Perfect Song: 'A Girl Like You' by Edwyn Collins with Rob Harvilla

This episode, we’ve asked our podfather Rob Harvilla to pick his perfect 90s British Rock song: “A Girl Like You” by Edwyn Collins. Listen along as Yasi and Rob cover the birth of indie pop, Edwyn Collins’ Orange Juice days, and his earlier solo career, right up to the release of his third album Gorgeous George as well as the Empire Records soundtrack, which helped launch this song into the rock stratosphere. CREDITS: Host: Yasi Salek @yasisalek Guest: Rob Harvilla @robharvilla Producer: Liz Sánchez Audio Editor: Adrian Bridges Additional Production Supervision: Justin Sayles Theme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Look, it's not that confusing. I'm Rob Harvilla, host of the podcast 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, except we did 120 songs. And now we're back with the 2000s. I refuse to say aughts, 2000 to 2009. The Strokes, Rihanna, J Lo, Kanye, sure. And now the show is called 60 Songs That Explain the 90s: The 2000s. Wow, that's too long a title for me to say anything else right now. Just trust me, that's 60 Songs That Explain the 90s: The 2000s, preferably on Spotify.

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• 1:24Speaker 04

  What's with this band anyway? I don't get it, can you please explain? Wait, like, BandSplain? Never heard this band in my life. Oh, you haven't? I'd love that. Really? Why? Yeah, I love this song. Oh, I don't know that one. BandSplain, BandSplain, BandSplain. I really hate this band! Whatever, I'm their biggest fan. BandSplain, BandSplain, BandSplain, BandSplain. BandSplain!

• 2:03Yasi Salek?

  Hello and welcome to Bandplain. I am your host, Yasi Sawick. This is usually a show where I invite an expert guest on to help me explain a cult band or iconic artist, but today's episode, you guessed it babe, it's a little different. Okay, listen, I know this is like the 18th shorter, non epic, Homeric Bandplain episode in a row, but some of us over here are struggling to catch up after some acts of God derailed us, okay? So I hope you're enjoying them. We will be back with the mythically long Bandplain episodes soon enough, but these are fun too, and I appreciate your patience. Anyway, today's episode is about one perfect song. That's the new episode type, a perfect

• 2:48Yasi Salek?

  song. And that song is "A Girl Like You" by Edwin Collins.

• 3:01Yasi Salek?

  My guest today, just like a song from days of yore, Mr. Robert Bobby Hervilles.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  But now you come along. I've been singing this song for the last 90 minutes.

• 3:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I was really late.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  Including, yeah, while you were getting coffee, I just sung this song to me and to your producer, apparently. It's a catchy little tune, is the conclusion that I've come to.

• 3:27Yasi Salek?

  Do you think that's the hallmark of a perfect song is that it's like, or one of the hallmarks anyways, is that it's an earworm?

• 3:34Speaker 00

  It's a pretty good sign. Yeah, it's just, it just, it gets you bopping, you know? I'm like singing the guitar line, like I'm

• 3:53Speaker 00

  It's like a song comprised entirely of earworms, just interlocking earworms, like stacked.

• 3:59Yasi Salek?

  Is the Macarena a perfect song? And just following this logic?

• 4:05Speaker 00

  Well, I think there is a similarity and then it gets stuck in your head, but I anecdotally, it seems as though people who get the Macarena stuck in their head are angry, are displeased at this.

• 4:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Whereas I, in my experience, I have, in my experience, and I've never heard anyone complain about having this song get stuck in your head. I think this song, I think a girl like you does get stuck in people's heads, but they're like, oh, cool. I prefer this to whatever was going on in my head.

• 4:34Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  Before this got stuck in it, like, including any thoughts, you know, or feelings you may have had, like, this song is superior to anything else you could be thinking about or feeling.

• 4:44Yasi Salek?

  So potentially, all perfect songs are earworms, but not all earworms are perfect.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  Correct. Exactly. There you go.

• 4:55Yasi Salek?

  Okay. "A Girl Like You" by Edmund Collins came out in October of 1994, but this is Band Plan, so we're gonna go ahead and start in 1977.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  This is the bite-sized episode.

• 5:09Yasi Salek?

  That's right.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  This is not the full scale, and yet, we travel back 20 years.

• 5:14Yasi Salek?

  Because, as you can see on the shared Google Doc that I have made and sent your way, the first thing that is at the top is, who invented Indie Pop?

• 5:26Speaker 00

  I don't know if I've ever been shared on the Indie Doc before, or the Google Doc before.

• 5:32Yasi Salek?

  It's a new thing.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  You talk about it all the time, but this is my first experience with it, and it's, even for a smaller quote-unquote episode, this is a daunting, it's like a complete history of human development from 1977 up to the point of the song. It's very impressive.

• 5:49Yasi Salek?

  You should see my.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  We got all the lyrics here.

• 5:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  I'm sure I would add, actually, I would actually not.

• 5:55Yasi Salek?

  Literally has the industrial revolution bullet planted.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 5:59Yasi Salek?

  Okay, do you have thoughts about the origination of Indie Pop?

• 6:04Speaker 00

  I think that as with when we spoke about Oasis, I need to lean in to my role here as the ugly American, right? Like, the uncool American. Teenager. I think one way to come at this song is to know the history of indie pop, to know, you know, Edwin Collins is to know his band, Orange Juice's vital importance to indie pop, to post punk, you know, what he meant, you know, to multiple genres of music before this song ever come out, or you can be 16 years old in 1994 and listening to the radio and this song comes on and you have no context for this person, for his band, for basically any genre that he's ever

• 6:47Speaker 00

  worked in. Like, I was thinking about the Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana 50 Greatest Records.

• 6:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  You know, and how many American teenagers who fell for Nirvana, who fell for alternative rock, learned about the raincoats, you know, young marble giants, marine girls, who learned about all this stuff because Kurt Cobain said it was cool. Like, you look at that list and like, half of it is like Big Black, you know, and the Melvins and whatever. And the other half is, you know, this really childlike, you know, dainty, enjoyable indie pop that you've never heard before. You have no context for it if you're raised on MTV, on alternative radio, or whatever. So I just, I'm trying to come at this song and to come at Edwin Collins

• 7:35Speaker 00

  the way I did when I was 16 in 1994, which is having no idea about anything other than a vague sense of like Kurt Cobain thinks some of this stuff is cool and therefore it is cool.

• 7:46Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  You know what I mean?

• 7:47Yasi Salek?

  I didn't even know that. I was just like, that's that Austin Powers song.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  That's exactly what I thought.

• 7:53Yasi Salek?

  Which I think was like, two years later, though, I think, but still.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is exactly what I thought.

• 7:57Yasi Salek?

  Empire Records, that Empire Records. That was my first introduction, was the film Empire Records.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  Right. I think that's true. I think that's true for a lot of people. And like, the two movies that I think about immediately when I hear this song still are Pulp Fiction and Austin Powers.

• 8:13Yasi Salek?

  Which, Pulp Fiction is a Baron Stain Bear situation, isn't it? Because is it actually in Pulp Fiction?

• 8:18Speaker 00

  No, it is not. It just feels like it should be. It just has the same energy as like- Urge Overkill covering Girl You'll Be a Woman Soon. Or like the, the collapse of genres and decades. Like this idea that old stuff can be hip too. I think that Pulp Fiction just, that was the light bulb moment for so many, you know, clueless American teenagers. And this song just felt like it should have been in Pulp Fiction and that it should be in Austin Powers, even though Austin Powers comes out like two or three years later. It's a really weird thing, but it's absolutely true that those are the two movies I think of, not Empire Records.

• 8:56Yasi Salek?

  Perhaps there's another aspect, again, maybe not every perfect song, but at least of this perfect song, which is sort of like a timeless quality, right? That like it can be, it can have come out, it could have been a cover of some 60s song, but it's not.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Right, right. It feels timeless. It feels like you could have heard it on the radio, you know, in 1968, in 1978, you know, in 1988, you know, but it's just the time warp aspect of this song, even if you don't really understand, you know, what genres, what eras are being collapsed. It just, it feels like a song that you've heard before the first time you hear it.

