Thirteen

On New Year's Day 2010 I started Bagging Area- which has made it very easy to remember when the blog's birthday is if nothing else. Today the blog enters its teenage years, thirteen years old. There are several songs titled for what is often seen as the unluckiest number.

Big Star's Thirteen from 1972 is a celebration of teenage love. 'Won't you let me walk you home from school', it begins, the ache and pain of young love perfectly captured by Alex Chilton and Chris Bell.

Thirteen

Big Audio Dynamite's V Thirteen is from 1987, co-written with Joe Strummer who also produced the album it came from (Number 10 Upping Street, according to Joe, the home of 'an alternative, funky Prime Minister'). V. Thirteen's lyrics take in all sorts of stuff, not least Little Jamie who writes 'V 13'- I've always assumed this means writes as in graffiti- my copy of the 12" came with a stencil for spraying V. 13 onto walls and other surfaces, still unused. V. Thirteen is one of B.A.D.'s finest moments.

V. Thirteen

Teenage Fanclub released an entire album titled Thirteen, released in 1992 following the flush of fame that Bandwagonesque brought. Inevitably it felt like a bit of a slump, the songs not quite up to par, many being fragments and leftovers from 1991/2. The experience of making it wasn't a happy one for the group, it dragged on and became hard work. Drummer Brendan O'Hare left after they toured the album. Time has been fairly kind to Thirteen I think, it sounds pretty good today, just not a great step on in any way. One of the key songs was 120 Minutes, a Raymond McGinley song, which the group recorded acoustically for their Teenage Fanclub Have Lost It EP, released in 1995

120 Minutes (Acoustic)

Andrew Weatherall's 2016 solo album Convenanza included a song called Thirteenth Night. The album was a wide ranging affair, spanning post- punk/ punk funk trumpets and featured Weatherall's vocals on many of the songs including references to writers Hans Fallada and Robert Walser (Fallada wrote Alone In Berlin, the true story of a German couple who leave a series of handwritten postcards around Berlin during the Nazi years attacking the regime and who then become involved in a deadly cat and mouse game with the Gestapo). Thirteenth Night was a slightly melancholic instrumental. For the remix album that followed- Consolamentum- Thirteenth Night was remixed by Andrew's Asphodell's bandmate and studio engineer Timothy J. Fairplay. The Asphodells' steam powered drum machine makes a welcome appearance.  

Thirteenth Night (Timothy J. Fairplay remix)