If you had such a dream, would you get up and do the things you believe in?

Way back in the mists of time, before there was ever an Arctic Monkeys, oh, just under a decade ago, there was a Brit Award for Best Newcomer that didn't turn out quite as expected, thanks to a bit of fan-rallying on the interweb. The hot favourites for 1999 were Steps, who were protegés of Pete Waterman, the 'Hit Man' himself who'd introduced the world to Rick Astley, Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue. But the winners on the night were an obscure (ish) indie band from Glasgow called Belle and Sebastian.

Waterman cried foul, perhaps not without some justification: at the time of the awards, the winning 'newcomers' were in the studio working on their third album. They were so sure they wouldn't win that they sent their drummer and trumpet player 'down' to London, so that they could at least have the chance to schmooze a bit and maybe guzzle some free champagne.

With a bit of hindsight, a marketing mind as adroit as Waterman's must have seen the demographic inevitability of this: B&S were an indie band, beloved of students, who would have been more likely to have internet access (especially back then), while Steps fans were probably out buying clothes, or alcopops, or sitting around in tanning salons, or something.

The indie kids went online and voted en masse for their favourites, and lo and behold: an obscure band on a minor independent label were surprised in the studio by a Scottish news team looking not so much like award winners as maybe small furry nocturnal animals who'd been spooked by a flashlight. The violinist lamented that her mum would be mad at her for not going down to the ceremony and putting on a nice dress; the keyboard player expressed utter bemusement, and the guitarist kept throwing things at the TV, on which the awards ceremony was playing. A nice, refreshingly ordinary wee bunch of boys and girls.

It all turned out okay in the end. The following year, the Brits introduced a new award for Best-Selling Most Awesomest Popstars In The Universe Ever, or some such, and Steps won hands down. Such was the enormity of their achievement that the award was immediately retired after that, so that history will remember Steps as the only ever winners. (And that's about all they'll be remembered for.)

A few years later, Belle and Sebastian signed a major label deal and decided that they'd make an album with a Real Producer at last.

Someone with a real proven pedigree in the pop charts.

Someone who'd produced guaranteed, epoch-defining smash hits.

Someone who wasn't Pete Waterman.

So Trevor Horn, the man behind Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Propaganda, tAtU, the man who gave us Seal, the man who'd made "hip-hopera" fusion records with Malcolm McLaren, the man who Replaced Jon Anderson In Yes forcryingoutloud... the man who gave us The Buggles... manned the boards for Belle and Sebastian's major label debut. (Well, it was Rough Trade...)

In some quarters, the indie kids wept and gnashed their teeth. What were they doing, making proper sounding pop records when they should have been enabling the lifestyles of arrested adolescent hipsters everywhere? They were even sticking in Thin Lizzy bits... what was going on?

Belle and Sebastian were growing up, is what was going on. They were playing the same music, but it now sounded much brighter and punchier, as though a fresh pair of ears was subjecting every note to careful scrutiny and putting everything in the right place so that it worked more effectively, which was exactly what was going on.

Not so long ago, I was browsing the racks of the local emporium when I came across the band's DVD. It looked interesting, it was reasonably priced and I had enough disposable income (that weekend) to spring for it. The cover of the DVD said "Fans Only", though, which gave me pause. I liked some of the band's stuff, but did that really make me a fan? I mean, fans are people who play records over and over again. They sit in coffee bars with other fans talking about the band incessantly. They nick setlists after gigs. They choose their friends according to who likes "their" band and who doesn't.

Unfair of course. That definition of "fan" is based on my own stereotype. And the fact is, even though I never considered myself a "fan", over the years I've found myself defending the music of Belle and Sebastian to anyone who puts them down. But it's not as though they haven't produced music that I can't stand. They have done this, and they have done it, oh, several times. When I'm Waking Up To Us came out, for instance, I figured that B&S were finished as a band, and that they knew it. Why else would they put out a song with a bright, snappy arrangement, a catchy melody, and what sounded like the most whiningly adolescent, self-pitying post-breakup lyrics ever?

It was almost as though they were trying to sabotage their career, to take themselves apart in public as a final self-destructive statement, much like the Beatles did with Let It Be, or the way drag artists smear their makeup when they finish the act. (I was wrong. IWUTU is a fine track, and you just have to take the lyrics with a pinch of salt. It's a pithy and funny examination of the bitchy and ill-considered things people say when they break up, is all.)