• 9:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, totally agree. So just to put some respect on Edwin Collins's name, I will go a little bit back. We don't have to map the entirety of what, where indie pop started and what it was, but you kind of mentioned already, I mean, I think the argument could be made, were you to be interested in arguing about genres, which I'm not, that the television personalities made the first indie pop album with, uh, And Don't the Kids Just Love It? Although that's also kind of post punk, which, you know, they're sort of intertwined.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 10:11Yasi Salek?

  The go-betweens, you know, having their own pollen of indie pop somehow floated along over to Australia, because they're obviously indie pop. Then there's the Monochrome set, which was formed in 78, and Orange Juice, which officially started in 79. And then later you mentioned the Marine Girls, Asta Camera, Pastels, the Vaseline's, Tallulah Gosh.

• 10:35Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 10:36Yasi Salek?

  Marine Girls famously featuring Tracy Thorne later of Everything But The Girl. Yeah, et cetera, et cetera. See the NME C86 tape. We're not going to get into that because we will be doing an episode about that later.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  Excellent.

• 10:51Yasi Salek?

  Let's talk about Edwin, who was born August 23, 1959 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  Excellent pronunciation there.

• 11:00Yasi Salek?

  Thank you. He co-founded the band The New Sonics in 1976 with his friend Alan Duncan, with a couple of kids in the year below them. And there's a couple of changes in lineup, but they did re-Christian the band Orange Juice in 79. And then Edwin Collins and his friend Alan Horn founded the label Postcard Records, which was like a pretty seminal indie pop label. Ostensibly formed to put out Orange Juice's first single, Falling and Laughing. It sold 2,000 copies. It's a great song. Maybe my favorite Orange Juice song. I know Rip It Up Hive will have something to say about that, but Falling and Laughing really gets me.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  First of all, Orange Juice is a great name for this band.

• 11:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Like, just, it's a perfect name. Like, again, like, sort of the childlike, the bright, the sunniness. Like, it's just an extremely well-named band.

• 12:02Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  That's right. There you go. There you go.

• 12:04Yasi Salek?

  So it's a lot, a lot, doing a lot of heavy lifting, the name. I think the one thing to say about indie pop that's interesting is that, like, the cool prevailing indie music of the time before it was Joy Division, The Fall, Echo and the Bunnyman, particularly with Joy Division, The Fall was sort of a more intense, darker type thing. So it kind of was.

• 12:33Yasi Salek?

  In stark contrast to that, this like more like teenager-y, dealing with youth and had this jangly guitar thing going on that wasn't really present there in that kind of severe post-punk. And Edwin Collins was a primary songwriter of those songs.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  There's just a buoyancy, right? Like, there's a joy. Every time I put on Orange Juice, I'm reminded once again, like, oh, Talking Heads. Like, it's just, they, they sound so much like Talking Heads to me. And that's partly about Edwin's voice, just the rubberiness, the bounciness. It's a very David Byrne-type voice. But even the lyrics, like, there's such a joy. And it's like, oh, I'm feeling this feeling, like, I'm walking down the street and I'm seeing this. There's just such a, not naive, but just, just as open to experience sort of joy to his lyrics. That's absolutely in contrast, like Joy Division or anybody. You're supposed to be dour and gloomy and you're supposed to hate

• 13:33Speaker 00

  everything and be miserable all the time. But there's just a bounciness and a wryness to the band. And then like the basslines, like, just the total Tina, Tina Weymouth sort of bounce to them. And like, parts of Orange Juice, parts of these records sound to me like very early Talking Heads. Some of them sound to me like, you know, Remain in Light, like, when they get a little denser, when the guitars get a little proggy or like, this, this band really maps onto Talking Heads for me. And maybe that's superficial, but I do think that they sort of served a similar purpose, the same way Talking Heads would be a contrast to whatever, like, the Ramones or somebody harder and louder, you know, that I think Orange Juice served that same purpose for, you know, Echo and the Bunnyman, Joy Division, whatever.

• 14:17Yasi Salek?

  No, totally. I also feel like the Talking Heads comparison is really good because I think Orange Juice is also maybe not given enough credit for how much, like, exploration they did within their sound. And like, you know, Rip It Up as an album is very interesting. And it doesn't kind of just stay in that, like, this is no disrespect to the Pastels or whatever, who I love, but like, they kind of kept it in one mode. You know, and I think that this there's a bit more of a complicated approach to music that orange juice was doing. It does feel like they kind of set the table for a lot of what came later, but didn't really get the credit or the fame or the success that maybe was afforded the people that they paved the way for.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  I also thought of Jonathan Richman. Isn't the first

• 15:05Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  The first orange juice record is named You Can't Hide Your Love Forever, I think is a modern lovers, right? Like, so even before I knew that, like, the same thing with Jonathan Richman, like, it's springtime in New York. Like, here's my description of springtime in New York. And it's you superficially, you can look at him and say, like, oh, he's so naive, you know, he's it feels sort of superficial and brainless, but it's just, it's so wise and it's so smart. And again, it's just like so open to experience, you know, in a way that you're not used to hearing in pop songs, but just the immediate connection emotionally that you make with someone like David Byrne, someone like Jonathan Richman, and someone like Edwin Collins, you know, that style of writing, you know, that's very smart,

• 15:50Speaker 00

  but also cheerful isn't even quite the right word, but there's just, there's just more openness to it, I guess.

• 15:58Yasi Salek?

  I mean, you're not saying the word that was sort of lobbed at these bands as an insult, which does a little bit fit, which is twee.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 16:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:09Yasi Salek?

  But it is a little, it's a little twee.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  Was that one of those things where it started as a pejorative and then it was reclaimed?

• 16:15Yasi Salek?

  As, yeah, as like kind of the genre.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:17Yasi Salek?

  And also anorak music, which we don't use here in America, because most Americans probably don't know what an anorak is.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  I don't have a parka or an anorak.

• 16:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it was, that was a diss. Those people, they were called people anoraks, those anoraks.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  It's very rude, right? Like, it's, it's raining, you know, like, what are you supposed to?

• 16:39Yasi Salek?

  Imagine in American terms, like, those jackets.

• 16:44Yasi Salek?

  Doesn't really work as well.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  Those hoodies.

• 16:46Yasi Salek?

  Those damn hoodies.

• 16:47Speaker 00

  You know, those guys are such hoodies. Yeah.

• 16:50Yasi Salek?

  In Sounds Magazine in 1980, they reviewed Orange Juice and then the other band that was on Postcard Records, Joseph Kay, and they said, "Orange Juice makes me smile and feel good for no obvious reason." And I feel like that kind of echoes what you're saying, right? Like, that was the feeling evoked by the music of Orange Juice. And they did okay. Like, listen, I'm not, I don't want to downplay them. They went on John Peel's show.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:15Yasi Salek?

  They had a pretty big hit with Rip It Up. I mean, it was number eight, which is not huge, but still a big hit for what they were thinking of an indie band.

• 17:34Yasi Salek?

  And then they put out their final album in 84 called The Orange Juice. That album, which I don't know if you've listened to it recently.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  It's my favorite, I think.

• 17:45Yasi Salek?

  Is it?

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it is. That's the one that starts with, "I'm going through a lean period."

• 17:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  That's, that just struck me as, and the second song is like, "I guess I'm just too sensitive," or something like, it's, there's, that album struck me as really funny and really knowing. And as we talk about all the time, like, funny bands are fans, bands that make you smile, or bands that make you cheerful for no reason. Like, those aren't the critically adored.

• 18:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  Those, that's not cool. It's not cool to be like that. "I guess I'm just a little too sensitive." Like, that's a great song title.

