Witch: Softer, Softest

Hole: Softer, Softest
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I’ve written before about my admiration for Hole’s album Live Through This, and in that piece, I summarized Courtney Love’s difficult life, so I won’t repeat the details here, except to note that if her life has been marked by addiction, wild behavior and anger, she came by it honestly. She is someone that I have found fascinating but not always in a good way. But I think that she has produced a bunch of good music over her career. There has been a lot written by young women who identify with her anger, her pain, and her attitude, and as an older man, I can’t understand her music the same way, but I don’t think you can listen to Live Through This without being moved by it.

“Softer, Softest” is a song that I really hadn’t paid much attention to, but in researching this piece, I think that it is one of the most poignant songs on the album. Introducing the song on MTV Unplugged in 1995, Love stated that it was “about the girl that always smelled like pee in your class, and she was me," so clearly it is autobiographical. The song’s lyrics appear to be about an abused girl, likely with the knowledge of her mother (or, at least, a female caregiver), because the litany of abuse is interrupted with the following lines:

Burn the witch 
The witch is dead 
Burn the witch 
Just bring me back her head 

This is, of course, heartbreaking, and I don’t really think that there’s much more to say, other than, listen to the song.

Instead, let’s discuss whether Courtney Love is a witch, an issue which has a certain amount of currency on the Internet, with a number of sites claiming that she definitely is, although others point out that she has publicly discussed Buddhist chanting. I don’t know enough about witches to know whether you can be one and be a Buddhist. At the same MTV Unplugged show, Hole covered Donovan’s “Season of the Witch,” although it wasn’t televised at the time, and was only released later. (That would be a good song to discuss in this theme, but Seuras Og already did so a couple of years ago, linking to Hole’s version). Love is friendly with Stevie Nicks, who has written songs about witches (and Love has covered “Gold Dust Woman,” Cover Me's No. 1 Fleetwood Mac cover of all time), but I’m not sure that is really evidence. Also, when she performed on Later... With Jools Holland in 1995, Love introduced a song by mentioning that she had “hexed” a “jerk” who was now losing his hair (probably former boyfriend Billy Corgan).  No one, to my knowledge, has tried to determine whether she weighs as much as a duck. Although she has dressed up as Donald Duck.

Love’s daughter, Frances Bean Cobain has been pictured wearing what appears to be a Wiccan moon necklace, her Instagram user name is “space_witch666, and her Twitter handle is “The_Space Witch.” Of course, her daughter’s beliefs aren’t necessarily those of her mother’s, a distinction that Love, considering her childhood (and the lyrics to “Softer, Softest”), would probably agree with.

SAME NAME/DIFFERENT ARTIST: MARC/K ALMOND

When I was a boy I was always suspicious of Marcs, feeling them to be a little affected in their ways, a name for hairdressers and models, not actually realising that the name, in that spelling, is a diminutive, for Marcus. Marks always seemed more manly. Anyway, this is not a tale of two Marc/ks, being a little more complicated than that, as Marc Almond is one person and Mark Almond, or to be more correct, Mark-Almond were a core of two, but with anything up to another 30 associated. Let me explain........

Jon Mark, guitar/vocals, and Johnny Almond, sax and flute, were a pair of jobbing musicians in the 60s, each earning a pedigree from a combination of sessions and the company they kept. Mark was in the short-lived 'Sweet Thursday', alongside Nicky Hopkins, later becoming bandleader and musical arranger for Marianne Faithfull's nascent works. Almond was kept busy in 'Zoot Money's Big Roll Band', also including later Police-man, Andy Summers, and the ex-Animal, Alan Price's 'Alan Price Set'. Meeting on the sessions scene and becoming members of the legendary John Mayall's band, like all Mayall alumni, the logical next step was to form a band. Arguably jazzers more than rockers, their music was a hybrid of the two, with hints of the later Steely Dan in some of the moods evoked. Augmented by a swathe of the great and the good in both genres, with the likes of Billy Cobham, Dannie Richmond and Steve Gadd present on occasion, individually if not collectively, and that is just the drummers. They actually lasted way longer than just the first two albums I am familiar with, with a number of reunions, ahead of finally calling it a day in the mid 80s. Mark still plays music, producing new-age and celtic fare, actually gaining a Grammy for a record of tibetan chants in 2004. Almond died in 2009.

