I’ve been sick, in more ways than one. The only person I can demonstrably say has kept me sane through it all is someone who died when I was in high school, and someone I’ll never have really known, yet someone I know, someone who, like all the musicians and artists I adore, never got their due the first time around. There’s some kind of perverse fascination in the genius and legend who was roundly overlooked.
As a review of the Associates’ debut album explained, “Billy Mackenzie is vocally reminiscent of Bowie: but Bowie has never sung with so much delightful range and subtlety, never really had to.” I can see where David Bowie started it all, but where did Billy Mackenzie take it?
I think the best way to demonstrate where he took it is to lay out alternate versions of the same song, side by side. The first is a B-side, “Mona Property Girl”, released in 1979; the second is “A Girl Named Property”, the same song (as in, same lyrics), but with an entirely different arrangement and vocal take on what is best described as a combination mockery/paean of personifying the inanimate.
Why do he’s call their ships she’s?
For comfort or for company?
He phone calls his lover by name, then another wave
Goodbye let stones skim their seas
One is a fat, bubbly, down tempo post-punk bridge extended into a full song, the second is, well, absolutely meant for the nave of a church. Here is a vocalist who wasn’t afraid to remain on the margin (unlike Freddy Mercury), and also a vocalist who used more of what he had because he simply had it (unlike David Bowie). In his voice, you hear goth, cabaret, krautrock and torch songs all at once. When I hear these songs, I know that I was looking hard for this, for years, and am finally rewarded with the queasy comfort in his voice. I wonder if he ever considered that there would be people out there like me, unable to find the right words to demonstrate respect for what he did, a decade after he died like the normal person he wasn’t, buried in some public cemetery in Dundee. He had to want that on some level, so I hope I’m giving him his due as much as one person can.