• 18:20Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  The last song is called "Salmon Fishing in New York." The concept of which is like, I'm trying to win your love or something and I would have better luck finding Fishing for Sa- like it's, it's, it's a great album. That's just really funny in a way. Like you can take that all the way up to, I don't know, like Fountains of Wayne or something like they might be giants. Like all this stuff that I love, that's so smart and so clever, I guess, you know, that can be a pejorative too. But there's just something so funny and so sharp about this songwriting that usually doesn't get like the most critical adoration, but like it really, really works for me. And so, yeah, this is, I think this is my favorite album right now. Is that him on the cover?

• 19:09Yasi Salek?

  I think so, yeah.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  With like the rad, yeah, like the sunglasses. Like that's a pretty rad looking dude. Kid in Play is exactly... Kid in Play ripped him off. Absolutely.

• 19:20Yasi Salek?

  I think it's interesting that this is your favorite because you chose this song for our, because I, you know, came to you hat in hand as usual. Please Rob Marvila, save me. I need to, an episode, we're doing perfect song. What is your perfect song? That is from the UK and you, you know, this was the one you chose. And I think that that final Oranges album has more of that blue eyed soul sound.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:45Yasi Salek?

  Than any of the prior ones. And also I think you could get a pretty clear through line to this Girl Like You song. Would you agree?

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And like, this is another case where if you have any idea what you're talking about, that you can talk a little bit about like Northern soul, right? And sort of the relationship between that and Motown, you know, the way American soul music goes over to England, becomes something else and then it comes back to us. You know, I think there is a through line there. Absolutely.

• 20:14Yasi Salek?

  This album also doesn't, it kind of fails to break into the top 40 with any of the singles. And I guess maybe just tired, beat down. I don't know what happened, but Oranges plays their last show in January of 85. Edwin Collins signs with Creation Records that same year and puts out his first like solo single, Don't Shilly Shally.

• 20:44Yasi Salek?

  On the creation had an offshoot label through, I think, Warner's called Elevation Records. He put out two more singles for that elevation label in 87. They were both produced by Robin Guthrie of Cocktoe Twins. They're pretty good. Shilly Shally is pretty good, too.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  What is shilly shally? Is that dilly dallying? What is the dictionary or the unofficial dictionary definition? And why, why should you not do it according to Edwin Collins?

• 21:23Yasi Salek?

  Shilly shallying is failing to act resolutely or decisively.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 21:29Yasi Salek?

  It's to be indecisive. Seems related to dilly. Yeah, dilly dallying is more speed it up. Take, you're taking your sweet time. But then shilly shally is more being indecisive. Like you said, yes, wishy washy.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  All right.

• 21:44Yasi Salek?

  What a, what a, what a beautiful language. What a, what a, what an elegant language we have. Shilly shally, perhaps that's a more UK phrase. I've not, oh, it comes from the mid 18th century, originally as shilly, shall I?

• 22:03Speaker 00

  Okay, I think we, I think it's evolved.

• 22:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Splendidly, yeah. I don't believe I never heard that phrase in Ohio. Exactly. Yeah, that didn't make it over here.

• 22:12Yasi Salek?

  They still say it in Glasgow.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  Days of yore.

• 22:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, days of yore. Anyways, Elevation gets shut down in 1987, just 10 months after they put out their first single. And Edwin Collins has a bit of a falling out with Alan McGee, the founder of Creation Records. And because of this falling out, he does not migrate to Creation Records, like the main label, like the other bands that were signed to Elevation, like Primal Scream and The Weather Profits. So he has no record contract now. He does still put out his first solo album in 1989. It's called Hope and Despair on an indie label called Demon. It's not a good sign.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  That could go either way.

• 22:58Yasi Salek?

  It could go either way.

• 22:59Speaker 00

  If you were making remotely demonic music, it might be a good sign.

• 23:02Yasi Salek?

  Black metal, maybe.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Like this, I'm picturing Edwin Collins in like an illegible font.

• 23:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  No, like, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's not a good fit.

• 23:11Yasi Salek?

  And then he put out another album one year later on Demon also called Hellbent on Compromise. I listen to these albums. They're pretty good. I mean, he's clearly like a really talented songwriter and and has obviously has that really like charming and, you know, beautiful voice. But none of those records have a son. I mean, you know, there's no a girl like you.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 23:34Yasi Salek?

  There's nothing that grabs you like that. And I guess that's would be normal. You can't have more than one a girl like you, but.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  Do you get the sense that he's trying in these early records to write a girl like you to have like a breakout global, including American pop success, you know, and it took him two albums and change to manage it? Or is this just a total fluke, you know, a girl like you and he's just doing what he's doing? And, and it's just one of those things where we just arbitrarily seize on one song. Like, did those records accomplish what he was hoping to accomplish? Or was he really trying this whole time, you know, to have a big radio hit?

• 24:13Yasi Salek?

  I mean, I can't speak for his heart and mind, but from what I understood about orange juice and like the choices they made, it does feel like that wasn't the like end goal. I mean, it sounded like, especially with oranges, I think there was one song, which is not coming to my mind what the name of it was, where they did set out to write like sort of a pop hit and it was really bad and super embarrassing. And they like really regretted it like, and I, and I'm.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:44Yasi Salek?

  Extrapolating that maybe if it were me, maybe that left a sour taste in the mouth and like, oh, I'm not going to try that anymore. I'm just gonna like make my music.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  Another person I thought of was Nick Lowe.

• 24:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, totally.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  You know, Nick Lowe does not have a song like this. He does not have a solo breakout hit. What he has is that he wrote what's so funny about peace, love and understanding. And it goes in the Bodyguard soundtrack.

• 25:05Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  You know, and he's a billionaire now, right? But like Nick Lowe just keeps doing what he does, you know? And he gets older and he gets really swamped. Love and elegant and he's very funny and he's very witty and he's very sharp. And he makes these solo albums that clearly are not trying to be blockbuster mainstream hits. You know, he's just doing what he does. And I get a vibe like that, you know, I think Nicola is probably a little or maybe much older than Edwin Collins. But I get a similar vibe of like he's Edwin Collins at this point is sort of settled into who he is and what he is and what he is trying to do. You know, and you're not going and looking for that big hit. And as you say, like, when you try to do it, it often sucks.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  You know, it's when you absolutely stop trying that something might organically come up like this and be perfect.

• 25:55Yasi Salek?

  Totally. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there's many such cases where people set out to write a pop hit and made a pop hit. And they were like, check, hell, yeah.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:05Yasi Salek?

  But I don't get the sense that this was that, I mean, I, there's not a ton. I did as much research as as usual as I could, but I didn't find a ton about like the impetus. In fact, and I don't want to get too ahead, but like, there was some talk of like, in the studio when they recorded it. He just was like, oh, we made this song and it was cool. And it was, it was someone else who said to him, this is a fucking hit, man. And he was like, really?

• 26:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 26:36Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so what happens is those two albums come out again, they're, they're not breaking through. They're not super successful. He parts ways with Demon Records and he kind of doesn't put anything out for like four years. And then he had built his own studio to record the next album, which is Gorgeous George. What a great, you know, I'm partial to the gorgeous so that I would like that.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  That's right. I didn't even think of that. But yeah, that's speaking to you pretty directly.

• 27:03Yasi Salek?

  That's right. And so, and he produced that album himself. And on this album is the song, A Girl Like You.

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• 28:01Yasi Salek?

  So he records this song amongst the rest of the album in his own studio. I guess he had started by like, I'm not sure if this is the initial part of it, but the way the song starts is a drum loop from this 1965 blue eyed soul guy Len Berry's song "One, Two, Three". That was like on the DECA label in America.

• 28:35Yasi Salek?

  Also total sidebar, but the writers of that song, the "One, Two, Three" song, were sued by Motown at the time because they said that song had stolen the song "Ask Any Girl", which was a Supremes B-side to "Baby Love".

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 28:59Yasi Salek?

  They were given 15% of that "One, Two, Three" song royalties.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  Just for the drums, just for the opening.

• 29:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:09Yasi Salek?

