BRINSLEY SCHWARZ: THE NEW FAVOURITES OF BRINSLEY SCHWARZ (1974)
1) (What's So Funny 'Bout)
Peace, Love And Understanding?; 2) Ever Since You're Gone; 3) The Ugly Things;
4) I Got The Real Thing; 5) The Look That's In Your Eye Tonight; 6) Now's The
Time; 7) Small Town, Big City; 8) Trying To Live My Life Without You; 9) I Like
You, I Don't Love You; 10) Down In The Dive.
For their last album, Brinsley Schwarz turned
to Dave Edmunds, already a minor celebrity in his own right, an avid lover of
early pre-Beatles rock'n'roll who would as much want to impose that love on
others as dwell in it himself — and indeed, The New Favourites should have rather been titled The New Old Favourites, since it just
might be the single most retro-oriented Brinsley Schwarz album there ever was.
It does begin with what is arguably Nick Lowe's
most famous song — the catchy pop anthem in support of idealistic ideals that
would, however, only truly catch on in the popular conscience with the Elvis
Costello cover several years later (and then be cemented even later with the
version from the Bodyguard
soundtrack, but we will try to erase that
from the record). You could argue that this song, too, is «retro» in a way —
advocating for a fallback from decadence and cynicism to the naïve, but noble
(if also somewhat mythical) sentiments of the previous decade — but musically,
it should probably be described as «power pop», punchy, muscular, employing the
three-chord punch of ʽBaba O'Rileyʼ (to weaker effect, though), and quite
modern for 1974. It's not a great song in terms of composition, but Lowe makes
an excellent, passionate vocal run towards the chorus resolution, and at the
very least, comes across as a convincing spokesman for the cause — no wonder
the song was endorsed for the Vote For
Change tour in 2004 (even if the election results that year ultimately
showed that something really was very
funny about peace, love, and understanding, but that's really beyond the
point...).
Nothing else on the album, however, even begins
to approach the anthemic fire of that song: all the other songs are quite
down-homey, humble, and formulaic in comparison. Symbolically, one of the record's
two covers is ʽNow's The Timeʼ, a very early, very simple and naïve pop song by
The Hollies — not a songwriting gem like ʽBus Stopʼ or ʽKing Midas In Reverseʼ,
but a generic early Merseybeat-style ditty that the Schwarzes perform with
their usual diligence, yet how could they ever beat the Hollies' harmonies —
their only serious advantage as of 1963, and one which still makes these early
ditties outstandingly enjoyable, as opposed to this immediately forgettable
cover? The second cover, by the way,
is much more recent — Otis Clay's ʽTrying To Live My Life Without Youʼ, but,
again, it is not clear how the band can improve on the song or make it more
interesting in at least some respect.
Most of the «originals» also turn out to be
pastiches and imitations — like ʽSmall Town, Big Cityʼ, which is essentially
ʽAlley Oopʼ with new lyrics — and it looks like the band is not even trying to
cover that up; maybe Edmunds was the one who convinced them that «good bands
borrow, great bands steal», but they got the causation wrong — it's not «if
you steal, you're a great band», it's «if you're a great band, you steal», and
because of this, here we have a good band stealing, which is embarrassing. I
am not 100% sure that each and every one of these chord progressions had
already been used in some pop / rock / country song in the 1950s/1960s, largely
because my memory is not vast enough to stockpile all those chord
progressions, but it does honestly feel like this is the case, and then the
idea of Brinsley Schwarz as the Stray Cats of the 1970s or something like that
just doesn't seem so hot — except for the tactical idea of preserving the
pleasures and vibes of pre-Beatles entertainment in the mid-1970s, which has
been inevitably obsolete since, well, the mid-1970s, there is nothing about
this music that elevates it above «listenable if you are ever forced to listen
to it, so cross it off the Guantanamo list».
Since Brinsley Schwarz disbanded in 1975, The New Favourites could be regarded as
one last bluff, undertaken to revitalize their image — and I am not saying it
could not have worked, because a large part of the world, fed up with
progressive, glam, and Californian soft-rock, might have welcomed a retro-twist
like this, were it properly presented. But this was a weak band from the very
beginning, and even the addition of a dedicated producer could not have made it
any stronger. Besides, the presence here of ʽPeace, Love, And Understandingʼ
shows that Lowe could write
passionate and powerful songs, at least occasionally — the logical question
then being, why couldn't they write any more like that, instead of focusing on
low-key secondhand stuff. Perhaps they didn't want to, because low-key
secondhand stuff was what they really liked — in which case, well, they
arguably got what they deserved.
By virtue of the song's appearance on The Bodyguard soundtrack, Nick Lowe said he made far more money from that album than anything he did in his proper discography—and in spite of the fact that, as far as he can tell, the song isn't anywhere to be heard in the movie.
ReplyDeleteI can't help it: each and every time the chorus is repeated and they go 'Aaah' I expect them to sing 'Jesus was a crossmaker'. Anything silly about that?
ReplyDelete