The truth is, it took me many years to stop worrying and love the Belle and Sebastian band. Bear in mind that most people I know who like the group like their newer stuff, the post-Jeepster, post Trevor Horn, "frog in my throw-it" stuff, and are glad they grew out of those wispy-sounding old indie records that I sometimes play them.

And they have a point. By some trick of time, or of the marketplace, or a bit of both, or maybe just inevitable maturation, Belle and Sebastian have become a very different band since they left Jeepster Records. Some fans welcome this, some don't; some would sooner sit around and listen to Tigermilk over and over again. (Personally, my own choice would have been If You're Feeling Sinister, but then I'm not a "fan", am I?)

At whatever stage of their career, though, the band has made the most of the fact that they're a unique blend of different, equaly cardinal, personalities. The band's titular leader, Stuart Murdoch, does most of the singing and writes (or originates) the bulk of the material, but in terms of the group he is merely playing the "singer-songwriter instrument", in the same was as Stevie Jackson plays the "rootsy-guitarist instrument", or Sarah Martin the "quiet but effective multi-instrumentalist" instrument.

Fans Only, anyway, is a DVD retrospective of the band's Jeepster years, from the Dog On Wheels EP (when the band consisted only of the two Stuarts, trumpeter Mick Cooke and some session players) through to the Storytelling album (which was nominally a soundtrack album, though most of it was never used in the film). And you know what? It's quite a lot of fun. You get the snappy pop singles like Legal Man and you get the early, funny stuff - flickery, studenty looking films with a lot of gooning around and acting silly. In those far-off early days, Belle and Sebastian didn't do interviews or press photos. People assumed they were a male/female duet or maybe just a bunch of students having a laugh.

The official tracklisting of the DVD gives you the impression that it's a roughly chronological compendium of the band's videos; this is a cruel and callous trick. What you really get is a deftly put together cut-and-paste documentary of the band's career, including bits from an early BBC documentary, TV appearances (that Brit awards thing in full) and vignettes from the band's various tours, all in between (yes) the promotional videos. Sometimes there's a rude, home-movie feel to it, or even (gasp) the very occasional song you may not like, but overall, it's a film to sit down and watch all the way through; it tells a tale.

Before your very eyes, watch keyboard player Chris Geddes transform from a gangly bespectacled chap into a fully fledged Monster Soul DJ! See cellist Isobel Campbell change from a cute indie schoolgirl with a floppy dog into a self-assured and capable arranger, performer and filmmaker (she directed quite a few of these vids). Tremble in amazement as Bowlie bard Stuart Murdoch transmogrifies, before your very eyes, from a bookish church warden into a gunslinging groupie magnet, while managing to look Exactly The Same! Thrill as snooker ace Richard Colburn swaps his cue for a pair of drumsticks and a bowl of pasta and chicken soup surprise! Most of all (in my own case), yelp with delight as guitarist Stevie Jackson makes an amazing job of the Beach Boys' Darlin' in front of an ampitheatre full of sundazed Coachella concertgoers...

Fans Only follows the group from their earliest incarnation as a self-described "product of botched capitalism" to a bona-fide hit making machine in their own right, and by the time the closing credits roll you realise you've been following the story of this band for almost two hours. Depending on your temperament, you may even want to do it again. For a band who've never really been too concerned with pushing themselves out in front or drawing too much attention to themselves, they've managed to carve out their own niche in the world of popular musicianry, and good on them for it. Watching Fans Only feels like cheering on your local team, even if you come from half a world away.

Anode Enzyme, IQ 12,790...

...it was 12,794, but he lost four points watching TV.

From Genius by John Glashan.

It's about that time...

Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul et al, Paris 1991.

It's about bloody time...

You're 6:49 a.m.

You're the time of day right around sunrise, when the sky is still a pale bluish gray. The streets are empty, and the grass and leaves are a little bit sparkly with dew. You are the sound of a few chirpy birds outside the window. You are quiet, peaceful, and contemplative. If you move slowly, it's not because you're lazy – it's because you know there's no reason to rush. You move like a relaxed cat, pausing for deep stretches that make your muscles feel alive. You are long sips of tea or coffee (out of a mug that's held with both hands) that slowly warm your insides just as the sun is brightening the sky.

O - kay...

The Void on celluloid...

Control, the movie about Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, who took his life in 1979, came out last year, and guess which lazy blogger is only getting around to writing about it now?

