Pete Wylie is touring again, playing the hits and the misses of his and Wah!'s back catalogue with a full band, promoting along overdue Best Of album, Teach Yourself Wah! Pete may not have the biggest back catalogue and has had a few bumps in the road over the last four and half decades of making music, but his best songs are as good as anyone's and there are several which I hold very dearly. We arrived at The Deaf Institute last night before 8.30 to find Pete and the band on stage, Pete mid- anecdote (Pete Wylie is perpetually mid- anecdote, his stand up/ stories/ tales are as much part of the Wah! live experience as the songs and he is sharp, funny and candid). It was a bit frustrating to arrive late and it became clear we'd already missed Come Back (a favourite of mine and I was gutted not to hear it) and the room was packed, so we ended up crammed in by the door, unable to move much or get to the bar and constantly bumped into as people came and went including a bouncer who caught me off balance and sent me careering into the couple standing next to me.
The first song Pete played after we arrived was the 1983 single Hope (I Wish You'd Believe Me), Pete in fringed cowboy shirt, leather kecks, top hat and green Telecaster, and in good voice. The songs are legendary, one after another, Pete prefacing each with the comment, 'the record company thought this would be a big hit... it wasn't' followed by laughter. There is much laughter at Wylie gigs, he's a natural raconteur and story teller- sometime sits difficult to tell if its songs separated by talk or talk separated by songs. The songs are full of love and heart, Pete mentioning friends who have gone before many of them- an emotive FourElevenFortyFour is dedicated to Josie Jones. The first song of the encore, Seven Minutes To Midnight is dedicated to John Peel and he speaks warmly and movingly about his friend Janice Long before singing for her. He tells a long and very funny story about Tony Wilson's funeral and the enormous bouquet that arrived with the message With Love From Liverpool accidentally ordered in two foot high letters, dominating every other floral tribute at the funeral, Peter Hook approaching him with the words, 'you wanker'. Disneyland Forever is done solo on acoustic guitar, a song written after meeting Gerry Conlan, one of the Guildford Four, backstage at a gig GMex in the early 90s. Gerry told Pete how much John Peel's radio show meant to them when they were in prison and how Pete's songs were part of that. When Pete asked Gerry what he was going to do after being unjustly imprisoned for sixteen years, Gerry replied he didn't know but it would be Disneyland forever.
Pete launches into The Day Margaret Thatcher Died, the Prime Minister who was on record as saying she wanted the 'managed decline' of Liverpool, with as much venom as ever, ending it with Michael Gove, Jacob Rees Mogg and Esther McVey inserted into the song. Mid- set they play Sinful, my favourite Wylie song, guaranteed Bagging Area catnip, and trailed with the remark, 'the record company thought this would be a big hit... and it was!' Arms aloft, everyone cheers and amusingly they then mess the opening up, have to stop and start again. Behind him there are projections and loops of videos and clips from TV, young and beautiful Pete Wylie and Josie Jones from the 80s looped as 2024 Pete sings and plays. They play is hometown epic Heart As Big As Liverpool, a song that a room full of Mancunians (and a good number of scousers) respond to enthusiastically. 'It's a song about community and belonging', Pete says, 'and optimism and we need that today'. Free; Falling In Love With You from 2017's Pete Sounds is Pete and Wah! channeling Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Wah! do the encore without leaving the stage, Pete saying the steps to the backstage are too much for his knees. Seven Minutes To Midnight is electrifying, urgent, clanging 1980 Cold War dread repositioned for 2024 and we finish, with the curfew approaching, with The Story Of The Blues, Pete's biggest hit and the song he'll always be known for. If it was the only song he'd ever written it would be enough.
Today's Sunday mix was a fairly obvious choice. Pete solo, in various Wah! incarnations and with friends, songs of strength and heartbreak as one of his albums had it.
Forty Minutes Of Pete Wylie And Wah!
- Imperfect List (Version 1)
- Hope (I Wish You'd Believe Me)
- Don't Lose Your Dreams (Excerpt From A Teenage Opera Part 154)
- Sinful (Tribal Mix)
- Come Back
- FourElevenFortyFour
- Make Your Mind Up (Time For Love Today)
- Talking Blue (The Story Of The Blues Part Two)
Imperfect List, a 1990 single, was a Wylie record done with Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie and Josie Jones as Big Hard Excellent Fish. For the 12" it was remixed by Andy Weatherall , four mixes under the title Rimming Elvis The Andy Weatherall Way. Josie recites a list of hates, some universal, some very 1990, some very specifically Liverpudlian, all very relatable. Pete's story about Morrissey's usage of it as walk on music and his associated anecdotes about the singer are very funny and on point.
Hope (I Wish You'd Believe Me) was a 1983 single, backed with a cover of Johnny Thunders' You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory. Wah! do pop soul.
Don't Lose Your Dreams was under the name Pete Wylie and Wah! The Mongrel, a 1991 single and hasn't made either the tracklist for the Best Of or the setlist for the gigs. Which is a shame as I love it, massive early 90s guitars and synths, Pete at his optimistic best, 'Don't you ever lose your dreams/ No matter how far you may tumble/ When people criticise your schemes/ Your wild extremes/ Don't ever lose your dreams'. Another Wylie song that mentions Jack Kerouac. Should have been a massive hit.
Sinful was a 1986 single and a big hit. Pete promoted it on Top Of The Pops and on Wogan, memorably aided by Josie on Paul Weller's pop art guitar and three dancing nuns, the Sisters Of The Anfield Road. The Tribal Mix is even better, seven minutes of dancefloor gold, a thumping proto acid house drum track and Pete's vocal. The Tribal Mix was remixed by Zeus B. Held.
Come Back is a magnificent and stirring love song to his city and a plea to those who have left to look for work elsewhere in the unemployment ravaged early 1980s, a 1984 single and the emotional centrepiece to the Word To The Wiseguy album from the same year. A massive if Springsteen was scouse sound and a hugely, defiantly northern record.
FourElevenFortyFour was on the 1987 album Sinful, an overlooked album. This song has some very 80s production but gets away with it, a love song with a title and chorus that references the enigmatic 4- 11- 44 number.
Make Your Mind Up (Time For Love Today) is the opening song on 2017's Pete Sounds, an album partly crowdfunded by fans- I was one of them- and recorded at Pete's Liverpool studio Disgracelands. A friend tells me Pete has a piece of carpet from the actual Gracelands.
Talking Blues (The Story Of The Blues Part Two) is the second half of the 1983 smash hit The Story of The Blues, Pete talking over the looped Phil Spector sound, talking about people being thrown away, about those with power, about hope and pocketbook psychologists, class struggle, love and everyday life and 'something Sal Paradise said'. That's the story of the blues.