The Housemartins, Happy Hour (1986)

Artist: The Housemartins
Title: Happy Hour
Description: single; track, London 0 Hull 4
Label: Go! Discs
Release date: 1986
First heard: 1986

What a good place to be

Time, ladies and gentlemen, please, to further deify a man already deified. As we peer round the final curtain on The 143, tears dilute beers, and pint pots are duly raised in the direction of John Robert Parker Ravenscroft. He was our sturdiest bridge over the troubled waters of popular music, post-prog, linking the throb of dub reggae, Bulgarian voices, Kanda Bongo Man, Barmy Army and The Wedding Present to Bongwater, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, Duane Eddy and Toumani Diabaté, by way of The Undertones, the Elgins, Link Wray and the Flying Lizards.

There’s nothing dazzling or original or post-rational to say about John, at whose Aga-warmed Suffolk house I spent a bucolic day in the summer of ’99, a pilgrimage we all dreamed of making, and yet the truth was, we all enjoyed the same intimacy wherever he was broadcasting from and wherever we heard it, under the bedclothes or over the soundwaves. The synapse crackled constantly. We knew him. He knew us. That he latterly broadcast from his own manor was the most important home truth of all. It was always all back to Peel’s. (I was in Stowmarket to interview John for a 60th birthday cover of Radio Times, a landmark for me, too.)

I know for gospel that I first heard the Housemartins’ heart-stopping debut Flag Day when most people not fated to live in Humberside did: between 10pm and midnight on Radio 1 on 29 July 1985, when Peel broadcast their first session bearing his imprimatur. I was living in a study bedroom in Battersea, South London, at the time, both lonely and never alone in the twilight hours. The fleet-of-foot foursome with a spiritual bent recorded Drop Down Dead, Flag Day, Stand At Ease and Joy Joy Joy that summer, and somehow or other, between mouthfuls of reactivated powdered milk and plain own-brand biscuits, I sealed the standout onto cassette tape, alerting me at once to the band’s musical acumen and SWP rigour (“It’s a waste of time if you know what they mean/Try shaking a box in front of the Queen”). Ironically, the migratory bird after which they are named has a blue head; the band had not a blue bone in its body.

The third band signed to the still-wet Go! Discs, they followed Flag Day with Sheep the following year, and set out their counter-metropolitan stall with the decisively named London 0 Hull 4, produced by John Williams (not that one), which signified cardigans, CND badges and a homoeroticism peculiar to firm male friends lined up against the world. That their first squirts of royalties were invested in a local youth football team went without saying. Chief songwriters Heaton and Cullimore (with input on three songs from former bassist Ted Key and a single co-credit for session wingman Pete Wingfield) said an awful lot without saying.

The LP’s kick-off, Happy Hour wasn’t just an indie hit, it was a hit hit, its match-fit jangle-guitar jamboree reaching a vertiginous number three. It had entered the Top 40 at 30 on 8 June, risen to 12 the next week, then to its peak on 22 June, kept from the number one spot by Nu Shooz and The Edge of Heaven, farewell single from bronze gods Wham! Our problem-skinned quartet held steady on 29 June, this time robbed of a flag day at the summit by Wham! and – hello – Madonna. Tough competition for the third most popular act in Britain. Cap-sleeved Glaswegian Owen Paul arrived to nudge them back down to four in July, then seven, then ten. Their descent was decent: slow, incremental, leisurely. That’s a happy thirteen weeks. A good place to be. (They would top the charts that Christmas with an ecclesiastical cover of an Isley Brothers song, but denied Christmas Number One status by the reissue of a 1957 original by Jackie Wilson. Classic soul was their friend and enemy.)

Like most of the most memorable tunes that radiate out in harmonious waves from the shady grinning soul of Paul Heaton, Happy Hour is effortlessly catchy, misleadingly light, freighted with social commentary and soulfully sung by the nation’s favourite choirboys. (Also, in subsequent incarnations, girls: take a bow Jacqui Abbott, Briana Corrigan and Alison Wheeler.) As well as Cullimore, Heaton co-wrote with Dave Rotheray in The Beautiful South and currently collaborates with writing partner Jonny Lexus in Gran Canaria. Nobody else knows how Paul does it.

With its joyfully crude claymation video, Happy Hour had make-do charm built in and wooed even those – in fact especially those – who made happy hour so unhappy by being happy that the fire is real and the barman is a she.

And the meaning of style is a night out with the boss

It’s about male bonding rituals and the abject fear of standing out from the lunchtime crowd. It’s about “speaking a different language” from the flock, with their open wallets and closed minds, and their aspirations taken in “footsteps overgrown with moss” towards domestic safety and sexual compliance. There’s even a hint of Christian prurience in the couplet, “They tell me that women grow on trees, and if you catch them right they will land upon their knees.” Not to pray, one dares to assume. I’m thinking about Joe Lampton and Arthur Seaton and Colin Smith and Vic Brown and the other male relics of Barstow and Braine and Sillitoe and Delaney when I hear the desperate plea, “And you take all your clothes off, and go back to the kitchen sink.”

Five years, two albums, one number one, six Top 20 hits, four old heads on four young pairs of shoulders: the Housemartins built a nest in the eaves of popular music and then flew away south to broader pastures.*

 

* As happy good fortune would have it, the concurrent reruns of Top of the Pops on BBC Four are dominated by The Beautiful South, a bigger unit that staked a claim with debut single Song For Whoever, sealed now in amber as one of the UK’s all-time great number twos. Its organically inexorable rise saw it curve from 35, to 23, to 11, to 8, to 3, to its peak at 2, then 4, to 8, to 19, to 37 … They really were marvelous times.

