Bob Geldof - Talking, Under The Influence

Yeah, Cliff was really cool for a second and never more so than on the never played secret, young, beautiful and fuck-off "b"sides. "Apron Strings" (mega drums 'n' guitar) was on some sisters pleasing anodyne "a" side that I couldn't be bothered remembering or listening to. It's never been said but without Cliff and The Shads, there's no English pop business. As George said "No Shadows, no Beatles", wow.

The overture of "Oklahoma" needs to be played very loudly in the car some beautiful summers day, screaming up the outside lane, (preferably top down), conducting recklessly with one hand and beaming manically with the sheer, utter joy of its music. Breathtaking optimism from some of the cleverest and wittiest songs ever written. Beautiful music, especially for a sad little boy.

I wanted to BE Dr. Feelgood. Not Lee or Wilko, I mean the entire band. All of them. The unit. In the dismal musical days of '74 and '75 that forced the Boomtown Rats into being, we talked of how music needed to MEAN something again. To be fundamental, passionate, dancable, vital, about... US. The I heard the Feelgoods. The great lyrics, the stripped-bare passion, unvarnished aggression, and the threatening, manic look and I was exhilarated but pissed off that we hadn't done it. So we did. "All Through The City" is everything I've described on four tracks in a Canvey basement.

Like everyone doing this series of compilations I didn't know where to start. You can do 20 of these things and still not run out of stuff that made your very existence explicable and bearable. I could have done the blues one ­ my first love. Could have done the cool, cred, underground, obscure one, the forgotten genius one etc. I went for the pop one. The in-car comp that I'd play on some 80 minute journey and each track would make me happier in direct proportion to every inch travelled. Like music has done in my life. So this is the Catholic Compilation. A reminder of why all these musicians are so great. A little memory jolt of pure joy that all meant something vast to me.

You'll notice that eveything is very songy, I love words and stories, it's probably the first thing that gets me in a song. The narrative and use of language, married to the sound. The pure texture of the thing rather than the notes. Televisions, "Venue" fits all of that from the superb "Marquee Moon" album Tom Verlaine wrote a beautiful, New York junky night of futility, as brittle in its wild jangle sound as his lines are fragile. The world is so thin \ between my bones and skin.

The NY Dolls are the great join between, the laughably irrelevant tripe that rock had become by 1970, and the trashy, tranny irony of punk glam that would lead to the bands of '76. It's a famous track and a great one. You can hear a proto-pistols all over it, the vocals, the guitars... It's funny, noisy, disjointed, shambollick and cool.

"Do The Strand" - Well... Wonderful. What a band. What ideas. What a musical intelligence. Arch camp, meaningless\full, retro-nonsense Pop art. "Rhododendron is a nice flower.... "Yes it is Bryan".

A reminder of how great a writer Lou Reed is. It's fairly atypical of the Velvets, but it's such a lovely song. Choking on compassion and understanding. The opening lines are probably in my "Top 10 Opening Lines Ever". And he could sing "properly". I would have used as "the most band in my life" and early Rolling Stones song, but neither they nor The Beatles will allow their songs to be used on compilations. Which is cool that they can afford that, but a drag because their isn't a rock musician of my age (any age I suppose) who was not utterly electrified by them and Dylan. The other ones, a year or two later were The Who and The Kinks. Next to The Stones, Pete Townsend freed me. The songs are just so fucking good. The thrill of their controlled, considered, almost studded aggression, brilliantly articulated in the sound, the lyrics and the manic dynamic of the three instruments and their players. I loved Townsend's huge honest intelligence married to Moon's anarchic mayhem. Pick any of the early songs. This one isn't heard quite so often. But as a guilt-torn catholic irish boy, whose wank fantasies flashed repeatedly and alarmingly between girls bodies and the roasting fires of hell. "Pictures of Lilly" made me feel alright. Thanks Pete.

When Pop went Rock and then Rock went stupid, I stopped looking to it for meaning. Metal and Prog made me sick. I, like millions of others, started listening to the new singer-songwriters. Louden Wainwright was and still is my favourite and I don't know why, I don't have a track of his on this album, but he is an unbelievable writer. The others I listened to in those days of squats and dole queues were John Prine, Kris Kristoffeson, Van (of course and, like Louden - next album), Dylan (of course). Leonard Cohen (of course) etc. The late John Garfield Blues is beautiful and typical. Utterley simple. If you just learn guitar it's perfect to bore your girlfriend to death with when you get maudling and drunk. It reminds me of my small red friend Sean Finnegan who was always drunk and maudling and would moan this song at me at 2 in the morning in some gas stinking squat in North London. Finnegan and I busked the cinema queues in the West End. Him "bottling" (collecting the money) and me playing. we were laughably shite but got enough to take a boat to Spain where he still lives. I did this song on those cold nights.... romatically thinking I was the guy in those opening lines. I went to see Kristofferson play in Hammersmith just after I finished selecting these tracks and he played this song. He hadn't known (obviously) that I'd put "The Pilgrim" on this record, but he introduced it by saying that he'd written it about Johnny Cash and then he dedicated it to me. WOW! GREAT LIFE MOMENT! When he played it I was thinking of the cold nights and the wierd journey to this place where I was sitting now... and I shouldn't have but I felt sad.