As befits a film with photographer/video-tician Anton Corbijn at the helm, Control looks fantastic, especially the "live" footage. Musically it's something of a (pleasant) surprise too. The actors actually play their instruments reasonably well, and while they're no Joy Division, they come as close as you could ever get to evoking the spirit of the band in performance. Some of it is based closely on clips of the original band, playing live and on TV, and a lot of work obviously went into these very impressive sequences. And yes, it is in black and white, like many of Corbijn's great rock photos were back in the day.

Control is based on Touching From A Distance, Deborah Curtis' memoir of life with her late husband. The book itself was guileless and honest, and the movie has something of that tone. Unlike the book, though, Corbijn also draws on others' memories of the Joy Division years, so the portrayal of all that boys-on-the-road stuff, as well as Ian Curtis' affair with Belgian journalist Annik Honoré, is a bit better fleshed out.

It's interesting to compare this with the first half of 24 Hour Party People, which treated of the rise of Joy Division and Curtis' untimely suicide with less depth but great economy, and a certain amount of black humour. Control for its part tends to focus on romance and relationships. It reminds me more than a little of Walk The Line, which was more love-story-told-with-real-characters-and-based-loosely-on-real-events than straightforward biopic, but quite effective for all that.

This movie is clearly aimed at a younger audience, the sort of people who buy records by modern bands who've been namechecking Joy Division and Curtis as an influence. And why not? Control tells the tale with exactly the right balance of sympathy and objectivity, humour and honesty.

I really didn't expect to like this, but it was well worth watching. Like I say, it's a seriously good-looking film, with enough substance to justify all the pretty pictures. And if it gets a new generation into the music of Joy Division, then I for one will be very happy indeed.

I was not so happy about Once, directed by former Frames bass guitarist John Carney, which is only just out (though I managed to get hold of a preview copy last year). It features Frames lead singer Glenn Hansard (who first appeared on cinema screens as Outspan in The Commitments) and Czech songstress Markéta Irglova in a sort of musical romantic tale set on the streets of Dublin's fair city. I expected to like it - I've seen it several times now, and really tried to like it, but I'm sorry, it just left a bad taste.

I'm not a big fan of the Frames' music, though I do admire them for the fact that they've survived as a band despite all the begrudgery and sheer malice they've had to endure in their native land. The kind of spite that would be more properly levelled at, say, that other Dublin band, the one whose name consists of a letter followed by a number...

Anyhoo, Hansard plays a street busker and Irglova a flower-girl (awww) who also turns out to be a pianist. They bond over her broken vacuum cleaner, which he mends (that's his day job, y'see). Then they get to know each other and help each other out musically. And, well, that's about it.

Maybe I'm being too hard on this movie, but what is all the fuss about? Do Seppoes think they have, like, totally cute accents and stuff?

It's not that Once doesn't have some good qualities - Hansard and Irglova are both fine musicians, and though not 'proper' actors, they have a pretty good onscreen chemistry. Their friendship develops believably. The music isn't my cup of tea, but it's worked well into the movie. Director Carney clearly knows his stuff. The ending may be a bit of a cop-out but at least it's not standard boy-gets-girl schmaltz. It's just that I couldn't find anything in this that actually added up to, you know, A Movie.

Joy Division were a band whose music was associated with despair and alienation but actually had its own cathartic, uplifting power. And some of that came through in Control. Whereas Once, for all its celebration of the joys of music and the virtues of friendship and (tentative) romance, just leaves an empty feeling. As though one had just been watching an adaptation of Notting Hill for raggle-taggle groupies.

Friday On My Mind #8

Being a semi-regular Friday feature wherein we take a look at three songs from the canon of Mr. David Robert Jones of Brixton, London SW, latterly of Bromley, Kent and currently of New York, New York.

Art Decade - Low
This is inventive and engaging; not necessarily everyone's cup of tea but it's short, to the point and full of economical little musical phrases that kind of creep up on you. The Low album, for those of you who just came in, is divided into two very thematically distinct sides - the first mainly vocal, the second mainly instrumental. Side one begins and ends with instrumental tracks too, but these are full band tracks. The four pieces on side two, of which this is the second, consist of two long, rambling tracks that make use of wordless, multitracked vocals, and two short purely instrumental pieces in the middle. The sounds are pretty much all made by Bowie and his chosen aide-de-camp, Brian Eno, who'd been Roxy Music's musical secret weapon before striking out all on his ownio.