  But what Edwin Collins said was that it started actually with a straight guitar riff, sort of a Holidays in the Sun, Iggy type thing. And my engineer fed it through a sampler and treated it and it made it a bit more contemporary. I thought that was really interesting because part of what we had just talked about with indie pop and the sort of teenageness, the jangliness, the like referencing girl group type things. It was a little bit, not a rejection, but at least a sidestepping of punk.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Right, of course.

• 29:41Yasi Salek?

  This song does sound like it was like sort of Edwin Collins came back maybe to punk because he is in a lot of orange juice interviews like kind of openly rejecting like Sex Pistols and stuff like that.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 29:55Yasi Salek?

  To come back, be like, what about this? And then it kind of leading you to your big hit is really interesting.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. And isn't this a thing, you know, where he, that's a sample, didn't he have to pay for that? Like this is a situation where if he didn't know and this would be his big hit, he probably would not.

• 30:12Yasi Salek?

  I had to pay through the nose.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  Shared, yes.

• 30:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  The profits.

• 30:16Yasi Salek?

  And then he said, on top of that, a jangly orange juice guitar thing, a bit of Motown in there as well, that Isley Brothers riff that everyone remembers. Then to bring it back to Iggy, there was that thing he did on a Raw power track where he started singing, I want to tell you how I feel. That led to the bit about, you made me acknowledge the devil in me. Okay. On the song, The Cadard, who was in Subway Sect, one of the first British punk bands, like right there alongside Sex Pistols and The Clash and stuff, who was kind of a hero of Edwin Collins, he did say in some interviews that he was like a big Subway Sect guy, like over the other bands. He came up with that ending that it's, yeah, it's all right. Yeah, it's all right.

• 30:59Yasi Salek?

  Which is such an important part of the song, don't you think?

• 31:03Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I think the beginning and the end are both really important because more than anything for me, this is a radio song. This is a song that you hear on the radio and I like I was streaming it this morning and it felt weird. It felt it was like listening to Adele on 8 track or something. It's like this is not the right format because no, I, I want to be 16. I want it to be 1994 and I'm listening to the radio and I'm listening to a Nirvana song and the Nirvana song is over and this song starts and it goes through and then you get to yeah, it's all right. And like the guitar is freaking out and there's a specific moment right at the end where the guitar goes like that's the point where the next song starts. Like I even today, even however I hear

• 31:48Speaker 00

  this song, I hear it as a song I'm listening to on the radio with like the echo of the song that played before it and the echo of the song that's going to play after it. And for that reason, yes, the very beginning, even if it costs a shitload of money and the very ends, you know, that outro, that's, those are both important, you know, essential qualities to this song for me.

• 32:18Yasi Salek?

  It's funny. You have like a Pavlovian response. You're like just waiting for like blister in the sun or like James Laid or whatever were the hits of the time to come on right after. You know, not to harp on this, but again, I think, I think it's very telling that like Edwin Collins has been saying in interviews since 1980 that he was like a subway sect and Buzzcocks guy over like a Sex Pistols guy because the Buzzcocks were also sort of like R and B turned into punk music whereas the Sex Pistols were doing something a little bit different.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Right. I, I mean, I was reading about the Strokes a little bit recently and someone was saying like, I know everyone talks about television or the Velvet Underground, wherever, but I hear the Strokes, I hear the Buzzcocks, right? Like I think the Buzzcocks are as beloved as they are, rightly, I think. They're still underrated. It's like a huge, huge, huge influence on so much because as you say, you know, they were partly poppy. They were partly punk, but they had enough fluidity, you know, to be many things at once, to be ultra, ultra catchy, you know, at the same time that they're a little too, a little hard, but not too hard.

• 33:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I mean, I think you're so right. The Buzzcocks, not just musically, but definitely hugely more musically than the Sex Pistols. I think the Sex Pistols had a huge cultural impact, like more outsized, obviously than the Buzzcocks, but maybe not as, don't have as many musical children and grandchildren in the world. Whereas the Buzzcocks definitely did musically, but also they really opened up the floodgates of Manchester and like they were sort of the elder statesman there, you know, in so many ways, like so many bands looked to them like, oh, they, they're doing it. Maybe I could do it, you know?

• 34:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. And if you think about 1994, you know, and like the punk, you know, quote unquote, like whatever it is, Green Day, Offspring, you know, I, there's a lot more Buzzcocks musically and maybe even temperamentally in the new nineties punk than there is Sex Pistols, I think.

• 34:26Yasi Salek?

  Do you think that's partly why this song also with like, it's like gossamer thread of Buzzcocks was so resonant in 1994 or five?

• 34:37Speaker 00

  I think that's part of it. There's a cinematic quality again to this song.

• 34:42Yasi Salek?

  It's in Pulp Fiction in our minds.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  Exactly. I, you know, that you make the Empire Records the correct connection if you know it, but it just, it feels like a Pulp Fiction song.

• 34:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 34:54Speaker 00

  You know, and once Austin Powers comes out, like it connects that way. Like there is just something, I do think that the Pulp Fiction soundtrack was so huge for so many impressionable teenagers and just sort of convinced them, you know, of all this music that was out there, you know, that was also really cool. Or could be really cool if it was presented right, you know, and like just John Travolta and Uma Thurman dancing to Chuck Berry, you know, I, I do think that in a really, really broad sense that opens so many minds, you know, to so many different kinds of music and right, it's like, it's almost exact, I want to say, like the album, Edwin Collins album and Pulp Fiction coming out, like they're right on top of each other, I want to say, and I, I do think

• 35:38Speaker 00

  there's a direct connection there that we just, we got a little more as dumb ass, American teenagers, you know, in a grunge or whatever, we got just a little more open minded at the exact moment that this song appeared, you know, and we could, we could hear it as like, whatever, like a Bond theme, you know, or whatever, however, we pictured it, you know, we just, we were open to music that wasn't just super modern grunge from Seattle.

• 36:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I think that's really true. I mean, I don't want to get too off topic, but I also think like, there was something about Pulp Fiction in particular, again, to be crystal clear, this song is not in Pulp Fiction, but the Pulp Fiction.

• 36:20Speaker 00

  I know, he has to say that over and over, like, it doesn't Edwin Collins in every interview, so it's not in Pulp Fiction.

• 36:25Yasi Salek?

  That was a different words in a different movie, but just like, I very much remember as a 12 year old in 1994, how cool retro stuff became like, and maybe, maybe it always was, I don't know what teenagers in the eighties were looking back towards, like maybe 50s, I'm not really sure, but I wore the world's fucking ugliest polyester 1970s button down, like geometric print shirt in my eighth grade middle school yearbook photo.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  Okay, can we get a look at that? Can we, can we?

• 37:01Yasi Salek?

  No, because it burned up in the fire, but thanks so much for asking.

• 37:09Yasi Salek?

  I'm not kidding about it burning up, but it does.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  I know you're not kidding.

• 37:12Yasi Salek?

  I really did put you off there for a second.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  Nor is it funny. Yes, but yes.

• 37:15Yasi Salek?

  I'll, I'll contact Callie Mayer Middle School in Torrance, California and see if they have a back, a back picture of that. Um, I looked real sharp. I mean, it isn't ugly. Sure.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 37:25Yasi Salek?

  But you know, that's what we were all wearing at the time, like Ringer tees from the thrift store and corduroy pants. And I really feel Pulp Fiction was a huge part of that because it made all this retro stuff so cool. Like, was I carrying a metal, like Scooby Doo lunchbox or something? You know, like, there was, it was all sort of like part of this cultural zeitgeist that for me anyways, as like a preteen and teen, made things of the past, specifically like 60s, 70s, things feel so modern and cool.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 37:58Yasi Salek?

  And the song like slid right into that. I also think it's very cool. Like we just said, Vic Goddard of Subway Sacked, you know, is on this song. He sings backing vocals. He got that, yeah, it's all right bit. But also Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols is a drummer on this album.

• 38:14Speaker 00

  Right, right. In a very non Sex Pistols mode.

