Good bits: Remember when your vinyl copy of Sgt Pepper got scratched and the needle kept skipping back over that fairground music bit in Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite? Yeah, bummer, wasn't it? Well, if you were Jim Noir, you'd be treasuring that damaged Beatles album and turning the skippy bit into a song of your own. Noir's music sounds like fragments of your favourites, from The Beatles to ELO to The Beach Boys to the Beta Band, the bits they left behind on the tape after they'd completed their classic album. Like some strange, time-travelling scavenger, Noir has seemingly gone back to various legendary music locations, snaffled all the leftovers from the recording sessions of the past, and sticky-taped them together to make his own unique yet oddly familiar sound. So, Paul McCartney, if you ever wrote a ditty called Eanie Meany and then tossed it in the rubbish behind Abbey Road, Jim's got it now.
Jim'll fix it: The Jim Noir story begins in the Manchester suburb of Davyhulme, where young Alan Roberts is sitting in front of the TV writing a protest song about the Vietnam war . . . a little after the fact. "It had no words, but my music was so powerful you would have known what it was about," he recalls. At nine, Alan formed his first band with his schoolmate Batfinks, and they regularly freaked out the other kids with their kiddiepop versions of 808 State and other rave acts of the day. The pair won a karaoke contest with their rendition of You're the One That I Want from Grease. Their prize? Batman water pistols. One Christmas, their teachers decided that, instead of a Nativity play, they would teach the kids Beatles songs; Alan and Batfinks were so blown away by this Scouse combo that they raided their parents' record collection in search of treasures. Alan resolved to play music like this for a living, and Jim Noir was born.
Dad's rock: In 2003, Noir signed up to My Dad Recordings and released his debut EP, Eanie Meany (sample lyric: "If you don't give my football back I'm gonna get my dad on you"). The music was informed by 1960s psychedelia and jingle-jangle, and fuelled by a childlike innocence and a magpie instinct. "I listen out for the stange things people say, those little rhymes that people come out with." As word got around about this idiosyncratic artist with retro tastes and a sense of the surreal, Noir's three EPs became collectors' items. His mum even sold one on eBay for 50 quid. To meet the continued demand, My Dad Recordings gathered together the EPs along with some new tracks and released them as Noir's debut album, Tower of Love.
C here: Noir has been compared to fellow Manc bedroom-bard Badly Drawn Boy, but the sartorially conscious Noir prefers bowler hats to beanie hats. His recent gig in Crawdaddy proved a hit, and his UK tour wound up with sold-out gigs in London. His new single, The Key of C, is an ode to his favourite musical key.
Kevin Courtney
