Tim Peaks – Songs for a Late Night Diner

Returning to New Horizons after a few weeks of lockdown-imposed repeats, William Dart takes a look at a new compilation album from Tim Burgess and Bob Stanley inspired by the soundtrack music to the David Lynch TV series Twin Peaks.

For some, the act of eating, in silence, is almost unimaginable. So much so, that the late Kate McGarrigle provided her own melancholic music for this rather forlorn solo meal.

A new release from Tim Burgess and Bob Stanley, an imaginary playlist for a café in the English North West, has prompted some musical memories from years of dining out.

It’s the quirky and sometimes irritating musical backdrops that linger. Such as what was offered at Topo Gigio, a small Italian eaterie in Auckland’s Dominion Road back in the early 90s – an establishment that proudly listed, on its menu, the musicians who’d be serenading diners over their pasta or pizza.

I remember being extremely worried during one outpouring from The Gypsy Kings that, without warning, it might suddenly morph into the ballad ‘Granada’, and bring back unwanted recollections of Television New Zealand talent shows in the 1960s.

‘Granada’ never eventuated, but this was not music to induce relaxation, over a smooth gelato or tiramisu.

For that we might have hightailed off to another establishment on the corner of Nikau Street and Mt Eden Road – a café named Duxbury’s, that’s also no more. It featured munchable food, alarmingly casual service, and I swear just the one Betty Carter LP on its turntable. But what a singer and what songs.

The only danger, listening to Betty Carter is that food could get cold, with this musical distraction. These 1955 recordings had recently been reissued for a new and younger audience and I remember being transfixed, fork in mid-air, as the jazz diva took a set of beloved ballads to scat heaven.

But, in general, restaurants play it fairly cool with their listening menus, whether piped through the premises courtesy of Spotify, or delivered from turntables by discreet DJs.

Tim Burgess and Bob Stanley’s food memories don’t go back quite as far as mine. Their new album, Tim Peaks, Songs for a Late-Night Diner, was inspired by the early 90s television series, Twin Peaks, its mysterious ambience perfectly captured in Angelo Badalamenti’s score.

As opposed to the pervasive puzzlement of Twin Peaks, the new Tim Peaks album has no secrets at all in its jukebox. Tim Burgess and Bob Stanley explain their choices, song by song, in a generously proportioned booklet.

But then Stanley, apart from being a member of the band St Etienne, is an experienced music journalist, and Burgess is still remembered for his years at the helm of The Charlatans.

Stanley explains how they set off with a shared ambition — to create a soundtrack for an imaginary café in the English North West, complementing that of the Double-R diner in Twin Peaks, which was set in the Pacific North West.

And the 20 tracks they’ve chosen, ranging from 1980 to 2018, are as tantalising as any culinary treat to be found on their café’s menu.

First up for me was a re-introduction to the band Young Marble Giants singing ‘Choci Loni’.  

Burgess had been alerted to the group by Kurt Cobain of all people and Stanley sums up the sound of this song by suggesting that the post-industrial Welsh valleys could have had no greater soundtrack than this.

Welsh vocalist, Alison Statton, finds her employment as a chiropractor these days but, through the 80s and 90s, she fronted bands such as Young Marble Giants, Weekend, and Spike.

But, for me, the opening instrumental alone is almost hypnotic enough to slip into the original Twin Peaks score, without causing the slightest ruffle.  

I can’t help feeling a certain pride in finding the next track up is homegrown Kiwi: in this case a 1987 song by The Chills, titled ‘House with a Hundred Rooms’.

Tim Burgess had been smitten by Martin Phillipps’s music from the early days of  ‘Rolling Moon’ and ‘Pink Frost’ but, a few years after that initial bloom of first love, ‘House with a Hundred Rooms’ was a revelation for him.

For Bob Stanley, it had a low-key windswept quality that he also found in a lot of Flying Nun music at the time. A quality that made it a cousin of sorts to British bands such as Factory and Zoo.

I’ve got my own take though. Let’s imagine for a moment that that eternal flower child, Donovan Leitch, had got himself a mansion with a hundred rooms, as well as a band of musicians as sharp as guitarist Justin Harwood, drummer Caroline Easther and keyboard man Andrew Todd. If so, this number could have been his theme song.

Just as new restaurants offer the opportunity of taste-bud adventures, Burgess and Stanley’s diner soundtrack comes up with plenty of musical surprises. And they’re not all from 30 to 40 years ago.

Gwenno Saunders is a singer-songwriter whose music comes from her mix of Cornish and Welsh heritage, recording as she does in both languages. Check her out on line making her debut on the Jools Holland show singing ‘Tir Ha Mor’, a rather whimsical ballad in Cornish about flying horsemen.

Burgess and Stanley have picked another song from Gwenno’s Cornish language album here, a number titled ‘Hunros’.

However, the men’s comments on it are a little nebulous for my taste, likening it to a soundtrack for an imaginary film.

