Beisty wrote:Scott
While I’m sure Philip will give a more accurate answer, I believe that this track was Jem’s baby mainly. I know he had tried it all before with Metropolis, but I think I remember reading that in that song he had felt a bit of pressure to still put in the Irish bits. With Gridlock he wanted an out and out jazz blast. And on Peace & Love he finally felt he had the freedom to do that.
"Gridlock" is the track I most readily think of when Shanes's oft-quoted pseudo-criticism "With Peace And Love they thought they could do whatever they felt like and did, more or less" appears. Which is exactly why it is the first track. Our capacities as musicians showed very little sign of stretching beyond our ambitions at that point as a developing band. This was so blatantly and comically absurd that we got it all out of the way at once, Side One, Track One, followed by the new Pogues album if you choose NOT to consider "Gridlock" part of the new Pogues album (which I do). Personally, I thought it was an eloquent and witty way to make the point. That may have been the same day "Contact Yourself" unexpectedly went missing from the album, along with any number of other half-cocked experiments that are not actually on the album at all but may certainly have made an appearance in the early stages of recording the album.
If memory serves, most of "Gridlock" was worked out in Spain during the endless "Fiesta" video shoot with Adrian Edmondson. Bored to tears being bulls, toreadors, minstrels, barkers, cops, comics, kings and whatever else, we set up our backline in the rear of a grubby ould transit, a good distance away from Winnebago Land, and just played, acoustically. Andrew Ranken gets the shared credit because, self-evidently, Jem did not actually compose the lengthy drum pattern intro which Andrew had been legitimately writing for some time.
Though I can't be certain, there is no reason to suppose that not all the Pogues play on the recording. My thoughts are that, on the contrary, Lillywhite would rather have insisted on that, to add a "guess who plays what" dimension to the artifice behind the art.