• 38:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, Cookie is a good, he's a good drummer. Can do whatever. But because he was playing with Vic Goddard and Edwin Collins was like looking for people, he was brought in by Vic and Paul Cook was like, I'd heard Orange Juice singles, but I wasn't in tune with post punk bands until I met Edwin and listened to all his back catalog. And I realized what a great singer songwriter he was. So all these like little beautiful things are coming into play. And then also I think this part was very interesting to me that Edwin Collins at this time was 34 years old. Which in like cool rock music terms, like he's ancient, but he had, he had an engineer named Sebastian Loosely, who was 21 and he gives them a lot of credit with just the tone and feel of the song.

• 39:02Yasi Salek?

  Cause he was like, I think it's good to have different musical generations involved in the making of a song.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is cool. I remember distinctly when I'm 16. I have no conception of what it means to be thirty six versus fifty six.

• 39:17Yasi Salek?

  Honey, you're dead. You're dead. You're all dead to me. You're all in the senior citizen home, retire bitch, like.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  Exactly. And so the same way, like, I don't know, with Tom Petty or Aerosmith or any of these people who had like arbitrary feeling huge radio or MTV hits. It's like, wow, like the old guy is really out there. Like Neil Young, even once he's hanging out with Pearl Jam, like just I, how young I used to be and how dumb I used to be about what it meant to be old.

• 39:52Yasi Salek?

  Thirty four really came and went, didn't it, Rob?

• 39:56Yasi Salek?

  It's a glimmer in the, in my mind's eye, it's in the rearview mirror. Anyways.

• 40:03Yasi Salek?

  All of these factors and Edwin Collins is just actual kind of fantastic songwriting. It makes this great song. He spoke to the thing about it where he was like, I didn't realize I'd cracked it with a girl like you. It was Vic Gdard, who in fact pointed out that it was a number one. I didn't realize he meant a number one in Belgium where it first went number one.

• 40:31Yasi Salek?

  Which is true. It did go, it had a very strange, like, trajectory because we keep talking about it. It came out in nineteen ninety four, but I, I don't think you and I heard it till nineteen ninety five because when it really kind of made it in America was, it was on Gorgeous George, then they released it again as like part of an EP called Expressly Edwin Collins, a four song EP, like kind of helmed by a girl like you. And it had Don't Chilly Shally and a couple of other songs on it. In early nineteen ninety five, maybe on the back of this EP, it became a top ten hit in Australia and France. Then it was re-released again and peaked at number four in the UK on the singles chart in July, number one in Belgium, Flanders, and Iceland.

• 41:17Speaker 00

  Iceland.

• 41:18Yasi Salek?

  That's right. They have great taste there, Bjork. But it wasn't until Empire Records, great fucking soundtrack, by the way, put this song on the soundtrack in September ninety five. And it was right there alongside fucking bangers, like Till I Hear It From You by the Gin Blossoms, Evan Dando's cover of the Ballad of El Gudu, and of course. Sugar High by Coyote Shivers. Goddamn, we're just beautiful song.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  Can I tell you something about Sugar High?

• 41:47Yasi Salek?

  Please.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  The first band I was ever in, just out of high school, just like a poppy rocky type band, the leader, the guitar singer, songwriter, band leader.

• 41:59Speaker 00

  He had a crush on a girl and we did a show, it was either in a garage or in a driveway in our suburban neighborhood and we covered Sugar High and we had her come up and do the part, her part.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  Okay, so we recreated the scene from the movie with that song for the girl that the lead singer of my pop rock band had a crush on.

• 42:26Yasi Salek?

  How did it go?

• 42:27Speaker 00

  I wouldn't say it worked long term, but I'm guessing that it probably worked short term.

• 42:31Yasi Salek?

  That would have worked on me, I think.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  I would think, I would have worked on me, honestly, you know, that's a pretty, that's a pretty grand gesture, I think. So I, shout out to him, shout out to us, I guess, but that was, that was also the most significant song other than this, other than Edwin on this soundtrack was Sugar High.

• 43:02Yasi Salek?

  A thing I appreciate about you, Rob, is that all roads lead back to some situation in your apparently long and storied musical career. Almost every episode, you're able to connect back to a coffee shop acoustic guitar performance or one of your bands, including the ska band.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, it's, my musical career was neither long nor storied and so it is, I work very, I work very hard to work it into every conversation about music that I have. That is, I am expending more effort in doing this. Than I ever expended in these bands that I was briefly in in college. This is my true legacy is trying to retroactively create a legacy for myself. That is undeserved.

• 43:55Yasi Salek?

  I can't wait till the box set comes out. The Rob Harvilla. We're gonna, we are gonna scrape together any recordings there are. Where do you rate the Empire Records soundtrack on 90s soundtracks?

• 44:10Speaker 00

  Right. I love the Gin Blossoms. I love Till I Hear It From You very much.

• 44:15Yasi Salek?

  Written expressly for this soundtrack.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  Oh, that's good. That's always better when that's the case, right? It's just a little more personal. I don't know if this would make my personal top 10. You know, I don't think it would go before the old like Crow. You know, Crow City of Angels, you know, even Spawn like I, I don't know exactly where it would fit. I get it confused with Can't Hardly Wait occasionally.

• 44:44Yasi Salek?

  Also a pretty good soundtrack. That had Biff Naked on it, I believe.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  Ooh, Biff Naked, right? Yeah. So, so I don't know. It's, it's more. It wasn't like a personal favorite of mine. I remember seeing the movie. Where does a girl like you appear in the movie? Like, this is the great thing about a movie about a record store is just your entire soundtrack and just be playing. You know, logically in the backgrounds, right? Like it's, they don't have to wedge these songs on car radios or whatever. I assume it's just playing in the record store at some point, right?

• 45:16Yasi Salek?

  Yes. That scene is between Renee Zellweger and Rex Manning when she seduces him. In the, in the back room, the copy machine.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  There we go.

• 45:29Yasi Salek?

  It's a very, it's a tense and painful scene because a lot going on there with Liv Tyler and her, their character. Yeah, she had called her, calls her some sort of slag. I'm not totally sure. Anyways, it's neither here nor there. That kind of sets it off in America as far as I remember. I remember the video being on MTV a lot. Do you remember this video? It's kind of a black and white video.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  I was gonna ask you, is it a, is it one of the clips from the movies type deal or is it actually him?

• 45:58Yasi Salek?

  It's just him and it's, it's like a vaguely retro, has like dancers in it.

• 46:04Speaker 00

  All right. I'm sure if I. Pulled it up right now, I would vaguely remember.

• 46:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  I can't.

• 46:09Yasi Salek?

  I was kind of surprised to see him. Were you surprised to see him that he looked like that?

• 46:14Speaker 00

  A little bit, like just the only image that I had of him was the cover to his record to Gorgeous George. And again, that sort of solidified for me at 16, like, oh, he's older. How much older? I have no idea. What does that mean? I have no idea. But oh, he's older. It's like, he's, he's not balding, really, but like the hairline is just slightly different.

• 46:35Yasi Salek?

  He doesn't have the Kid and Play or Last Orange Gist album hair anymore.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  Right. Cause like, the other thing about this song is like, the bummer about this being his breakout hit is that if you're a kid in 1994 and you love this song and you want it on CD, I think you're more likely to get the Empire Records soundtrack than you are to get his record.

• 46:57Yasi Salek?

  Hundred percent.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  And so I was, I was trying to listen. I put on Gorgeous George this morning and was trying to listen to it the way I would listen to a CD that I just bought for $20 for one song. Like this record is awesome. This record is hilarious.

• 47:13Yasi Salek?

  Space Hogcore, if you will.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  Space Hog is an excellent, that's an excellent way to look at it.

• 47:19Yasi Salek?

  I did buy that album for the one song.

• 47:21Speaker 00

  Oh, totally. I think everybody did. The first, A Girl Like You is track two.

