Everything I do is Wrong

Brooker / Reid at their most primitive?

Roland @ BtP

The sleeve of the Italian Liquorice John CD ascribes Everything I do is Wrong to Brooker and Reid, and I'm recklessly choosing to believe that, although the insert has obvious inaccuracies elsewhere (not least, ascribing Joe Cocker's Just Like a Woman to Liquorice John Dead and the Rock and Roll Allstars).

The track opens with fantastic gusto, raucously overdriven guitar alternating A and D major chords, drums, bass and piano winding up the intro before the Brooker vocal cuts in. We notice that the same two chords supply the backing for the whole of the verse, and then also for the chorus, and suspect that this is a deliberate exercise in R&B primitivism; yet it's not, because the arrangement is simultaneously trying to disguise its harmonic banality with key-changes (a pop device, supposed to inject emotional lift, but pretty wisely eschewed in Procoldom), first up into B flat, then into C, then down into B flat again, and finally home to A major just for the last chord! The effect is most unappetising.

It's a shame in a way to have such a good sound here (crisply-recorded drums, and trade-mark Chris Thomas echo much in evidence) lavished on such a disappointingly under-evolved song. It was abandoned before any instrumental solo was dubbed on, leaving the same two-chord backing to bash on emptily for its statutory eight bars. As a composition it's worthy of comment only in that it really throws into relief the complexity and sophistication of Procoloid R&B numbers like Whisky Train or even Juicy John Pink which, on first hearing, stuck out from their album surroundings with seemingly Neanderthal rawness (further notes on the songhere: and of course the song is correctly-attributed on the Friday reissue, here)

I see a great big sign on a one-way street
Going down the wrong way, who do I meet?
A big policeman a-walking his beat!
Everything I do is wrong

I'm busy getting ready for a big date
Rushing like a madman, it's getting real late
I take a wrong turn, wind up in another state
Everything I do is wrong

Well I hate to be the type that's got to complain
But every time I wash my car it's bound to rain
I take a trip North and catch a South-bound train
Everything I do is wrong

(The song ends with Gary doodling on the piano and singing 'Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay ...', the opening line of Old Black Joe by Stephen Foster. The (boogified) chorus of this song, which Foster wrote in 1860, can be found on other Liquorice John out-takes; and it was inexplicably featured in some mid-70s Procol Harum concerts as an encore)

These verses, if really by Reid, can surely be nothing more than first thoughts; scarcely relieved by humour or word-play, they merely catalogue the workaday upsets of a particularly ordinary character. The odd touches of confusion seem more likely to be due to hasty composition than to any dreamy design: but we do see here the preoccupation with being lost, with signposts leading us astray, or nowhere, which surfaces so much more interestingly in Shine on Brightly and Homburg.

Small wonder, then, that this recording evolved no further, nor that it has never seen official release in any form. But what a relief to hear the band still enjoying a raucous and pointless bash together, so many years into their professional career.