Mar 19, 2024
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My C86 era vinyl purchases arrived. Really pleased, great condition and absolute bargains.
AllMusic Staff Pick: The Primitives Lovely
Coloring straight-ahead pop melodies with a bit of Manchester danceability and shoegazer experimentation, this group from Coventry broke through with their 1988 debut. Memorable for those complex guitar textures alongside compact hooks and singer Tracy Tracy's sweet, intelligent delivery, it includes the U.K. Top Ten and U.S. alternative-radio hit "Crash."
- Nitsuh Abebe
The Primitives - Crash
Lil Creamsy | The Primatives
belle and sebastian - crash (the primitives)
from latenighttales belle and sebastian volume 2.
(source: stereogum)
EARLY WORKS FOR ME
(First Steps, Starting Points, and Juvenilia)
The All Night Workers - "Why Don't You Smile"
This edition of Early Works For Me is a bit of an odd duck. The track we're looking at is by a band who only ever made one single, meaning their extant recordings total two songs.1 But, although this is a recording by The All Night Workers, they're supporting characters in this article. That's because the people we're concerned with are two of the co-writers of the song. If you haven't enlarged the image above, do so now. And look at the last two names in the parenthesis below the track title.
(Phillips - Vance - Reed - Cale)
In 1964, Lou Reed was working as a in-house tunesmith for Pickwick Records in New York. It was there that he recorded a minor hit called "The Ostrich",2 which led to the label forming an ad-hoc group called The Primatives to play the song live.3 One member of the group was a newly immigrated Welsh musician named John Cale. The two hit it off and eventually wound up forming the Velvet Underground and caused everyone who bought their first album to form a band.4
But, first, the two collaborated on the song above. It's the first piece of music that the two composed collaboratively, and it's a clear sign of things to come for them. Strangely, the song sounds more akin to what Reed would later write without Cale on the Velvet Underground's last album Loaded. That is, the track tends toward the pop end of the Velvets' spectrum rather than to their experimental side. It's a melancholy ode to lost love, with just a slight edge of the droning guitar style that Cale and Reed perfected later.
Download the All Night Workers' entire discography (both songs!) here.
-TWG
1. Their other song, "Don't Put All Your Eggs In One Basket," is a dizzying soul track that is the complete antithesis of the one above. (And, honestly, it's probably my favorite track of the two. It's exceptionally good, but it just doesn't have the royal pedigree that "Why Don't You Smile" does.)
2. "The Ostrich" was a parody of contemporary dance songs that features lines like "Put your head on the floor / And have someone step on it" and lots of screeching. It might be weirder than anything the Velvet Underground ever recorded.
3. It was in the recording of this track that Reed invented "ostrich guitar" by tuning all of his strings to the D pitch class. He later used the same tuning for both "Venus in Furs" and "All Tomorrow's Parties" with the Velvet Underground. The tuning has been subsequently used by Coldplay, Soundgarden, and Sonic Youth.
4. My sincerest apologies to Mr. Eno.
