Crosby, Stills & Nash, Marrakesh Express (1969)

Artist: Crosby, Stills & Nash
Title: Marrakesh Express
Description: single; album track, Crosby, Stills & Nash
Label: Atlantic
Release date: 1969
First heard: 2011

I smell the garden in your hair …

Gotta love BBC Four’s music documentaries. I don’t care how many times they re-slice the cake and roll out the same old clips of Woodstock, Carnaby Street, that bloke in the Smiley face t-shirt pumping his arms and the police boarding the Sex Pistols’ boat, I’ll be there, taking it all in, again. Although there is comfort in recognition, and self-congratulation in shouting out, “I’ve been there!” or “I know him!”, I relish being educated and – in hippie parlance that seems altogether relevant in the circumstances – “turned on.”

A few years ago (although it’ll have been repeated many times since), I found myself totally absorbed by Hotel California: LA From The Byrds To The Eagles, a 90-minute revel in West Coast rock, sun-bleached, country-tinged and dope-softened. Having long ago fallen under the spell of the Eagles and the Byrds (and, by extension, Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers), it struck me while watching this doc that Messrs D Crosby, S Stills and G Nash represented a six-legged, part-moustachioed gap in my knowledge. Suitably enthused by this latest lecture at the University of Four, I did something about it the very next day and purchased Crosby, Stills & Nash, hooked in by clips of Suite Judy Blue Eyes, You Don’t Have To Cry, Guinnevere and – surely the keystone track of the time and place – Marrakesh Express, a locomotive little ditty that encapsulates all that was heady and infused about the late 60s and Laurel Canyon, and which I wasn’t aware of ever hearing before. (I know they played it at Woodstock, but I don’t think it’s in the film of the gig.)

Written by Graham Nash when he was still in the Hollies but famously rejected by his parochial bandmates, precipitating his split and overdue relocation to California, Marrakesh Express makes me “want to go to there” (in the words of Liz Lemon). Not to Marrakesh and the train full of “ducks and pigs and chickens”, but to 1966-68, when such mind-freeing experiences in Casablanca and Goa were coming back in the battered suitcases of white musicians to Sunset. The beat is essentially skiffle. The riff is high and squeaky. The vocals breathy, sometimes out-of-breathy. It’s almost like a kids’ song. Although, for a “supergroup” its single writing credit suggests it as a solo effort, that’s how they rolled (only one track on the album has a multiple credit) and in any case, the three-part harmonies in the chorus are sublime. It’s a key component of this marvellous calling-card debut, and works in isolation as well as in situ. It’s a gem that I feel I shall always now carry with me, its uncanny ability to “sweep cobwebs from the edge of the mind” often required on voyage.

There are some records whose simple sleeve image makes you want to own them. I may have been late catching up, but I will always love the way Crosby, Stills and Nash sit in the wrong order on that duffed-up sofa outside a condemned shotgun shack: Nash, Stills and Crosby, as yet unnamed as they pose in thrift-shop repose, a clapboard prelude to the coolest DFS advert in the world.

Incidentally, I don’t wish to preempt or tantalise, but having hereby enshrined Crosby, Stills & Nash in The 143, in accordance with my own self-imposed rules I am still permitted to include contributions by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (I think you can guess which song I’m thinking of), Young (Cortez The Killer still battling it out with Old Man), the Byrds (perhaps one of their classic early covers) and Buffalo Springfield (again … take a wild guess), which could prove the most fertile, cross-pollinated patch in the final allotment.

The Jesus & Mary Chain, Never Understand (1985)

Artist: The Jesus & Mary Chain
Title: Never Understand
Description: single; album track, Psychocandy
Label: Blanco Y Negro
Release date: 1985
First heard: 1985

Scene: 3rd Floor lift lobby, Ralph West Halls of Residence, Battersea, London
Date: February, 1985

A 20-year-old art student bursts from his cell in what is a great big tower block full of art students in South London, overlooking the park. A haystack of backcombed hair atop his head, he sports a selfconsciously de-sleeved t-shirt, roomy dungarees and kung fu pumps without socks. Kicking the wooden wedge under his door to prop it open, a declarative skreeeee of amp feedback at full volume follows him from the Hitachi stack into the “communal area” by the lifts, where he flings himself down onto an armchair. And waits.

Never Understand, the just-released second single by music press sensations the Jesus & Mary Chain blasts forth from what might ordinarily be a “study bedroom” were the block not full of art students. (The art student had erroneously first read the East Kilbride band’s name as Jesus & The Mary Chain, when their violent early gigs were reported in the NME and the buzz coalesced into legend.) From the squall, a grumbling bassline, then a crackling guitar riff and rudimentary drum signature emerge, and an oddly sweet but half-hidden voice makes recognisable words amid the interference. It is – to borrow an ugly phrase from a quarter of a century into the future – his latest jam.