Art Decade, as far as I can tell, is mostly Bowie's own work, layering bits of synth, sax, random effects and (probably) mellotron over mechanical beats from a rhythm box (or maybe even a couple of rhythm boxes). There's a romantic-sounding, complex melody that resolves itself a couple of times, but I defy anyone to try and whistle it...

I didn't hear Kraftwerk's Ralf und Florian album until a few years later, but this sounds like it could have come from there - it has a similar sense of space, and even some of the loose, improvisatory feel. Don't forget, before Kraftwerk hit it big as electro-humanoids their music was a lot more space-rock, Kosmischemusik influenced, and to this day I still maintain that their music swings mightily. Maybe this is what "Krautrock" would have sounded like if it had been invented by Englishmen...

Anyway, this isn't just pretentious wafty ambient music, it's a beguiling listen for them what has ears, and surprisingly rich and full of ideas after you listen a few more times.

Bring Me The Disco King - Reality
Heathen had managed to reassure all of us Bowie fans that the man was still doing his job in fine fashion; Reality, which is his last original album to date, only suffers in comparison because by then we know the man was still plugging away. For the most part, this album has a more pared-back sound, but the writing is, thankfully, strong and our hero is in as good shape as he's ever been. Bring Me The Disco King is rueful and contemplative, based around a Mike Garson piano comp that could have come from Steely Dan circa Pretzel Logic. Garson's accompaniment really takes off as the song develops, and weaves around a bravura vocal performance from Ol' Traffic-Light Eyes himself, his voice sounding notably more mature than, say, the dashing young blade of the Ziggy era.

Not too long ago I saw the DVD of Bowie at the Point in Dublin from 2003, and in the middle of a set pretty well balanced between old and new, this absolutely brought the house down. Our singer muses here, not only on fame and all that comes with it, but on life and memories and regrets, all the while looking onwards to... what? There's a very palpable sense of mortality in this song, and Bowie puts heart and soul into it; Bring Me The Disco King is easily up there with his best stuff. Fair dues.

Free Your Heart - Hunky Dory
Probably not the first song to escape the lips of Bowie fans asked to name their favourites... I mean, this is a cover of a Tiny Tim song, yes? So I thought, but a bit of digging I discovered that Free Your Heart was co-written by Paul Williams and Biff Rose... I'd almost forgotten about Rose, who used to do light, humourous songs in the 60s on various comedy shows. So this tune has Williams' melodic invention as well as Rose's gentle optimism, and it's quite nice if not particularly classic. Bowie takes just the right approach, gently taking the mickey and singing with tongue firmly in cheek, though there's also an easy, unhurried sense to the singing that's kind of appealing. Hunky Dory is an album of many moods, and I don't know who else would segue this into something like Andy Warhol with odd synth effects and studio chatter. I still can't stop thinking of Tiny Tim though, and wondering why there are no ukuleles on this version...

Friday On My Mind #7: "...Told her that he'd found a chum..."

Okay, now that we're well and truly into 2008, and it being Bowie Friday, let's remember that next Tuesday is an important date for us Thin White Duke fans, being the 61st birthday of the man himself. So, for the sake of celebration, and because the guy needs a bit of a break, it's time to devote this birthday blog post to three songs by other people for a change. Well, sort of...
The Man Who Sold The World - Lulu
Yes, somebody did actually cover this before Nirvana. Stateside Bowie fans have probably never heard of Lulu, which is actually something of a pity. On this side of the pond, this Scottish-born chanteuse has been pretty much ubiquitous since the mod days of the early 60s, when she brought out an absolutely stratospheric version of the Isley Brothers Shout! that made even the Who's version sound tame. (YouTube clip from Ready! Steady! Go! here.) She ended up with her own TV variety show and by some odd serendipity ended up giving young Jimi Hendrix his first TV appearance (more YouTube). Unfortunately, she also ended up representing the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest with an unspeakably awful song called Boom Bang-a-Bang.

By the time this Bowie cover version came out as a single, around the same time as the Pin Ups album, Lulu had, somewhat unfairly, been dismissed by rock fans as some sort of chirpily cute light-entertainment songstress, and the idea of her doing a song by David Bowie, the weird androgynous glam rocker guy, seemed as incongruous as you could possibly get. In fact, Lulu and young Davy Jones were contemporaries on the R&B club scene of the early 60s and would have known of each other from way back. So there.

