Every Song I Love — 17. The Vaselines — Son Of A Gun
Every Song I Love is a series where I attempt to write about every song that I love, or die trying. Sometimes I’ll explain why I love them, sometimes I’ll tell the stories behind how I fell in love with them, sometimes I’ll do both. Most importantly, I hope you love them too.
The Vaselines weren’t the first band Kurt Cobain helped me fall in love with, but they might just have been the last. When Nevermind became my first true musical obsession, I of course wanted to get my hands on as much of Nirvana’s music as possible, including the unfortunately named compilation of b-sides, rare singles and session tracks that was Incesticide. I particularly enjoyed two songs, Molly’s Lips and Son Of A Gun. They stood out as quite different from the rest of the tracks of the album, simple, poppier, and devastatingly catchy. I didn’t realise for a long time that they were so different because they were covers.
At some point I picked up on the fact that Molly’s Lips and Son Of A Gun were originally by a band called The Vaselines. I knew they were Scottish, had split up a few years back and were not all that well known other than the Nirvana connection. That was the sum total of my knowledge. I was curious to hear more, especially when Nirvana covered a third Vaselines song, Jesus Don’t Want Me For A Sunbeam on their MTV Unplugged performance. Vaselines records were not that easy to find back in the 1990s though, so they remained just one of many bands I thought I should probably get round to listening to at some point. It certainly took me a while.
In fact, it wasn’t until twenty years later when my wife bought me a vinyl reissue compilation called Enter The Vaselines, which included pretty much all of their minimal output from the 1980s, that I listened to them properly. They turned out to be exactly the sort of thing that I like. Melodic, fuzzy indie-pop. Slightly twee perhaps, but with a little edge and a sense of humor that offset that tweeness. Son of a Gun became a particular favourite, initially perhaps because I already knew the song, but after a while on it’s own merits. The two vocal parts from Frances and Eugene combine perfectly (I’m always a sucker for a good female/male duet) and the repeated melodies build in a way that is somehow ecstatic, when in lesser hands it could be annoying.
It didn’t take long before it had surpassed the Nirvana version in my affections, although I still prefer Nirvana’s version of Molly’s Lips, if only because it doesn’t have that annoying bike horn noise (If you know, you know). I loved the rest of the record too, particularly their cover of the 80s camp classic, “You Think You’re A Man”
Even though Son a Gun was a song I enjoyed very much, it didn’t become a significant song in my life until two friend got married in 2019. Their wedding reception was at the best music venue in my home city and, because the husband-to-be was a veteran of the Leeds DIY band circuit, there was live band karaoke at the wedding. I have had a life long fear of performing in front of an audience, but I decided maybe it was time to face that fear. This is despite the fact it would have been easy enough to get out of it, as plenty of the guests opted not to perform.
I would need support though, so my wife and I decided to duet. We had to submit our song choice in advance, so the band could learn it before the big day. We needed something that was a male/female duet, not too difficult to sing (for me, my wife can actually sing properly and used to be in a band), and didn’t have too many words to remember (again, mainly for me).
Our choice, you will be unsurprised to hear, was Son Of A Gun. It fit all of those criteria, and would hopefully go down well at what was a very indie gathering. On the day I was extremely nervous, but the fact that the other performers and audience members were varying degrees of drunk was a big consolation. I was fairly confident that I wouldn’t be the worst performance of the night (if also certainly not the best). Once I was up there, to my surprise, I actually quite enjoyed it. Possibly partly because there were no vocal monitors, so I couldn’t hear my own voice. I didn’t panic or dry up, or forget the words, although I did get a bit confused when the guitarist tried to count me in after the long instrumental break. The crowd was full of people I knew, who appreciated I had done it, even if not necessarily the performance (watching the video back I was essentially just shouting rather than singing my parts, although my wife was good as always).
A few years later, we saw The Vaselines themselves, on one of their intermittent reunions, at the exact same venue, so I had the strange sensation of watching the song being performed from the same spot where I had stood, and to appreciate this song that had been a part of my life for over 30 years. I never ever would have thought the teenage boy rocking out to it in his bedroom would become the married man singing it at a wedding, or that I would take so long to see it performed live, but I’m happy that I did, and I love the way that songs can be this little thread connecting different parts of our lives.
Originally published at http://markjwray.com on September 15, 2024.
