Sweet Jane. I’ve loved it since I was sixteen. I first heard it on Radio One’s Star Choice, a show hosted by various artists from Bowie to Frank Zappa. Bowie introduced me to Sweet Jane and 96 Tears by ? And The Mysterions. Zappa introduced me to All Tomorrow’s Parties, and The Rocky Horror Show’s Tim Curry hipped my lugs to Rock &Roll. I had to get Loaded and have a good time. I bought a second hand copy from Europe’s second-largest record store, Ezy Ryder in Forest Road, Edinburgh. One of 10,000 albums they had available. I think I made a good choice. A 1978 Lou Reed live album I bought around the same time, Take No Prisoners, has an incredible version of Sweet Jane on it. “Sorry we’re late – we were just tooning” deadpans Lou and then launches into the most brilliantly offhand four chord rant – like Lenny Bruce marching in a battalion of wooden soldier


Anyway, May 20th, 1979. It is a Sunday. A Sunday in an continued line since the Sunday I was christened just up there on the High Street in St Giles Cathedral in the shadow of folk clubs and the ghosts on the gibbet. It is a special Sunday; the Sunday of the Starman on the airwaves. David Bowie hosts Star Special on Radio One. I tape the show on my Boot cassette player. The selection of tunes is fantastic I hear 96 Tears by ? & The Mysterions for the first time, Love Street by The Doors, Einstein On The Beach by Philip Glass… but I keep coming back to the sleaziest sunniest sexiest sidewalk song I’ve ever heard delivered through the airwaves by the Starman: Sweet Jane. This was the rush for me from the African hi-life intro through the lurch into the opening chords and…Standing on the corner, suitcase in my hand…and you can smell the summer in the city, the sexy sweaty sun all the more potent for bouncing its rays off some hoary old building on the corner as the steel subway rattles underneath through shafts driven through the strata of a previous age. Temporal ubiquity. I sensed the coexistence of many times and places. The song was a palimpsest, much like the psychogeography of my home city. Decades slipped in song. A Stutz Bearcat was mentioned. I had no idea what it was he was saying. Could not Google it. “Those,” sang Lou, “were different times”.

From the bridge in Newhaven Road, near where I lived, you could see ships in the harbour from Leith Docks. When I first heard ‘Heroin’ and the line “I wish that I’d sail the darkened seas/On a great big clipper ship/Going from this land here to that/In a sailor’s suit and cap” it was so real to me. The old sailor’s missions and things like that were on my doorstep.
lyrics
And I’m lying on my bedroom floor
Sometimes it’s best to close the door
At the age where you seek and you hide
And the radio sets up the ride
Called Walk On The Wild Side
That’s something I’m drawn to
Hello, Lou

And I rifle thru the record bins
Can’t get enough of your sweet sins
So tough and just a smidgeon effete
This must be the sound of the street
Just beyond my view
With my Leith Walk with my East Side talk
Hey , Lou

Ev’ry single day it’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK
Ev’ry single day where the drag queen junkies turn blue
Hello, Lou.

And I wish I was on a clipper ship
Sailing out from Leith to somewhere hip
Wish I was in my vision of New York
Union Square and Andy Warhol’s Pork
I’m a plastic fork
You’re a gay blade and sharp, too
Hello, Lou

The heart that beats in you
Hello, Lou

Ev’ry single day it’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK
Ev’ry single day you and David make it new
Hello, Lou.