OPPOSITES: LIGHT/HEAVY

Hmm, a third week, a third challenge. Silly? Serious? Low-brow? High-brow? Light-weight? That’s it! Avoirdupois! Weight. Of course, as a nominally music appreciation site, it can also be your difference twixt Sabbath and Sweet Thursday, so, well, just so. 

Traces (Light and Weight)/Enigma

Me, I am going for weight, going for the compare and contrast between a ton of feathers and a ton of lead. (And, believe me, I toyed with what you’re thinking, feeling it a tad obvious…..) So, for the sake of the songs, light and heavy. And if you fancy a drink with that, be my guest, whether it be a light and bitter or a pint of heavy. More anon.

Lighter Than Air/Christine Collister

It is the glorious voice of Christine Collister that kicks us off, she possibly better known as half of Clive Gregson and...., it being in that duo she made her name.I recall I had heard about the cassette only debut by Clive and Christine, persuading my wife to get me a copy for Christmas. Clive Gregson I already knew of, from his band, Any Trouble, featured here. Anyhow, shortly before that Christmas, we toddled off to see the Richard Thompson Band, playing at Birmingham Odeon. Imagine my glee as, not only were Gregson and Collister the opening act, they were also in Thompson's line-up as well, a state of affairs that lasted a few years. As a duo they were also regulars at the Red Lion Folk Club, also in Birmingham, and we caught them a number of times. A couple in life as well as art, differences arose and they split, with there also developing some sort of rift between Gregson and Richard Thompson, with a snarky RT review, penned by the former, appearing in Mojo, after he was no longer in the band. Legend suggests the Thompson song, 'Put It There, Pal', was the riposte. 

Both Collister and Gregson went onto solo careers, each continuing to this day, if never quite attaining the accolades of their joint work. This song, a rare co-write by Collister, appears on her 2005 outing, 'Love', which actually had origins in showing off the capabilities of the then wilting format of vinyl, and is designed as a showpiece for her vocals, actually better in her earlier solo output, or, at least, with more sympathetic arrangements. But it is still a powerful instrument, irrespective.

Light and bitter, the drink, is, or was, the popular combination of a half of bitter, draft english ale, the kind best served at room temperature, for any philistine readers from afar, and a small bottle of light ale, which was, I guess, slightly lighter, both in colour and volume, bottled variant of the same. (Here's the science.)

He Ain't Heavy (He's My Brother)/Rufus Wainwright

Apologies for posting the Rufus rather than the better known 'original', which of course it wasn't. It was a cover version. Ahead of the Hollies having their 1969 smash with it, something they were in sore need of, Graham Nash having jumped ship a year or so before, it had earlier failed to set the charts alive in versions by Kelly Gordon (no, me, neither), or, Lord help us, Neil Diamond. Written by a pair of jobbing songwriters Bobby Scott and Bob Russell, I bet you want to hear the Diamond version, don't you? My sole reason for posting this version is that I have always liked the timbre of Rufus's voice, something I gather many don't, and he has a quite a decent way with covers. This strays little from the original, and I have half an idea that the producers of 'Zoolander', the film in which it features, did not have the rights for the Hollies version. 

Two interesting things I learnt about the song for this piece. Firstly referring to the lyric, I had previously assumed heavy was as in heavy, man, thus a description of seriousness, or sternness, and that brother was meant as in a friend or colleague in dudedom. The original phrase comes from a sermon delivered by the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, in the 1890s, wherein a young peasant girl was being asked how she could be possibly be managing to carry a young man on her back. Her response, maybe minus the ain't, was the basis of his Sabbath message and, latterly, of the song. And secondly, the session pianist on the Hollies' version was one Elton John!

Returning to this version, surely nobody can be unaware of the fact that Rufus is the son of acerbic singer -songwriter, Loudon Wainwright and of the late Kate McGarrigle, but here's the back story if you are not. Somewhat of a theatrical talent, shall we say, drawn a little to musicals and the like, it is his simpler and less exotic fare I enjoy the better.

Heavy is what the Scots drink, or order, in preference to bitter, and, by and large, it is a slightly heavier and darker brew than the English style, although the two terms mean more or less the same. It can get confusing. Mind you, ordering a beer in Glasgow has always been confusing and not for the timid. Lagers are as popular, strangely, here as much as south of the border, and if you were to hear someone asking for a pint of Mick, it would be that they were after, an example of best Weegie* rhyming slang, where lager rhymes with the be-lipped Stones frontman.

*Weegie = Glaswegian.

Light

Heavy

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.