• 47:25Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  On Gorgeous George and track one is called The Campaign For Real Rock. And it is six and a half minutes long and it's like a diss track for like old washed up folk singers. Like it's, it's fantastic. You know, like every Christmas, I feel like somebody goes viral saying like, you're a mean one. Mr. Grinch is just the rudest. So like, it's just a seven minute diss track or whatever. I got the same vibe off this song, but it's, it ends with a chorus of yes. Yes, it's the summer festival, the truly detestable summer festival. And like, I'm trying to like, if you're, if you're in America in 1994, like that, there is no like,

• 48:10Speaker 00

  you're like, what, like Lollapalooza, like?

• 48:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that's very British, but and again, very clever to your point. It's back to real cutting words. Yeah, I mean, I think you get the sense where you look at the Spotify of it where you're like, wow.

• 48:28Yasi Salek?

  Campaign for Real Rock has a million streams, but I think just from the bump of people starting from the beginning. But then every other song, I mean, it really dwindles. Like the one before and the one after Girl Like You are, you know, benefit from a bump. But then a girl like you has 136 million streams and every, all the other ones are like 116,000, 86,000.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  Track three being called Low Expectations, you know, I just, I believe that's like the chorus is something like, your expectations should be lower, like it's a good song, you know, but already, there's not really a whole lot else on this record that sounds like a girl like you, right? Like it's, it's not an entire album of cool swinging, you know, Motown via Northern Soul via whatever, like jams. Like it's, it's, it's not like a total outlier, but it's a little bit of an outlier. And if you buy this record asking, wanting, you know, more of this, you don't quite get more of a girl like you.

• 49:28Yasi Salek?

  No, and to your point earlier, like the cover, it's not giving 1994. Like it's not really fitting in with the like kaleidoscope of what like the sponge rotting pinata cover. Or like, you know, I'm just thinking of CDs I bought just on the strength of the cover alone. So I was like, what's that candy corn? That's crazy. It's cool. I'm buying that. Something very nineties and then this is, this, this is giving more, it's at the counter at Starbucks.

• 50:01Yasi Salek?

  CD. Like it's a, it's like giving buble. You know what I mean? Like I'd be like, this man is gonna sing some standards.

• 50:09Speaker 00

  Right. He's doing like the, the thinking emoji pose a little bit. He's very dapper. Like his shirt isn't tucked in. It's like, this guy knows what's up, but it's, it's a black and white photo of an, of a Scottish guy. And you probably don't even know he's Scottish at this point, like of an indeterminate age that is older than my current age. And that enough was enough to be like, I don't know, I'll just get Empire Records.

• 50:35Yasi Salek?

  I wonder if there was like a small, mighty sect of people who are older than us, like later Gen X or that were, or even like maybe early boomer, who were like diehard post punk aficionados who loved orange juice and were like really checking for what Edwin Collins was offering these days. And they were supporters of this album. Do you think that was the case?

• 51:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. I, I wonder how large specifically that sect is, but yeah, you know, like as a teenager, I don't know shit about shit. And then like years later, I'm reading the Simon Reynolds book, Rip It Up and Start Again, you know, which is about post punk and is named after an orange juice song. It's like, oh, that guy. Like it turns out he was actually really, really important long before he had this one perfect fluke song. Like, yeah, it's, it's, this is a song that rewards your attention immediately, whether you know a lot about the context behind it, or whether you know like zilch about the context behind it. But I would certainly, he had to have his own, you know, champions, you know, who were maybe kind of vindicated and kind of like, oh no, like

• 51:52Speaker 00

  now he's a big pop hit maker and he's not mine anymore. Like that probably brought up some nineties type, you know, quote unquote, sellout type feelings for our undergrounds, post punk guy to have a big pop hit.

• 52:05Yasi Salek?

  Maybe it was so far removed from the original source material of 20, you know, 15 years prior that people were like, whatever. I guess it wasn't 15 years. It was more like 10 years, but.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  Whatever was a pretty common way to feel in 1994, as I recall.

• 52:25Yasi Salek?

  So common, babe. Well, after Empire Records put this shit on the map, changed Edwin Collins's life forever, then Charlie's Angels Full Throttle. So we even got it wrong again. I don't even think it was in Austin Powers International.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  It was definitely not. It was definitely not. It just sounded to me.

• 52:44Yasi Salek?

  That's a different Edwin Collins song that was in Austin Powers.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  Oh, there was an Edwin Collins song? Okay. I didn't even know that. I thought he had.

• 52:51Yasi Salek?

  The Magic Piper of Love.

• 52:53Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 52:53Yasi Salek?

  This episode is going great. I'm killing it.

• 52:57Yasi Salek?

  Do you know, I've told you that my therapist says that my critical thinking and memory have suffered greatly in the past couple of months. I'm doing my best, you guys.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  Like it in their opinion, based on your conversations or are they listening to this podcast and feeling like you are deteriorating?

• 53:13Yasi Salek?

  That is my, that's my therapist critique of the podcast. She's a reply guy. She's actually, I, she actually didn't even say it directly to me. She posted it in the subreddit.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  Good gravy. That's not, I mean, it's, don't you have to authorize that? Like you would, like you're not allowed to listen to my shit or like, go ahead. Yeah.

• 53:31Yasi Salek?

  She's ever listened to it. I just complained to her of feeling very stupid and she mentioned that that is a side effect of experiencing something bad. Often you for a while are very dumb. She didn't say very dumb, but that's what's going on here, babe. So, sorry about it.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  Psychology is a fascinating discipline.

• 53:50Yasi Salek?

  It's very interesting. The days of yore that you pointed out earlier, just one more fun factoid is that this was a phrase his granny used to say, which is how it ended up in the song.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Quoting your granny in a big pop song.

• 54:02Yasi Salek?

  What's the best part of the song? Some might say it's, yeah, it's all right. Yeah, it's all right. I would say it's how he pronounces protest.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  I would agree with you on that.

• 54:20Speaker 00

  Did you know immediately that that's what he was saying?

• 54:23Yasi Salek?

  No idea.

• 54:24Speaker 00

  Okay, good. That's early.

• 54:25Yasi Salek?

  Literally till this week when I was researching this, I was like, oh, protest. Cause the way he says it, do you want to do it, Rob?

• 54:33Speaker 00

  Too many poor ass singers. I thought it was poor hyphen ass.

• 54:39Yasi Salek?

  Poor ass singers? Too many four ass singers.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  I don't know what they'd say in Scotland. That sounded plausible to me as a Scotland specific.

• 54:50Yasi Salek?

  Was saying too many poor ass singer.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  That for a brief period, I E. My teenage years. Yeah, that's what I thought. And it's like, well, that's weird. That must be, that must be a Scottish thing. I don't know what's going on there. There's a D in it. Like, I like podass, prodat, like how too many podass sing it like there's distinctly a D feel.

• 55:14Yasi Salek?

  It's fascinating because often you can't hear accent and singing, right? There's a whole thing about it. And I'm sure there's some fucking, you know, Malcolm Gladwell, you know, podcast episode about it or whatever, but like, like NPR, Fresh Air, I don't know, but this one you really can't get away from the Scottish pronunciation of protest. Protest singers.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  What do you think that line means? Too many protest singers, not enough protest songs. Like I, I wonder if this like that song that I love, the campaign for real rock. If this is like, everybody is just aping Bob Dylan or whatever, and singing the same old protest type songs. But nobody's doing like a new thing. There's too many protest singers, not enough newish protest songs.

• 55:59Yasi Salek?

  For sure. I think it's sort of a swipe on people being too preoccupied with identity and not interested enough in like, actual action and what they're like, the meaning of what they're doing and just trying to sort of present themselves in a way. Bad to guess.

• 56:16Speaker 00

  And even like the lead up, like this old town's changed so much, don't know if I belong. Like you hear that. And yeah, like that contributed. To my thought that this was a very, very, very old person. You know, like it's unfairly unfairly in retrospect, but it's just

• 56:35Yasi Salek?

  mere thirty four years old.

• 56:37Speaker 00

  I'm saying, yeah, it's I just, I had no idea what I was in for.

