Song 100: The Purple Rain

I keep on giving myself the opportunity to say that I prefer other things to Prince. 

This song, called 'The Purple Rain', is neither by Prince or about Prince. It's got nothing to do with Prince.

It's from this year, 2024, it's by my old favourites The Pernice Brothers, and it's a tribute to singer-songwriter David Berman. In fact, Joe Pernice says it's a tribute both to Berman and two other friends of Pernice who have died, but because of the title and the lyrics, and because Berman is a renowned figure, Berman is the figure who dominates it.

Berman and Pernice were friends - I hadn't known that. It slightly took me aback, as, although they were the same age, I got into their music a long time apart and hadn't associated them with the same kind of thing... though they were both literate, mournful country-tinged Americana writers.

Berman, especially since his death in 2019, has become a significant cult figure, perhaps the most revered of that generation of songwriters, whereas Joe Pernice is, has always been, very marginal. I may be among Joe Pernice's biggest 100 fans in the world! He keeps on keeping on. Little else he's done have I loved as much as the album 'The World Won't End' from 2001, but there'll always be well-crafted, poignant songs on an album Joe Pernice is involved with.

I do really love this song, 'The Purple Rain', though. I love that it does something very obvious, and stately, on the chorus. A slow refrain to remember. Too obvious, perhaps, for a pop classicist to usually employ. 

"Purple mountains in the purple rain" ... ah right, I remember when I heard it, without knowing the background, I thought, of course, this must be about David Berman. David Berman who, as Purple Mountains, released the album 'Purple Mountains' in the summer of 2019 and took his life weeks later.

Berman's lyrics are so good it blows your mind. Both in Purple Mountains and in his previous band, Silver Jews. His voice was limited and he was a rudimentary musician - not a fan of playing live, apparently. Joe Pernice is much more of an all-round songwriter than a musical poet. He started out alt-country but was capable of Beatles-esque, and Smiths-esque pop.

They became friends in the 90s, apparently, taking a writer's course at the University of Massachusetts, and also teaching there. Pernice's band of the time, the Scud Mountain Boys, were involved in recordings for a Silver Jews album, though those recordings weren't used.

Anyway, that's all the trivia. This is a lovely song, about someone you know is living close to the edge. Here's a compilation of the combined works of Berman and Pernice:

Dave and Joe

• Random Rules - Silver Jews
• Overcome by Happiness - Pernice Brothers
• All My Happiness is Gone - Purple Mountains
• Prince Valium - Joe Pernice
• Punks in the Beerlight - Silver Jews
• Grudge F*** - Pernice Brothers
• She's Making Friends, I'm Turning Stranger - Purple Mountains
• She Heightened Everything - Pernice Brothers
• Trains Across the Sea - Silver Jews
• Judy - Pernice Brothers
• Bum Leg - Pernice Brothers
• Margaritas at the Mall - Purple Mountains
• Somerville - Pernice Brothers
• Suffering Jukebox - Silver Jews
• 7.30 - Pernice Brothers
• I Loved Being My Mother's Son - Purple Mountains
• Massachusetts - Scud Mountain Boys
• Nights That Won't Happen - Purple Mountains
• The Purple Rain - Pernice Brothers
• The Wild Kindness - Silver Jews

Song 99: Head Home

I still listen to Midlake's 'The Trials of Van Occupanther' often. It's one of my favourite albums, and a very underrated one, I think.

It was acclaimed in specific circles on its release, in 2006, but it's not something you often see in retrospective lists. It was, I think, more of a "hit" in the UK than the US, and it is fair to say it is, at most, a minor cult album.

'Head Home' is the third of eleven tracks. I wouldn't say, though I do love it, it's one of my absolute favourite songs on the album - those would be 'Roscoe', 'Van Occupanther', 'Branches' and 'Chasing After Deer'. Still, 'Head Home', as I'll explain, is the one I want to write about.

What were, and are, Midlake? They began as a band of jazz students, at their most there have been seven of them, the main singer/songwriter until 2012 was called Tim Smith, they make American folk-rock with strong British influences.

They're still going, and have made a couple of pretty good albums since Tim Smith left. He released his first album as Harp in 2023.

