Pop records
Give yourself a present
Marcus Berkmann
• ecord shops are depressing places at the moment. Pan Pipe Moods 11 . . The Greatest 60s Album in the World Ever . . The Love Album 11 . . . so many of these dismal compilation albums clog up the shelves that you wonder if anyone these days wants to buy anything they haven't heard a thousand times before. But then these records aren't there to entice you and me. They are to entice our friends and rela- tives to buy them for us for Christmas, even though we don't want them. It's for this reason that, come January, second-hand record shops will be crammed with unwant- ed copies of Bon Jovi's Greatest Hits and the Best of Janet Jackson. If you really want such things, wait until then and get them cheap.
As ever, if you want decent records at this time of year, you're going to have to buy them yourself. It has been a lively 12 months for pop music, with excellent releases from Blur, Pulp and Paul Weller, and solid if finally overwhelming contribu- tions from Simply Red and k d lang, among others.
• My own two outstanding albums, as ever, are by old lags. Gary Clark is one of the great secret talents of British pop music, known to a wider public mainly for his old group Danny Wilson's only real hit, 'Mary's Prayer'. For a while it seemed as though this wonderful song would be the pinnacle of his achievements, as he released a series of increasingly polite and marginal albums, but his new group King L — possibly the worst name for a group in living memory — represent a sudden return to form and sanity.
Their debut album Great Day for Gravity (Circa) is a great snarling rock of beast of a thing, full of marvellous tunes and rasping grungy guitars. Regular readers of this col- umn will have noticed my long-term disin- clination towards rasping grungy guitars, but it's heartening to see a songwriter of genuine talent playing around with the old forms and coming up with something as fresh and exciting as this. The amazing thing is that it has made no difference to Clark's career at all. By any criteria, the album's complete commercial failure is an appalling injustice. Perhaps for this sort of music you need to be a flame-haired rock god in tight leather trousers. Clark is a short fat Scotsman with a head like an egg. He also writes some of the cleverest and most moving songs you can hear today.
Along oddly similar lines, and a real bolt from the blue, are Squeeze, who are now back in fashion after all the new young Britpop groups cited them as a vital influ- ence. This doesn't mean anyone has bought their new album, however, because Squeeze too have suffered the inevitable consequences of encroaching age, and now look like nothing on earth. Nonetheless, Ridiculous (A&M) continues the progres- sion in their work that started with 1993's cruelly underrated Some Fantastic Place.
It's rare that a group's 11th and 12th albums should be the best they have recorded, but between them, Glenn Tilbrook's broadening musical range and Chris Difford's lyrical maturity have reached a very special record. Glorious, lol- loping tunes receive a variety of musical treatments, although like Gary Clark, Dif- ford and Tilbrook have also rediscovered the simple joys of rasping guitars. Best track is Tilbrook's duet with Cathy Dennis, `Temptation for Love', a beautiful song which, in a just world, would be an enor- mous hit.
So who needs compilations? Pub juke- boxes, perhaps, but the rest of us can do without them. If you are going to succumb, however, much the most interesting is Warner Bros' new collection of Ry Cood- er's best soundtrack movements, Music by Ry Cooder. It was Cooder who supplied the memorable soundtrack to Paris, Texas, and that moody, patient slide guitar of his dom- inates the whole album. It's working or driving music, I suppose, but no less worthy for all that.
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