The odd thing is that this version actually sounds more like a "typical" Bowie song than the original album track from 1970, probably thanks to the fact that Bowie and Mick Ronson produced the single, and got the Spiders in to play on it. So the original's rough mating of acoustic balladry and scuzzy, Sabbath-era metal gets replaced by some snappy latter-day Ronson guitar fills, a much more syncopated and straightforward backing track, and of course, the customary wheezy horn overdubs which serve to remind us that it's actually a relief that young David packed in the sax and took up singing instead. Though Lulu herself does a great job of interpreting a tune that sounds a bit like Brel, a bit like Brecht, a bit like the Velvets and maybe a bit like Bowie's other cronies, Mott the Hoople.

The other odd thing is, this would have fit perfectly well on the Pin Ups album. Except of course it wasn't a cover version. And had some Scottish bird singing on it. I'm sorry. Where were we? Would you like some more tea?

Saw Lulu on TV not too long ago (on the New Year's Eve Hootenanny) and was pleased to note that not only is she still keeping busy and in good voice, but she is still - let's admit it boys - damn hot at 61.

The Secret Life of Arabia - British Electric Foundation
The BEF were Ian Marsh and Martyn Ware, who'd been in the original Human League before Phil Oakey got those girls in to sing songs about waitresses in cocktail bars. After leaving, they set up the BEF as an electro outfit with a different guest vocalist for each song, and inadvertently ended up reviving Tina Turner's career with their version of the Tempts' Ball of Confusion. But enough on that: this cover version is all about a remarkable young man from Dundee, up in Scotland, named Billy Mackenzie.

Unfortunately, Billy will always be a young man in our memories now, because his life ended way too soon, but he was one of the great singers of his (post-punk, pre-New Romantic) generation. His band The Associates based their early sound on something not unlike Bowie around the Station To Station era, except more dissonant and shredded. Mackenzie's unique four-octave range swooped and soared around arrangements that sounded like all of European music being thrown up in the air and let fall wherever.

TSLOA, from the "Heroes" album, was a number the Associates would cover back in their early days. I'd never cared for the track much myself; it just made me want to flip the record over and put on Beauty and the Beast again. On the BEF / Mackenzie version, though, it gets a dramatic, cinematic, and dare I say funkier (that word again) arrangement that's more than worthy of the original. Mackenzie's inimitable voice luxuriates in the melody, intoxicated, in love with itself. I'd love to know what the composer thinks of this one.

Sister Midnight - Iggy Pop
Okay, so not really a cover version, since this is the original, and it was written by Bowie, Iggy and Carlos Alomar for Iggy's comeback album The Idiot. Not long after, Bowie recycled the same tune and put new words to it on his Lodger album with the title Red Money, with not quite as impressive results. Bowie's "own" version wasn't a bad track, well played and all, and it's always great to hear yet another one of Alomar's classic slowhand-funk riffs, but on the album it kind of palls after the Lodger's real climax, a harrowing tale of domestic violence called Repetition that's admittedly hard to follow.

Sister Midnight starts Iggy's album where Red Money finishes Lodger, and even though Bowie, Alomar and rhythm section Dennis Davis and George Murray are present on both versions, they couldn't be more different. Where Red Money sounds like a muso jam that's precision-tooled itself into a corner, Sister Midnight drips with menace and dread. Iggy dredges up words from the bottom of some psychic abyss, conjures up Oedipal and patricidal demons, and works himself into a frenzy calling out to someone he's not even sure can hear him at all. The album may be named after a book by Dostoyevsky but the sentiment is pure Beckett.

The band (which includes Bowie on keyboards) grunt and grind like machines that are just about to break down and the beat is claustrophobic, desperate, struggling with itself. The mass-produced nightmare delineated here and on the rest of the Idiot album could be happening anywhere on the globe: in Berlin, in the north of England, even in Detroit. Iggy solo will never top his Stooges work in my book, though Bowie proved a worthy mentor and collaborator, but The Idiot is a classic work that somehow manages to be more than the sum of the people who created it.

We can't, of course, forget that the eighth of January is also the birthday of Elvis Presley, who used to take his influences from everywhere around him, wear makeup, dress weird, sing up a storm, change his appearance a lot, and sometimes looked like he could have come from another planet. Fancy that.

In all seriousness, it goes without saying that if not for The King himself, David Bowie would have ended up either playing sax in some dance band or doing mime on some street corner. Who knows, he may have even given up altogether and joined the Army. So happy birthday to both of them.