Nodding his hair, he revels in the racket, adoring the way the song’s conventional beauty is deliberately obscured under layers of extraneous din. Too young to have heard punk in its purest, pre-commoditised form at its creation, he feels blessedly connected to this music at the ground floor. Even though the band have already had an indie number one, it had passed the art student by, and Never Understand was his initiation. Its three minutes were even more intoxicating than the music-press descriptions hinted at, with their references to the Beach Boys. When was the last time an indie guitar band had done an Elvis “uh-huh-hur” and meant it?

The art student had bought the 12″ without ever having heard a note of the band (a common strategy for the NME disciple in the post-listening booth, pre-internet darklands); he knew. That pure red sleeve bearing just the band’s name? The torn-porn collage on the back? The b-side, Suck? The fact that he guessed it wasn’t even a longer version than the cheaper 7″ and boasted no extra track, but he wanted the 12″ anyway: a bigger piece of plastic and a bigger cardboard wrapper for his collection; a bigger declaration of unconditional love.

Within weeks, the fabled North London Poly “riot” would cement the Mary Chain’s reputation and confirm that he had backed a winner. But more immediate affirmation was afoot.

Lost in the fuzz, the art student’s heart leaps when it happens, mid-song. Another art student, one without a haystack of hair and with socks, wanders into the communal area and says, earnestly and helpfully: “I think there’s something wrong with your stylus.”

Victory.

 

The Wedding Present, My Favourite Dress (1987)

Artist: The Wedding Present
Title: My Favourite Dress
Description: single; album track, George Best
Label: Reception
Release date: 1987
First heard: 1987

That was my favourite dress you know
That was my favourite dress
Ohhh

I feel fairly certain that the first song by The Wedding Present I ever heard was their rumbustious cover of Felicity, which must have been the version from their first Peel session in 1986, when I was still at college. I know I sat up by the stereo and taped the songs I didn’t already have from his Festive Fifty at the end of that year and counted Felicity (number 36) and Once More (number 16) among numerous other cherishable gems on that live-paused cassette, like This Is Motortown by the Very Things, Kiss by Age Of Chance and Truck Train Tractor by The Pastels. In another year dominated by The Smiths – indeed, in an era dominated by The Smiths, Jesus & Mary Chain and New Order, the three Colossi of Indie – The Wedding Present felt like young, short-trousered pretenders, and were all the more thrilling for it. (Though of course they, too, would come to dominate the Peelscape, and with perhaps more purchase on Peel’s soul, a possession more akin to that exerted by The Fall.)

Remember that feeling of suddenly being overcome by the need to commit? I don’t mean to a girl in a favourite dress. I mean to a band. You’ve heard them on Peel, you’ve taped them off the radio, you’ve read about them in the NME; now it’s time to buy the album. You don’t have bottomless pockets; to fork out for an LP is a major declaration of love. Remember how stung you felt when you spent that week’s allowance from your grant on Dali’s Car by Dali’s Car because it was Pete Murphy and Mick Kahn from pre-accredited bands and you’d found the single hooky on Max Headroom or some other video show? An LP you wished you’d never bought was a shot through the heart. A waste of money. When I bought George Best on the strength of all those Peel tracks I knew it would be a sound investment. Well, if I didn’t like the record, I would always want that sleeve in my collection.

I loved the record as much as I loved the sleeve. I loved it more. Its locomotive guitar and drums combined under Chris Allison’s sympathetic, heads-down production to provide a new way to travel for the grown-up indie kid. There was something so right about David Gedge’s lovesick northern ballads, set to his and Peter Solowka’s never-ending riffs which were as raw and plaintive as the woes of the songs’ packed-in protagonists, whom we all suspected were Gedge himself, a man near-permanently let down, finished with, betrayed or two-timed by girls. Gedge was a few years older than me, but I identified with his struggle. Being single is the great leveller. I was newly single when I bought George Best and would soon be living in my first one-room studio flat, the perfect cell in which to lose myself in The Wedding Present’s breakneck melancholia.

My Favourite Dress is my favourite Wedding Present song. I think of it as definitive, and for all the constant pleasures Gedge has supplied since, as The Wedding Present and Cinerama, it remains unassailable. It pretty much breaks my heart each time I listen to it. Gedge’s pained recollection of uneaten meals, a lonely star, a long walk home, the pouring rain and a six-hour wait, leads inexorably up to this image of an ex’s dress. We who have fallen under Gedge’s spell have all imagined what that dress might look like. My first imagining – a floral print dress, maybe Oxfam, perhaps worn under a cardigan – is hard to shake.

There are two reasons why this song is magic. One is the decisive moan Gedge delivers after the last line. There are a lot of important “oh”s in pop music, but this is one to bruise your ribs from the inside. The second is the one minute and 24 seconds of outro, which rises and falls from that thousand-words “Ohhh” to the final, undressed jangle. I wouldn’t mind if it lasted a bit longer. It’s not even the end of the album, merely the end of side one.

When I finally met Gedge and interviewed the band in 1991 in snowbound Minnesota where they were recording their third album Seamonsters, he and I agreed to disagree that George Best was a classic album because it wasn’t perfect; he felt it could be improved. I don’t have that copy of the NME to hand, but if you do, look it up.

George Best and its zenith My Favourite Dress could not be improved.