Not too much is known about Smith - he seems a pretty reticent frontman. Nevertheless, '...Van Occupanther' is marked out by its singular character. It is, conceptually, one man's vision.

If I'm to give a pat summary of the three albums he made with Midlake - their debut, 'Bamnan and Slivercork' is in the sky, 'The Courage of Others', from 2010, is deep underground, and '... van Occupanther' is on the surface of the earth.

As much as people commented on the brilliant musicianship, the folk and prog influences, the historical and ecological bent, it grabbed me because it made a connection. It was sad, soulful and touching.

There's a fellow on twitter called Scott Innes who traffics in general witty good vibes, often via the medium of photographs of football managers, and I noted his favourite album is '...Van Occupanther'. He wrote once about the appeal of lines like "Let me not be too consumed with this world, Sometimes I want to go home and stay out of sight for a long time".

The album is full of lines like that, slightly off-kilter but weirdly moving.

"Whenever I was a child I wondered what if my name had changed into something more productive like Roscoe, been born in 1891, waiting with my Aunt Roseline"

"We won't get married, cos she won't have me, she wakes up awfully early these days"

"Did you ever want to run around with bandits to see many places and hide in ditches. It's not always easy, it's not always easy"

"They told me I wouldn't but I found an answer, I'm Van Occupanther, I'm Van Occupanther"

"there's someone I'd like to see. She never mentions a word to me, she reads Leviathan"

and

"I think I'll head home".

'Head Home' turned out to be the crowd-pleaser. More even than the band's most talked- about song and lead single 'Roscoe', it was 'Head Home' that really had the crowd going on the handful of occasions I watched Midlake at the festivals.

It borders on the anthemic and also allowed for an extended guitar twiddle towards the end. This was Midlake's few minutes as rock gods.

I remember watching them, second on the bill on the main stage at End of the Road in 2011, rocking out with their lank hair and studious beards, thinking "wow, this is really something. Maybe these guys could be big after all."

It wasn't to be. Tim Smith left the band not long afterwards, midway through recording an album that was scrapped - they held together pretty well, with another member, Eric Pulido, on lead vocals, and, to be honest, that was a slightly false moment of grandeur. A certain amount of interest from a mid-sized crowd, second on the bill, Sunday at End of the Road, is not being the centre of the musical world on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.

Still, that was, I suppose, the precise centre of my musical world. I've looked at the bill for End of the Road that year (a festival which started out in the mid-2000s taking about 5000 people, went up to  around 15000 and is still going strong) - Midlake, James Yorkston, The Walkmen, Laura Marling, Joanna Newsom, Gruff Rhys, not to mention The Fall, Mogwai, Beirut, The Staves, Emmy the Great, The Unthanks, Joan as Police Woman, Lykke Li, Tinariwen, Best Coast, Willy Mason, Micah P Hinson, Brakes and The Leisure Society. I doubt that there are many people other than me that think about half the great songs of the 21st century  emerged from that underperforming bunch.

So, Midlake, then, with what, as I reach the end of this piece, I feel a bit more confident to say is a better album than 'Pet Sounds', Rumours' and 'After the Goldrush' -  'The Trials of Van Occupanther'. With 'Head Home' which I always think of whenever I want to head home, which is often.

Incidentally, in the past couple of days, I listened, for the first time in ages, to the follow-up to 'Occupanther', 'The Courage of Others', which was generally deemed a disappointment, including by me. It was heavier, more impenetrable, and just didn't quite have the human magic. I did listen to it a lot, though, for a couple of weeks, and I remember it came out in the week I moved into my studio flat in Tooting in 2010, and was, for a short period of time, without Sky TV, without internet (no smartphone then) and a few other of the general trappings of modern life. Pathetically, that's as close as I've come to a Midlake-like existence in the past decade and a half. Anyway, listening back to 'The Courage of Others', it has plenty to like. Perhaps Midlake's time is still to come.

Midpoint on the Oasis

So people still like Oasis, then.

I, myself, would not pay several hundred pounds to see them now. In fact, I don't think I would go if you covered my travel expenses and gave me a t-shirt. I saw them once, at a festival, in 2005, and that was enough. They were ok. My friends didn't stick around, they went to see LCD Soundsystem, the right choice. I did. It was fine. They played some of their good songs, some of their less good songs. There was no drama, no glory.

