7.1.22 To All My Friends

 This is a moment of right place, right time. An example of me buying on vinyl something that I'd owned on CD for a decade or three. And a question of how greatness slips through the cracks.

I was in a meeting last October. Business offices on the Wirral for a project that will come to fruition early next year. And next door to the offices where we had the meeting was a second hand record shop (and CDs, and DVDs, and books and stuff) - well, I couldn't *not* go in, could I?

And there it was, sitting at the front of the rack. Superstar. Greatest Hits Vol One, the brilliantly titled (given that there were *no* hits - at all) debut by one of Glasgow's very finest. And Glasgow, as we all know, has had some bloody fine artists over the years. Liverpool's always had a kinship with the city and with its musical sons but I didn't discover this in Liverpool.

1992 - I was living in Leeds, managing the smaller of the two HMVs in the city (the one that's now an Italian restaurant on the edge of a huge shopping centre) and had spent the previous year convinced that there were only two albums worth listening to - Nirvana's Nevermind and Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque. It's only the latter that I've listened to at any point in the last 15 years.

And that there was only one label worth obsessing about. Creation. Creation in its pre-Oasis days. In the days of Screamadelica and Boo Radleys when there was a grand pop vision that you could do absolutely anything you wanted.

It was Creation that released the Superstar debut. It's not an album but it's not really an EP either - let's call it a mini album. There are six tracks and one of those six is directly linked to the fifth.

Superstar was (until the year 2000) the brainchild of Joe McAlinden, of the scene that birthed BMX Bandits, The Boy Hairdressers and the aforementioned Teenage Fanclub and a man with whom I weirdly ended up having a conversation on twitter a while back - see, social media can have its uses. 

The mini album sits squarely in the Teenage Fanclub milieu but where his compatriots managed to conquer small areas of the States with their feedback and Neil Young-esque chord sequences, Joe took the love for the glory and beauty of pure pop that inhabits the Scottish scene and added trumpets and sunshine.

Greatest Hits Vol One is a californian sun dappled thing; it's all 'ba-ba-bah' backing vocals, jangling guitars and surging horns. It has more to do with the melodies of the Carpenters and the Saturday Night Fever as interpreted by McCartney gloss of Jellyfish than it does with any of the acts that surrounded it at the time. It refused grunge, it simply shone.

And nobody bought it. As is often the way.

I'm on that last track now - for the second time this morning - the guitars are chiming, the drums are holding the fade out, building steadily to explode again and drive through the end and what seems to be a massed choir but is probably only three voices is proving that if you do it long enough then 'ba-ba-ba-ooh' is the most profound thing you can say in a three minute pop song.