Marc Almond actually was a Mark, leaving this behind him as he started his musical career. (What did he leave behind him? Do keep up.) With training in performance art, his childhood idols were Marc Bolan and David Bowies, hints of whom remain evident in his extravagant feyness. It was whilst he was at college that he met Dave Ball, the pair forming 'Soft Cell' in around 1980, with massive worldwide success arriving in 1981 with 'Tainted Love', a song by Gloria Jones, the wife (and widow) of Bolan, originally the b-side and segued with 'Where Did Our Love Go', the Supreme's hit. More slow burning in the U.S. than Europe, it got as far as number 8 on the Billboard chart, but later held the record for the most number of consecutive weeks on the chart. Some further success followed but the band were short-lived, splitting 3 years later, bar a later (or the inevitable) brief reunion tour.

Since then Almond has had a varied career, veering between distinctly arthouse material and more obvious chart-bothering, such as gloriously over the top duets with Gene Pitney and with Bronski Beat. His camp persona and theatrical overtones seemed  entirely appropriate for Gallic chanson styles, and one success came with his covers of Jacques Brel, 'Jacques', and then a more varied set in a similar style, 'Absinthe'. Later years saw him move to Moscow and work with russian artists on traditional folk song based material. In 2004, and back in London, he sustained a life-threatening motorbike accident, taking some few years to recover. Sustained by a decidedly odd covers album, he has since been been energetically pursuing increasingly widespread projects, with collaborators as disparate as neo-classical composer, John Harle, and, as above, boogie-woogie TV presenter and ex-Squeeze pianist, Jools Holland, with whom he has toured extensively.

I feel some irony that, given the purpose of this piece, to demarcate the differences between the similarly named artists, now, in 2019, the idea of Marc Almond fronting Mark-Almond would seem strangely not so odd. A pity it can't happen.

K.
C.

Same Name/Different Artist: Squeeze

Squeeze: Take Me I’m Yours
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I’ve always felt that Squeeze, despite some significant commercial success, never really got the respect that it was due. Top notch songwriting (to the point that Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook were often compared to Lennon and McCartney, which is a tough standard to live up to, but even being mentioned in that class is pretty good, right?), tight playing and great hooks made them popular in the UK, but less so in the US. Maybe there was something “too British” about them that didn’t translate so well here. But I’d stack up their second through fourth albums, and a handful of later songs, against anyone in their genre.

Plus, they played at a huge all-campus party at Princeton in 1982, and were great. I think.

This band was formed in 1974 by Difford and Tilbrook, who added Jools Holland and eventually drummer Gilson Lavis and bass player Harry Kakoulli. They decided to call themselves “Squeeze,” after the pseudo-Velvet Underground album of the same name. Their self-titled debut album (produced by former Velvet Underground member John Cale) was released in the UK in 1978 (although the two singles were actually produced by the band).

And here’s where we get to the theme.

In the United States, the band and the album  were called UK Squeeze, because a bar band from Connecticut called “Tight Squeeze” had registered the name, and the record company was leery of legal challenges. I’ve scoured the Internet for some audio or video evidence of this “Tight Squeeze,” but have been unable to locate any. Which may be a blessing (sorry, former members of Tight Squeeze, if you happen upon this blog post—send me some music and maybe I’ll edit this).

Guess what? Difford and Tilbrook and Co. were also called UK Squeeze in Australia. Because there was also a band from Sydney with that name. And while information is sparse on these guys, I did find a couple of videos, neither of which I find too compelling, but it does seem like they were popular in Australia, Germany and Scandinavia, and lead singer Robin Lee Sinclair has had a solo career, mostly as a country singer and Roy Orbison impersonator.

Our featured song, from the UK band, is “Take Me I’m Yours,” from the debut album that caused the identity crisis.