At the same time, I can't say, though I might like to, I belong to very vocal the "I never liked them anyway, they were entirely boorish and meritless, they caused Brexit" camp.

I did like Oasis, and, in fact, I still like the Oasis songs I like. The Oasis songs I like are the ones which are romantic and vulnerable, which have a hint of desperation and/or innocence. They are also, nearly always, ones that Liam Gallagher, a very distinct and memorable rock singer at his best, sings, rather than Noel Gallagher, who has unquestionably the least pleasant voice ever to grace two Number 1 hits (though, in fact, I realised, it's not even that Noel's voice is horrible in and of itself. When he sings gently, as on Half the World Away, or Talk Tonight, it's really not so bad, it's his loud voice which is the genuine horror)..

So, five Oasis songs I like are ...

Slide Away, the best Oasis song. 

Wonderwall. I'm afraid so. Wonderwall remains a massively popular song. It has over 2 billion Spotify streams. That's really top range - top 100 songs ever, worldwide. And that's only going to go up again now. And, with all that, I still have an affection for it when I hear it like the first time i heard it in the autumn of 95 in Greece and St Andrews.

I'm Outta Time (this is a late single, written by Liam, and genuinely rather lovely, the closest he ever got to a good John Lennon impression).

Round Are Way - just joyful and silly.

and, the one that has always been most interesting and particular to me,

Stay Young. The b-side to one of the worst singles by anyone ever, D'You Know What I Mean, the song that killed a decade. Noel Gallagher didn't/doesn't like Stay Young, so it stayed a b-side. It's better than everything on Be Here Now,

But the reason it's a little interesting to me now is that, when people see no merit in Oasis, they do overlook the merit of shared experience. of how powerful it is to feel something and feel there is meaning in a song, with other people. That didn't really happen much with me for Oasis. Certainly not when I saw them live. There was the communal feeling on Wonderwall being everywhere, of everyone on every street liking it.

Apart from that, the Oasis songs that have ever made me feel something are, I guess, Live Forever, and, oddly, Hey Now, one of the least notable tracks on What's the Story ... which I remember listening to on my Walkman in the snow when i went for a walk near a relative's house in southern Scotland, just after I'd been given What's the Story and Pet Sounds for Christmas in 95, secretly preferring the Oasis to the Beach Boys (though that didn't last for long)

And Stay Young, which, banal as it sounds now, I remember listening to in a car with my friends after we'd lost our first football match of the team we'd started in the second year of university, feeling really down about it because wer'd hoped we'd be good, all of us singing along to this and cheering up to the words "My faith's unshakeable" and then that football team didn't lose again all season, won nearly every game we played for three years, and was probably my favourite, most joyful sporting experience, just to be playing football well with my actual friends, rather than all the others i had to play with the rest of the time.

So that's Stay Young. It means something to me, man. Like I imagine a lot of Oasis songs mean a lot to other people. Clearly.

So I'm sympathetic to that. 

Saying all that, and for balance, I hate a lot of Oasis songs.

D'You Know What I Mean, the worst single ever

Roll With It, perhaps the 4th worst single ever.

Little By Little - bottom 10 of all time.

Shakermaker - abysmal. (indeed Shakermaker was the first Oasis song I heard, when all the hype was beginning, and I was entirely nonplussed, and didn't get into them for another 18 months or so).

All Around the World. A disgrace.

Who Feels Love. Yuk,

And I've no time for the big anthemic "aren't we great, we're having a great time" ones (i think Stay Yoing is different than that, i think it's insecurity and hope).

Champagne Supernova

Some Might Say

The Masterplan

even Rock'n'Roll Star.

Don't like What's the Story. 

Don't like Sunday Morning Call and most of the other ones sung by Noel Gallagher.

Also, Noel Gallagher has become awful. Just says lot of horrible, depressing, kids today don't know they were born. what's this woke all about, things (whereas Liam is, mostly, a little more of a good-natured, live and let live, ray of light in middle age than might have been expected).

So, no, I won't be seeing Oasis. But I don't hate them quite as much as I'd like to.