• 56:43Yasi Salek?

  It is a great verse, though, because the rest of the song is really just like kind of discussing in great lyrics and language, but like just kind of being in love like classic, like you got me crawling on the floor. You gave me a taste, so I want more, just really, you know, the thing about love. And then it gets into something more like broad and worldly at the end. I also really love, I hope to God I'm talking metaphorically. Hope that I'm talking allegorically. I love that you rhymed metaphorically and allegorically, man.

• 57:16Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, I don't believe there's another pop song that rhymes those two words or uses either of those words at all. Yes.

• 57:25Yasi Salek?

  It's really wonderful.

• 57:30Speaker 01

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• 57:59Speaker 02

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• 58:12Speaker 03

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• 58:15Yasi Salek?

  He said it was very funny, just like us, that after the song traveled around the world, he said, I think it was a disappointment to some people when they actually saw me. Hearing me, they thought I was a kind of Bowie figure. In the Philippines, people were used to seeing dancers in shiny shores performing the song, and then I turned up looking like one of the dancers' uncles.

• 58:34Speaker 00

  But now you come along. Yeah, yeah.

• 58:37Yasi Salek?

  I sent you the clip of him playing, performing the song on Conan O'Brien.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  You did, yes. I was gonna ask, like, did he tour? Like, did he break America in any larger way as a consequence of this? Or was this just a fun little blip that served him well, but it didn't lead to him, like, playing Peoria?

• 58:58Yasi Salek?

  You look, you love to reference Peoria.

• 59:01Speaker 00

  Who doesn't?

• 59:02Yasi Salek?

  I mean, there's very difficult to find this information, so I'm not really sure to answer your question. He must have. I mean, and once you have a hit in America, you don't, you have to tour it? He played 36 shows, according to Setlist FM, in 1995.

• 59:18Speaker 00

  I wonder if he got to Cleveland and I missed it. I doubt it.

• 59:21Yasi Salek?

  He played seven concerts in the United States in 1995. So, yeah, I guess, unless they're not all mapped on here, this song, as any great song, has some unfortunate covers. I'm only gonna talk about one.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  I am not listening to these. I ref, you sent these to me and it's.

• 59:44Yasi Salek?

  One is good. The Tame Impala one is pretty good.

• 59:47Speaker 00

  I will live and die. Sure, I can, I would, I'm sure that's tolerable. I, what is it? Machine Gun Kelly?

• 59:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, a thing about this podcast is that it leads me down dark alleys that I would never go on my own. It really takes me to the darkest corners of information on the internet that I had blissfully been.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  And I'm not going there with you.

• 1:00:07Yasi Salek?

  2021, babe, Machine Gun Kelly and Travis Barker teamed up.

• 1:00:11Speaker 00

  And Travis Barker teamed up.

• 1:00:13Yasi Salek?

  To do a cover of A Girl Like You for the trailer of a TV show I have never heard of called Paradise City, which is an American musical drama TV series that is a sequel and continuation of another TV show I've never heard of called American Satan.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  American whom? Satan?

• 1:00:33Yasi Salek?

  That's right.

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  Seaton or Satan?

• 1:00:35Yasi Salek?

  Satan, like devil.

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  American Satan?

• 1:00:38Yasi Salek?

  That's right.

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  I don't have any idea what you're. Talking about they called it Paradise City.

• 1:00:43Yasi Salek?

  That's right. That was the second.

• 1:00:45Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:00:45Yasi Salek?

  Anyways, if you want to give this a listen, it's on YouTube and.

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  I don't.

• 1:00:49Yasi Salek?

  Well, I'm just saying the you listening to the podcast, we're going to clip it here. So everyone else has to deal with it as well.

• 1:01:03Yasi Salek?

  There's also Miles Kane cover, which is okay. And a cover by a band called The Insects. Do you feel that you chose a good song? I think this is a perfect song. I think that it's the right length.

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:15Yasi Salek?

  It's succinct. You still get happy when you hear it.

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:01:20Yasi Salek?

  You could put it in a movie right now. It would work gorgeously.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  Put it in the new Bridget Jones diary, you know, and that would that'd be that'd be lovely.

• 1:01:29Yasi Salek?

  They didn't. They should have though. Great movie.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  They should have. Yeah. No, I heard. I heard you're into it. Yeah.

• 1:01:35Yasi Salek?

  This, I think we've successfully, we've successfully identified our first perfect song on the.

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  All right.

• 1:01:43Yasi Salek?

  Perfect song. I do want to talk really briefly just because Edwin Collins obviously did continue his career post A Girl Like You. It was not the last thing he ever did. Like I said, he put out another album of which a song was used in the Austin Powers movie that is International Man of Mystery.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  Would you say the magic flute of love?

• 1:02:06Yasi Salek?

  The Magic Piper parentheses of.

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  The Magic Piper parentheses of love. That's excellent information.

• 1:02:13Yasi Salek?

  That's right.

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:02:14Yasi Salek?

  And then in 2005, I think he had just finished an album. He suffered two strokes and cerebral hemorrhages that rendered him without the ability to read, write, speak, or use most of the right side of his body. And he was in the hospital for like six months, or as they say, they're in hospital. And he had aphasia and for a long stretch, it left him. He could only repeat four phrases. Yes, no, Grace Maxwell, which was his wife's name, and the possibilities are endless. And he did go through like intense therapy and he can speak, walk, read, sing again.

• 1:02:56Yasi Salek?

  I actually even back then, I think like maybe like a year ish, two years after they were interviewing him and he said, I actually think I sing a lot better now than I did in those early orange juice singles. My voice was awful on some of those tracks. He put out his sixth solo album, Home Again, in September of 2007 on Heavenly Records. And then he put another album called Losing Sleep, which I did listen to and it was actually quite beautiful, that is the first album he wrote and recorded since he recovered from the illness. And he collaborated on the album with Ryan Jarman from The Cribs, Johnny Marr, Franz Ferdinand, the drums, and Roddy Frame from Aztec Camera. And it's just like, it's

• 1:03:39Yasi Salek?

  really cool to listen to, given knowing what went on with him and how much he overcame. And he also, and then he put one more album out in 2013. Also, and I sent you this this morning, so I don't know, I'm sure you didn't have time to watch the whole thing, but there's a documentary about him made that came out in 2014 called The Possibilities Are Endless. It's so worth watching. I had never heard of it.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:04Yasi Salek?

  It's one of the most uniquely executed and beautiful and poetic documentaries about a person I've ever seen. Because basically, like, I would say, like, roughly 75 or 80% of it, you don't, you're not seeing Edwin Collins or his wife Grace Maxwell, who are like, kind of the two main subjects of the documentary, but you're hearing them in voiceover, particularly him. And he's still at a point in his recovery where he's able to get across, in some ways, what he's trying to say. But it's a struggle. And also, inadvertently,

• 1:04:46Yasi Salek?

  or maybe honestly, not inadvertently, like, it makes you think about that. The things that he does end up saying are like, so beautiful and poetic. And it's put over all this beautiful footage of the part of Scotland where him and his wife live, and a lot of sort of nature stuff. Then also, like, you know, there's B-roll of his orange juice time. It's just a really fascinating way to make a documentary. And it's, it's so beautiful. And it's really moving and really touching. And I don't know, it's, I really recommend it. I was, I was really blown away. It was kind of such like a, a cool byproduct of doing this episode that I didn't think I would land upon.

• 1:05:31Yasi Salek?

  Anyways, that's all. Just a glowing recommendation of the film, The Possibilities Are Endless.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, it, that's one of those things that sounds both really heavy and really uplifting somehow simultaneously.

• 1:05:44Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, and just like there's, he has such like an interesting attitude about it, it seems like. And again, you're only seeing what you see in the documentary, but just kind of like get good, getting back to it. But also like, they ask him about old music and oranges and stuff and like, he says, you know, things like, "It's strange to me that I even wrote that song." And there was one line that I wrote, cause it, wrote down, cause it was so interesting. And he said, "I remember the first song I did, Falling and Laughing, and now by the sea, it's good enough. I think it's good enough."

