnal nature of the material, which wouldn’t have been nearly as effective without it. Songs as bathed in anamnesis as these require at least that level of care and embrace. We’re lucky they got it, as it allows us to luxuriate in what, by today’s standards, is that rarest of waters, basic elegant songcraft, the kind that doesn’t trumpet itself and is all the more startling for it. The tidy ten songs on here (five per side on the LP, just as God planned it) are, in a phrase, modest and sublime, and in that sense remind of the crop of canny songsmiths that dotted the landscape in the mid-80s, Jasmine Minks, June Brides (no coincidence that Phil Wilson and Co. find themselves under the Occultation banner), Weather Prophets et al. Come to that, …Pier could be the after-the-fact masterclass in that type of pure pop suss. Example? Well, that’s the problem. Try to spotlight one and the others all tug at your sleeve with deserving, ‘No, no, listen to me!’ urgency. But here’s a go.
Ending side one of the LP, “When It Was Mine” slips into the world with a pair of sustained guitar strums, a brushed drum and a plumbing bass going straight for the bottom of your throat that might suggest heartbreak a la AMC, which is to say loneliness and ache. Finney’s vocal, of course, only reinforces that impression – full of anomie however brightly sung – but the killer here is Perrin’s five-note, reverbed guitar figure underlining the chorus, a short, rather heartbreaking jolt that recalls nothing less than the gut punch delivered by a certain Mr Reid in “Just Like Honey.” The fact that that’s almost certainly the first time ‘AMC’ and ‘JAMC’ have ever been brought together to reference the same song should give an idea of what a pearl of a song it is.
[to be continued]
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