Fifty Three

It's my 53rd birthday today. They say that when going through bereavement and grief anniversaries are always tough and we've found this to be true- a friend with experience in this told me 'the first everything fucks'. The second ones do too I think. Isaac loved a birthday, his or anyone else's, so they're always going to be tinged with his excitement about them and maybe that's what I need to try to remember.  

Glasgow record label 53rd and 3rd (named after Dee Dee Ramone's song about his experiences as a male prostitute in New York in the mid- 70s) was a brief but brightly shining beacon of indie nuggets, founded by Stephen Pastel, Sandy McLean and David Keegan. It released a total of twenty one singles and seven albums (two of which were label compilations) between 1986 and 1988 by indie royalty, the likes of The Shop Assistants, The Vaselines, Talulah Gosh, The Pooh Sticks and BMX Bandits. 

Safety Net was the label's debut release, a 7" single from The Shop Assistants in 1986, the kind of record that entire scenes are built around. If it were the only record The Shop Assistants made it would be enough. Three minutes of rumbling bass, buzzsaw guitars and sing- song vocals from singer Alex Taylor.

Safety Net

Teenage Superstars was on The Vaselines 1988 EP/ 12" Dying For It, a song that is part feedback driven indie thrum, part manifesto (David Keegan, Shop Assistants guitarist appears on the EP, Stephen Pastel produces). Makes me want to wear tight black jeans, leather biker jacket and love beads and grow my hair long. Things are most likely not going to happen aged 53. 

Teenage Superstars

Out today is the new album from Galen and Paul, Galen being the daughter of Kevin Ayres and Paul being Paul Simonon. The songs are all acoustic guitars, reverb and twin Nancy and Lee style vocals with plenty of gap toothed Simonon charm. This one, Hacia Arriba, is sung in Spanish- much of the record was written in Mallorca, where Paul spent much of lockdown. He has busked in the streets of Palma in recent years, which would have stopped me in tracks if I'd happened to be there at the same time. 

Safety Net

There's been a touch of c86 and mid 80s Scottish indie- pop in the breeze recently- two weeks ago Stevie at Charity Chic Music blogged about Edinburgh's The Motorcycle Boy and last week Brian at Linear Tracking Lives was writing about early Primal Scream (early Primal Scream, none of your Loaded Scream, not even your Ivy Ivy Ivy era Scream but All Fall Down Primal Scream). At the weekend Sky Arts showed Teenage Superstars,  a documentary about 'the golden age of Scottish indie', The Pastels, The Vaselines, BMX Bandits, The Jesus And Mary Chain and all he rest of it. 

As an archetype  of this sound you can't go wrong with this 1986 single by The Shop Assistants. In fact, this song on 7" might be the best song of the entire scene.

Safety Net

Cavernous but lo fi drums, the low rumble of  bassline, cheap buzzsaw guitars, handclaps, sing song female vocals, deliberately borrowing from the Reid Brothers in style and by pinching a 'trip me up' line and everything smothered in reverb, it is wilfully and brilliantly amateurish. Safety Net sounds like it exists solely to take up the two minutes twenty three seconds it takes to revolve around your stereo at 45rpm before you flip the needle back to the start and play it again. 

Sadly, it slipped out last year that Alex Taylor, singer of both The Shop Assistants and later The Motorcycle Boy, had passed away back in 2005. RIP Alex. 

Safety Net

You wouldn't have thought there'd be too much to get out of forming a band and making a record that sounds exactly like early Jesus And Mary Chain but with a girl singing. However Safety Net by The Shop Assistants would prove you to be wrong.

Safety Net