Driving north...

[rhythmaning]

A couple of weeks ago, I drove north. I had picked up a hire car the night before, a squat, little Chevrolet thing (I thought American’s made BIG cars. Not this one, it was tiny, like a Ka, but without the benefit of being cute).

I packed my hillwalking gear, a load of food, a bottle of whisky and a bundle of CDs, and headed north.

I knew where I was going – I know the route north very well, almost too well: I love the north west of Scotland, and for me, the north west starts at Cluanie Inn. My first stop was just east of there – I wanted to climb three hills to the north.

But this is about the drive.

I left early – half past seven or so (early for me) - and drove out of town and across the bridge. I had started off listening to the radio, but that really didn’t work.


So I put on the CD player.

For the next three hours, I was singing along to some of my favourite CDs. Well, I call it singing. You might call it shouting at the top of my voice.

I started with the Clash live - (From Here to Eternity. Just brilliant. I Fought The Law – thumping out the beats on the steering wheel. (I skipped Train In Vain. I usually do.)

Then Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, and some of the best dance music around. (Unfinished Sympathy is just wonderful – when the strings come soaring in.)

Then disc one of Substance, the New Order compilation: Temptation takes me back twenty six years (a birthday present for A. with the blue eyes). I could feel my voice grow hoarse. This didn’t tone me down: I was belting my lungs out.

I moved onto the 2005 live version of Horses as I pulled off the A82 to cut through Glengarry. I got this few months ago – prompted I think by hano - and whilst I had played, I hadn’t really focused hard on it. It is brilliant, and listening to it, I hear things in the original I hadn’t heard before.

It was thirty years after the original LP, and assembled a great line up, including Tom Verlaine (to Smith’s Rimbaud), who co-wrote Break It Up (a wonderful, painful cry). The pianist Richard Sohl died in 1994 – I think the substitute, Tommy Shanahan, wasn’t as sympathetic as Sohl (though that might just the live setting; or that he hadn’t spent years playing with Smith in small clubs).

The opening Gloria is just so powerful, full of teenage kicks - Marie! Ruth! and such a killer riff. Live – and now not so teenaged – it still works, full of life and lust.

The live CD follows the order of tracks on the original. In a couple of places, Smith’s ad libbing doesn’t work as well as first time round, maybe because now I expect it – almost demand it; and yet of course what I want to hear are the ad libs from thirty years ago, not her new riffing.

This is most evident on Land, not the last track (but it really should have been – Elegie being so downbeat after the frantic rush of Land that it is a comedown; bookending the album between Gloria and Land would have been tremendous); live, it is extended, and a lot of the killer lines weren’t there, the band slipping back into Gloria part-way through.

They finish off with My Generation – though not on the original LP release, it was the b-side of the single version of Gloria. Still thumping, but the words are changed – shit, we’re all old now – and that seems a bit lame. There is a heartfelt cry at the end, as Smith falls into a rant – “my generation, we had dreams! we had dreams! And we fucking created George Bush!”

Brilliant.

And then I went and climbed some mountains in the fog.