Raise All Kinds Of Candy To The Stars

Anthems aren’t just records you remember dancing to at the school disco thirty-five years ago, in the same way that society has to involve everybody, not just those who make the “right” faces. Listening to 1968: The Year The World Burned , Jon Savage’s latest excellent 2CD compilation album, and in particular to “Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone (which is included). That’s a politely very angry record and, in the end, probably a Kirk Douglas-style call to arms – “I am ‘everyday people.’” Its message was presumably not lost on the teenage Nile Rodgers. While in hospital earlier this year I read several books to help pass the time and get me back to sanity, and one of those was Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco and Destiny , Rodgers’ autobiographical memoir. At times an exhilarating read, at other times unreadable (as in: this is not the sort of thing you should read while in hospital), Rodgers is nevertheless razor-sharp in his recollections, and re...

Even as a young teenager growing up in Lanarkshire, I was always listening out for music that sounded out of kilter, whether it was George Crumb’s Makrokosmos III (the closing section of which I heard on a Saturday afternoon on Radio 3) or anything which “irrupted” the top forty. From the first time that I heard “Baker Street” on the radio – I think it was Dougie Donnelly on Radio Clyde – I was immediately hooked, mentally noting that this song seemed to go as much against the grain of a standard pop record as anything coming out of punk or New Wave, and was probably just as angry, if not angrier. For forty years I harboured the notion – and this was from a time when visiting London, never mind living and working in it, was still a distant pipedream – that the song encapsulated the situation of the displaced Scotsman, marooned in a world he doesn’t really like or perhaps even understand. Make no mistake, this is undeniably a Scottish record, and seemingly all about someone...