Dylan, Oh God what do you say? Ragged, superb, crammed with imagery and lines that stay forever with you. A song too famous to be written about, so familiar it's a cliche but every time I hear it it's the first time. Brilliance is always fresh. Another "Opening Lines Top Ten". Like everyone else Dylan did for my head what Mick did for my hips and Pete for my heart. Try and imagine hearing this when you were twelve. Gareth Gates my arse.

That same summer of '75 when I heard Dr. Feelgood in my friend's flat and was utterly shocked by its greatness, my mate went on to floor me with something that, for me, was so utterly original, passionate, political, rhythmically amazing and lyrically incendiary Catherdral music that I couldn't take it in. I borrowed both albums, The Feelgood's and Bob Marley's "Catch a Fire". They were the records that the Rats tried to learn in the beginning. The R 'n' B of the Feelgoods was ok but it took forever to even understand what the Wailers were doing. But we played it live. It was shite but eventually we got it. I was going to pick the sublime "Small Axe" by Marley but I see Weller's already done that on his comp... so it was going to be Burning Spear's "One Step Forward" (genius). It's Max because we played with him in New York and it's so good.

The Who, The Kinks, The Small Faces. Pete, Ray, Steve. The Blessed Mod Trinity. All with excellent hair and me with shite curly, wavy, unmanageble (still) Dippity-Do'd down to look like theirs. What a voice, writer, band. The Faces were a year or two older than me and the passion in their voice "Itchycoo Park" (Mods don't do hippy) and "Lazy Sunday" was ok music hall type stuff but "All Or Nothing" (guitar, voice, drums - amazing) and "In My Mind's Eye and "Here Comes The Nice" etc are the real deal.

Punk was the bastard brat of Glam and Pub Rock. It laid waste all behind it. One of its victims was the superb Graham Parker. There were newer kids around and Parker got subsumed under Elvis Costello, like Feelgood seemed suddenly redundant besides this different, younger mob who happily stole the anti-star attitude, dress down clothes and aggressive anti-showbiz bollocks of their older antecendents. This is a song about abortion. It is a huge performance. Brilliant, brilliant lyrics, the voice drips with pain, sorrow, despair, disdain, comtempt and devastating pity and sadness, I played it once live in Madison Square Gardens. I don't know why. It's just too great not to be performed I suppose. Where is Graham Parker and why are we not listening to a man who can write like this and sing like that.

It is commonplace now to say that Ray Davies is on a level with the Lennon-McCartneys and your Jagger-Richards in song-writing terms. I think it was always clear. There is absolutely nobody who writes like him. His songs are beautiful beyond measure. "Days", "Waterloo Sunset", "Sobbing" etc. etc, they are full of acutely observed humanity and understanding of that condition. They are also more explicitly British than any other writer I can think of save perhaps McCartney. "Dead End Street" is a wonderful piece of mid-60's observation, a piece of "musique verite". We fondly imagine that it was all Austin Powers then. It wasn't. It was shit for most of us. This is an exact description of what you could hope for back then, superbly constructed and played. It still lives because it's still true. Could you still have a hit today with this stuff? How sad that the answer is no. Pop Idol my arse (again).

There was only Bowie. Yeah you had yer metal, glam, disco and punk in the '70's but in the end there was only Bowie. Everything he did or touched was important and resonated still now. He invented the 70's and then wrote the 80's. When I heard him he went straight besides the Prines and the Dylans and the other singers. That's what I heard him as. But which of these other guys could have taken you off through Ziggy, Aladdin, The T.W.J., The Young Amercian etc and never lost you? What an amazing musical education. Genius I thank you. "Drive In" everybody knows it. No apologies. Amazing. Mad ideas - musically, lyrically. Voice - genius. Playing - genius. Arrangement - genius. Production - genius. Look - beautiful, amazing, genius. And the gigs.... Oh!

The Four Tops "Reach Out And I'll Be There" is one of the best dance records of its time. What a voice, what production. It makes me think of Daphne, and Anne, and Jackie, and being shite at pulling. And dancing. And the lads laughing and ...... this stuff just makes you happy.

How beautiful is this? How effective in immediately setting the mood. How profound the voice "It's 4 In The Morning, The end of December".... I'm there Len. Ok we all know Cohen is hardly Captain Chuckles but I've never understood people saying it was wrist-slitting music. It's about beauty and love and living and more gorgeously said than anyone. "Famous Blue Raincoat" is a letter he's writing one snowly winter night.

"Thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes, I thought it was there for good, so I never tried"

Sincerely L. Cohen

Yes, indeed.

Sincerely

B. Geldof

The tracks are as follows:

1. Jay Blackton and Orchestra - Overture from Oklahoma
2. Cliff Richard - Apron Strings
3. Dr. Feelgood - All Through The City
4. The Kinks - Dead End Street
5. Television - Venue D'Milo
6. New York Dolls - Personality Crisis
7. Velvet Under Ground - New Age
8. Roxy Music - Do The Strand
9. The Who - Pictures of Lily
10. Web Pierce - The Jailhouse Now
11. John Prine - The Late John Garfield Blues
12. Kris Kristofferson - The Pilgrim-Chapter 23
13. Bob Dylan - Visions of Johanna
14. Max Romeo - War In Babylon
15. David Bowie - Drive In Saturday
16. Graham Parker & The Rumour - Can't Be Too Strong
17. Small Faces - All Or Nothing
18. Four Tops - Reach Out I'll Be There
19. Leonard Coen - Famous Blue Raincoat