Advertisement

The Kinks, Autumn Almanac (1967)

Artist: The Kinks
Title: Autumn Almanac
Description: single
Label: Pye
Release date: 1967
First heard: 1985

Yes, yes, yes!

On a recent, feature-length Sky Arts documentary about the pivotal Kinks 1968 album The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, more concisely entitled Echoes of a World, XTC’s Andy Partridge was among a phalanx of high-quality fans to hymn its attributes, filials and legacy. (Others included Noel Gallagher, Paul Weller and Suggs.) In precis, the non-accidental Partridge said that he’d spent his entire career trying to write something as good as Autumn Almanac. (I would argue that he succeeded, but that’s another entry.)

In any case, it feels fitting to crown an English song, by an English band of English men (Ray and Dave Davies from London, Devonian bassist Pete Quaife and drummer Mick Avory from Surrey), addressing the subject of this foreign field that will be forever England, at a moment in early 21st century history when the Union seems precarious, the Jack has been hijacked and Englishness is – to quote a later British rock band indebted to the Kinks – “for the Englishman again.” Like many islanders, The Kinks stood on the white cliffs and peered out at the rest of the world, seeking fame and fortune in the United States and stopping to conquer. Like all decent bands worth their blue sachet of salt in the post-rationing 60s, they arrived at the recently renamed JFK singing in the borrowed vernacular of the blues and the barrel-house.

But once the Kinks started making cents, they were sent packing by Uncle Sam for reasons fabled to be union-related and in Kinks mythology precipitated by a punch-up over the only partly true notion that these four limeys had gone over there and stolen the Yanks’ rock and roll jobs. So when Ray Dave, Mick and Pete touched back down at Heathrow – having sampled the Indian subcontinent on the way – they regrouped around an Anglocentricity they’d hitherto never thought to run up the flagpole. The nation saluted.

Thus, having dabbled in the conceptual on fourth album Face to Face in 1966, and foreshadowed Orwell’s warm beer and old maids in the stand-alone track Village Green (recorded for Something Else in 1967 and kept back), they asked in earnest, who did they think they were? Autumn Almanac, recorded at Pye and produced by Ray, with Mr Pleasant on the UK flip, was an orphan; a non-album single. But it fended for itself.

I’m always reading about how fond guitarists are of the dirt that forms around a lovingly manhandled instrument – ancient, filthy strings seem to hold a particular allure – and despite the coming of springtime, there are few guitar sounds muckier than the one that heralds Autumn Almanac. That chop-chop-chop gives the impression of something primitive and earthen, and yet, from out of the sonic fug trill angelic Kink harmonies, with Ray in nature-documentary mode: “From the dew-soaked hedge creeps a crawly caterpillar …”

The harmonic scene is set when the dawn “begins to crack” and a breeze blows leaves of “a musty-coloured yellow” before being swept up in Ray’s sack – that’s his autumn almanac. The spirit of The Lion and the Unicorn lengthens like the shadows over a Friday evening where “people get together, hiding from the weather.” If you can’t taste the grill-blackened dried fruit and the sliding butter on Ray’s currant buns, you’re not listening. It is no coincidence that jam is another name for preserve. But this immaculate demonstration of what people in 1967 didn’t casually refer to as “world-building” results in no Prelapsarian idyll. There’s a “lack of sun, because the summer’s all gone” and our narrator’s “poor rheumatic back.” Ray Davies doesn’t deal in absolutes, he’s in the nooks and the faults, the cracks and the veins. Nature is confirmed as red in tooth and claw, but what of human nature? (Ponder this: which other of God’s creatures would compile an almanac?)

As I type, Brexit threatens to spread pestilence across the land. It’s why I have turned to the Kinks and village green preservation, a project steeped in hope and glory, not today’s pessimism and division. Britain was five years off voting to join the Common Market in 1968; to stop the world because it wanted to get on. Nobody dreamed of leaving. In this European future, would there still be “football on a Saturday, roast beef on a Sunday”? Blackpool? Holidays? Yes, yes, yes.

Ray gets all belligerent as the song woofs and flutters to its conclusion.

This is my street, and I’m never gonna to leave it
And I’m always gonna to stay here

He’s playing a part, as all good storytellers are able: the ultimate Brexiteer, purple-faced, aged ninety-nine with no right to tell the kids, or the Kinks, what to do. You sort of hate to tell him that all the people he meets who “seem to come from my street” will soon be gone. Whatever it is that’s calling to Ray’s surrogate in song it’s unsustainable. “Come on home“? He’s already home.

I first heard this song when it was played to me by fellow art student Rob in a study bedroom in Battersea at the opposite end of London to where Ray and Dave grew up in Fortis Green between Colney Hatch and Muswell Hill and other places that sound fictional but which aren’t. It slotted in somewhere between the more contemporary jangle of Aztec Camera and the new rockabilly of Thee Milkshakes and other Peel-time reprobates.

I didn’t know what an almanac was (it’s a calendar that notes high and low tides, eclipses, sport and prizes, that sort of thing – Whitaker’s is in its 150th edition as I type), but by sheer coincidence I had just learned about the drink called Armagnac, a play on words Ray had already nabbed. I discovered the Kinks piecemeal from compilations Rob lent me and I came of age with little idea of what song came from which parent LP. Autumn Almanac was, however, a keeper. It was also a flash-forward to the band’s greatest long-playing achievement. Ask Noel Gallagher, who regards Village Green as one of the three LPs you have to own.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes