The Trashcan Sinatras: I’ve Seen Everything: “Songs that clang as softly as chapel bells on a distant hill.”
It’s 1993 and I lie for a living. The more I lie, the more attention I get. And in 1993, other people’s attention — in particular, the approving attention of my editors at Melody Maker — might be the only thing standing between me and the dole queue. Currently, I’m so far down the pecking order here that, once all the bigger birds have claimed the week’s juiciest pickings, all that’s left for me is bones and polystyrene. I’ve barely been there six months and I’ve already been sent to cover four gigs by free-spirited acid jazz bongsuckers Galliano. After the third one, I summon the courage to point this out, just in case no-one had noticed, and my editor makes a point of sending me to a fourth one.
But one thing I have noticed is that if I fall into line with the prevailing critical orthodoxy of the paper, I’m rewarded with bigger features. If I venerate makeweight grunge records by hairy Americans in lumberjack shirts, that seems to work out in my favour. If I sing the praises of austere domeheads who bark opaque commands over the sound of a jackhammer trying to break up a fight between a radiator and a Braun Handblender, staffers who usually pretend I don’t exist shout “Great review!” en route to the coffee machine. And having written a few of those on the trot, I suddenly find myself asked to review the week’s new single releases. It’s the commission every lowly freelancer dreams of getting. The promise of a page all to yourself comes with the implied threat that, decades later, RuPaul would turn into a global catchphrase: Don’t fuck it up.
When you’re doing that week’s singles, press officers sometimes visit the office and push the latest offerings from their label into your open arms. The guy from Go! Discs Records is a genial Scouser called Tony. “Do you like Trashcan Sinatras?” he asks. I issue a circumspect nod. The old me used to like The Trashcan Sinatras, but the old me isn’t trying run with the big boys at Melody Maker.
In the reviews room, I grudgingly remove the CD single from its case, place it in the tray and press play. Seeking to mark clear territory between the old me and the new one, I try and affect indifference to no-one in particular. But within seconds, it becomes clear that occult powers are at work, and the new me is unable to thwart them. Suddenly, it’s like I’m in a scene from a musical. The four walls around me flip 180 degrees to reveal Victorian brickwork while the carpet tiles beneath me give way to Kilmarnock cobbles. Beyond the 26th Floor of Kings Reach Tower, brilliant South Bank blues retreat behind graphite ganache rainclouds. From those clouds, a sweet melancholy spray encircles me. And although the sadness has set in, that’s ok because I know who I am amid these sounds far more than I do the rest of the time I’m in this place.
The song is called I’ve Seen Everything. It’s a farewell song. A song about not really wanting to leave the place you love, but having no choice. It’s an address to the alleys and allies that got you this far but will not get you the rest of the way. It rather reminds me of my mum, aged 21, and her fiancé, boarding a ship from Piraeus to England and breaking her own mother’s heart in the process. But it could just as easily apply to the return journey, following an experiment that took decades to fail. I play it six or seven times that afternoon. Because I’m not a total bastard, I’m nice about it — but as it’s 1993 and I lie for a living, I withhold from I’ve Seen Everything the ultimate accolade I’m able to bestow. Even though it’s literally one of the most beautiful songs I’ve heard in my life. And so that week’s Single Of The Week prize will be awarded to Sheep On Drugs. What, you might ask, did Sheep On Drugs sound like? If you’ve got five minutes, a jackhammer, a radiator and a Braun handblender, I can show you.
Because time does nothing to dissipate the guilt, not a month has gone by without me thinking about that day. And because not a month goes by without me listening to Trashcan Sinatras’ second album, pleasure rarely comes without a top note of pain. By Christmas, I was in deep with this record. Unlike Cake, the debut album that preceded it, I’ve Seen Everything was the record where you could no longer discern the stitchwork that joined one band member’s material to that of another. Trashcan Sinatras songs seemed to grow in a shared safe space where men in small Scottish towns honour the unspoken pact they made to live a life of poetry rather than profit, but would nonetheless rather they didn’t have to choose.
Cursory listens told you these guys were making it their business to learn from the best. Dylan Thomas describing Mrs Price’s “lonely loving hottwaterbottled body” in Under Milk Wood stuck with John Douglas (guitar, vocals) and Frank Reader(vocals, guitar). How to alchemise the ineffable magic of silent nights in small towns into not just lyrics but music too? A measure of American success had bought them a studio and, with that, the space and freedom to make the music and words link arms on the deserted parade. Microphones over saucepans of water that, when summoned, ape the sound of puddles drunk on moonlight. The synaesthetic sigh of a well-timed joint borne out in delicate, dreamy pencil-sketches like The Perfect Reminder and Iceberg. And, in producer Ray Shulman, chosen for his avuncular presence and his stellar work on The Sugarcubes’ Birthday, a kindred enabler.
Robert Burns talked about riveting words together just to hear them clang. The songs on I’ve Seen Everything clang as softly as chapel bells on a distant hill. Written by Paul Livingston (guitar), Easy Read refracts a messy night in Irvine through hungover goggles and observes that “the biggest trade is lost and found.” John calls them “thoughts of the day”, these songs where you set fresh memories in the amber of notes and chords without stopping to question the logic of what makes it onto the page. Because in the no-man’s land between sense and its absence, there’s harvesting to be done — and no more so than on Hayfever, the Trashcans’ sole concession to the William Burroughs’ cut-up technique. A memento of the night everyone gets to work snipping likely extracts from magazines and throwing lines into a hat. One of those pieces of paper says, “Hello, I’m Harry”, and a womanising bully rises from the swamp of infinite possibilities, introducing himself in some detail to the startled pop group who gave him life.
Meaning doesn’t belong to the moment, not by any stretch. It takes hindsight to turn the endless random slide show of the present into a story. I’ve Seen Everything is an album that bears rich testament to that process. On The Hairy Years — a vivid reminiscence of a family holiday at Butlins — our prepubescent Catholic protagonist impetuously steals an ornamental snowscene from a gift shop. He waits for God to do His worst and — when nothing happens — there comes the realisation that there’s no hell or eternal damnation.
Perhaps if hell is other people, that’s also where heaven is to be found. And there’s something of that at work here. My favourite Trashcan Sinatras songs sound like hymns to a spirit that lives and dies with the humans who choose to share it. Orange Fell is a portal into a world transformed by young love. A serenade to the smitten, soundtracked by The Jordanaires and spotlit by “streetlamp Lucozade orange.” If you wanted to teach a Vulcan what a crush feels like, this is the song you’d reach for. When Frank sings about hard times, it makes no sense to say “Cheer up, it might never happen.” Back in the days when it wasn’t insane to hope the next record might sell a million, these gentlemen knew the deal. Without that understanding, a song like Killing The Cabinet (“Cheapskating over buying the ring / We’re signing on, planning offspring for something to do / This is our tale”) couldn’t exist. Being in a band was the trade you learned in order to avoid having to learn a proper trade. You only get one shot, so to hell with the consequences. Or, as Frank puts it on Bloodrush, “I know you must try / To overtake the undertaker / By putting your foot down and closing your eyes.”
If Trashcan Sinatras had a coat of arms, the motto beneath it might read “It beats working for a living.” For John in particular, this is more than a hypothesis. That much is clear from Earlies, the final song on I’ve Seen Everything, an achingly evocative tale of teenage escape, from Irvine to Kilburn, sleeping rough in railway stations before bagging a room in a shared house with Iranian students; Combat Rock nights with new pals from distant places, blurring into early morning shifts in Marble Arch McDonalds and then back again, day upon day, through “T-shirt breezes walking home from work” and “three feet of snow… on the Walnut Road.” And like everything before it, if this music earned as much as it yearned, then the people who made it would be ski-ing down mountains of cash to answer the doorbell.
But, of course, if such considerations were ever the point, then Trashcan Sinatras wouldn’t have made their founding pact. Every time I hear I’ve Seen Everything, my gratitude grows a little greater. By writing the truest thing they knew, Trashcan Sinatras created a record that has weathered with wisdom and the best of intentions. The same cannot, alas, be said of Sheep On Drugs. And that’s why, in 2023, I no longer lie for a living.
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