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  Hmm. By the sea.

• 1:06:24Yasi Salek?

  I don't know, right? Because, and then-

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  I gotta watch this, man.

• 1:06:27Yasi Salek?

  It just kind of, it kind of like really blew my mind open where I just kept thinking, I was like, language is so interesting and like how close things are maybe in your brain of what you're trying to get across. And like, there must be something about the sea connected to that sentiment or phrase or memory, right? I mean, again, I'm not a neurologist, I don't know, but it's just such a beautiful, this is a really beautiful documentary. It's really cool.

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  Just to seize on the phrase, "The possibilities are endless," is one of the four things that you can say along with your wife's name and yes and no, you know?

• 1:07:00Yasi Salek?

  Doesn't that sort of like, I don't know, again, I'm probably reading too much into it, but I'm just like, it makes me think like, what a, what an incredible person. Like if that's-

• 1:07:09Speaker 00

  No, I don't think you're reading too much into it at all. I think that's true, yeah.

• 1:07:13Yasi Salek?

  Hold on to? I don't know. Anyway, "That is a Girl Like You" by Adam Collins. Do you have- Do you have any closing remarks, Rob Harvilla?

• 1:07:22Speaker 00

  Never, never, never. I've had this song in my head the whole time and I'm still delighted. Yeah, I, it is a perfect song, you know, and it's a perfect song whether you come to it with a lot of knowledge about where it comes from and who it comes from and how we got to this point. And it's arguably an even more perfect song as a thunderbolt out of the blue that just feels entirely out of time and out of context, you know, from quote unquote, some old guy, you know, and you don't even like, you don't even, you immediately start misidentifying the movie that it's in, you know, and, and just like even, even knowing nothing about

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  it, that almost makes it more perfect. That almost makes it more of an anomaly, you know, and just this perfect thing that stands alone before you learn anything about, you know, the incredible career that he had before and after.

• 1:08:18Yasi Salek?

  I kind of agree. I think we've ruined it now for everyone and I'm really sorry because this song is truly so much better as sort of like a magical mystery standalone song without all of the backstory.

• 1:08:32Speaker 00

  Did you know that Machine Gun Kelly?

• 1:08:34Yasi Salek?

  Without all of the Machine Gun Kelly of it. That's where I really fuck, fucking blew it for you guys. I really.

• 1:08:38Speaker 00

  I think you might have.

• 1:08:39Yasi Salek?

  I apologize.

• 1:08:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, that may be a mistake. Too much knowledge is a dangerous thing.

• 1:08:44Yasi Salek?

  It's truly one of those, if I have to know about this, you have to know about it too situations, you know, like.

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:08:50Yasi Salek?

  I can't be expected to hold, shoulder this on my elbow.

• 1:08:53Speaker 00

  That's a lot. That's a lot to put on you.

• 1:08:55Yasi Salek?

  Can't carry this.

• 1:08:56Speaker 00

  We are all, we will share the burden. Well, I'm not, I'll never listen to it to just to reiterate, but I do, I will share the burden of knowing that it exists and that alone is substantial.

• 1:09:06Yasi Salek?

  Do you think that he had to agree to letting them do it?

• 1:09:13Yasi Salek?

  Like, not to be like, have, have you not been through enough, but like.

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:18Yasi Salek?

  And then on top of it.

• 1:09:19Speaker 00

  Edwin, so there's this rapper from Cleveland named Machine Gun Kelly and he wants to get together with this drummer. Like you've ever, do you think Edwin Collins has ever drank, drunk a Mountain Dew, like ever in his life? You know, like, is that, is that an experience he's had? Like, I just, I want to know what Edwin Collins, if there's any way for. Him to put either of those people in context.

• 1:09:48Yasi Salek?

  I don't know what the creative direction here was like, what if we make it so menacing? What if we make?

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  Yes, it's the dark evil cover version syndrome applied.

• 1:10:01Yasi Salek?

  But the whole, the whole thing is that there is a very faint menacingness to the original, which is what makes it so interesting and wonderful. But then you had to go and bash people over the head with this like bootleg nine inch nails ass version of fucking.

• 1:10:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. Making the subtext, the text is now what you want when it's Machine Gun Kelly doing it.

• 1:10:28Yasi Salek?

  We can't end like that. We can't end this beautiful podcast on Machine Gun Kelly's. We have, we have to, we have to fucking clean it up.

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  That was not my decision.

• 1:10:37Yasi Salek?

  I know. I'm sorry. Once again.

• 1:10:39Speaker 00

  Claim no.

• 1:10:40Yasi Salek?

  Here I go. There I go ruining everything. Yeah, it's all red. Yeah, that's not a good way to.

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's not a good version of that guitar riff, but I still remember it. And then Soundgarden starts, you know, and it flows together perfectly on the radio.

• 1:11:01Yasi Salek?

  All right, Rob Permel, it's been a really beautiful time with you here.

• 1:11:04Speaker 00

  It has.

• 1:11:05Yasi Salek?

  How do you feel about this, this new episode format?

• 1:11:09Speaker 00

  I think it's a phenomenal format. I think that you, once again, you're breaking the mold. You're breaking new ground. A podcast devoted to songs.

• 1:11:17Yasi Salek?

  Yes, who would have ever thought of such a thing? I'm the first person.

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  Kicking myself.

• 1:11:23Yasi Salek?

  To ever do a podcast that's, which one is about a song with no thoughtfully crafted monologue? Just simply fumes and vibes.

• 1:11:35Speaker 00

  I think this is a lovely, you know, I, this could never replace in my. My heart, you know, your upcoming 13 hour episode about the Pastels or whatever. But I do, this is a crucial, this is a nice little interstitial, you know, while you work back up to, to the, the speed and length and scale to which all us Bandplain lovers have become accustomed. You should keep doing this.

• 1:11:59Yasi Salek?

  Thank you, Rob. I do hope that I can take on this challenge that you've given me to do an episode longer than the actual discography in minutes of the Pastels about the band.

• 1:12:11Speaker 00

  Has that not happened?

• 1:12:13Yasi Salek?

  I don't.

• 1:12:13Speaker 00

  That has to have happened already. That's, I'm gonna go back and look now.

• 1:12:16Yasi Salek?

  Probably the Laws episode, because they only have one album.

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, there we go.

• 1:12:20Yasi Salek?

  Probably a little bit longer than the entirety of their one album.

• 1:12:24Speaker 00

  Even the Stone Roses, yeah, okay, this is, I'm gonna go look here.

• 1:12:28Yasi Salek?

  Oh, you mean the eight into nine hours we did on the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays?

• 1:12:33Speaker 00

  That is what I mean. If you add those discographies together, I guess there's a lot of remixes and stuff that might push the discography over the podcast, but it's close. The Laws is perfect. That's so beautiful.

• 1:12:43Yasi Salek?

  Thank you. There she goes again, as they like to say about me. Rob, thank you so much for taking the time to Never Met a Girl Before with me. And everybody have a beautiful day. Try to, try to Men in Black, erase that machine gun television from your mind.

• 1:13:06Yasi Salek?

  If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandplain. My guest today was Rob Harvilla. This episode was produced by Liz Sanchez and edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Executive producers for Bandplain are Gina Delvac and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Clavon, and graciously recorded by Carlos de la Garza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer emeritus, producer Dylan, AKA Dylan Tupper Rupert, and also Michael Hardman, Casey Simonson, Robert Adler, Leah Edwards, David McDonough, Dana Myerson, Jessica Hopper, and Will Trent back on television. I love Will Trent. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bandplain on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 1:13:57Yasi Salek?

  Let's check. Let's check before we say dumbass shit. On the back of my desk. People write me, Edwin Collins writes me a letter.

• 1:14:07Speaker 00

  Edwin Collins Reddit is gonna be like, ah, fuck you.

• 1:14:09Yasi Salek?

  Fuck you bitch.

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

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