The Cornish lyrics, however, do pose a problem. Its English title, ‘A Dream’, is just a hint of what’s going on as Gwenno sings this lullaby to her four-year son, Nico, reflecting her deep concern for our society’s youngest generation.

But am I being too literal here? Does it really matter, in an atmospheric chillout ballad such as this, that the words remain a mystery?. Perhaps its wash of delicately psychedelic harp is all the explanation you need while downing a tasty entrée.

There’s a number of strong women’s voices coming forth from the Tim Peaks jukebox, another being Deborah Wykes, whose song ‘Blue Dress’ is obviously included through the curatorial input of Bob Stanley. Wykes and Paul Kelly were both members of his band St Etienne before they left and started up their own group, Birdie, in the mid-90s.

And this is yet another number with just the right quality of mesmerising reverberance that could have fitting neatly onto the playlists for both Tim Peaks and Twin Peaks.

Just how many burgers might one demolish getting through all 75 minutes of Tim Burgess and Bob Stanley’s Tim Peaks album? But then perhaps the salad menu might be wiser, in case a hot dish could suffer a ruinous drop in temperature while you’re carried away in the alluring drift of 1980s esoterica.

Such as ‘Yanks’ by The Gist, a band that Stuart Moxham came up with after leaving Young Marble Giants in 1980. This B side from The Gist’s first single doesn’t pursue a narrative far beyond its first few lines. But musically, you could quite happily enjoy it as a rather clever, offbeat skewing of Van Morrison’s ‘Moondance’. 

There are other B-sides from the 80s on the Tim Peaks CD, such as ‘Fuel’ by Echo and the Bunnymen.

Here, though, I find that the substance of the song is annoyingly sidelined by the bold marimba of its opening bars that seems to fuel other percussive distraction throughout the number.

While The Gist didn’t have that much to say in that last song we heard, this group does, but you’re rather weirdly distanced from it.

If one can escape from this beguiling 1980s valley of nostalgia, there are quite a few tracks in Tim Peaks taken from the last few years.

It was good to catch up with four women of the band Chastity Belt, hailing from Walla Walla in Washington. They’ve been around for a decade, and the playful stroppiness of their first two albums dramatically coalesced into something more considered and three-dimensional in their third.

It was a journey caught in the CD’s title, I used to spend so much time alone, and in this song chosen for Tim Peaks — titled ‘Different Now’.  And while you’re listening to these women advising you to banish your pride and grief in order to be right where you need to be, spare some admiration for a band that can create such inventive instrumental flowerings within so restricted a harmonic garden.   

So, while the contents of the food menu at Tim Peaks will always be a mystery to us, the music being offered here certainly compensates. I found myself happily hanging in, track by track, until Dean McPhee’s closing guitar solo titled Sky Burial.

Tim Burgess may quip that anyone who can conjure up the guitar style of Bert Jansch and John Martyn is good with him, but McPhee is more than just a replicator. He’s a man who has his own individually defined presence. He’s opened for artists from Thurston Moore and Sharon Van Etten to Michael Hurley and Josephine Foster. In 2012 he assisted Michael Chapman on the experimental side performing Chapman’s The Resurrection and Revenge of the Clayton Peacock.

Bob Stanley describes McPhee’s contribution here as a kind of abstraction of English folk song.

As such, it gives Tim Peaks a certain geographical and cultural grounding for me, but do I also detect just the slightest whiff of Twin Peaks other-worldliness in McPhee’s atmospheric pluckings?

Music Details

'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)

'I Eat Dinner' (K McGarrigle) – Kate & Anna McGarrigle
Heatbeats Accelerating
(Private Music)

'Sin Ella' (Gypsy Kings) – The Gypsy Kings
Este Mundo
(Sony)

'Thou Swell' (Rodgers, Hart) – Betty Carter
Social Call
(Sony)

'Twin Peaks Main Theme' (Badalamenti) – Angelo Badalamenti
Twin Peaks Original TV Soundtrack
(Warner)

'Choci Loni' (Moxham, Moxham) – Young Marble Giants
Tim Peaks: Songs for a Late Night Diner
(Ace)

'House with a Hundred Rooms' (Phillipps) – The Chills
Tim Peaks: Songs for a Late Night Diner
(Ace)

'Hunros' (Edwards, Saunders) – Gwenno
Tim Peaks: Songs for a Late Night Diner
(Ace)

'Blue Dress' (Kelly, Wykes) – Birdie
Tim Peaks: Songs for a Late Night Diner
(Ace)

'Yanks' (Moxham) – The Gist
Tim Peaks: Songs for a Late Night Diner
(Ace)

'Fuel' (De Freitas et al) – Echo and the Bunnymen
Tim Peaks: Songs for a Late Night Diner
(Ace)

'Different Now' (Grimm et al) – Chastity Belt
Tim Peaks: Songs for a Late Night Diner
(Ace)

'Sky Burial' (McPhee) – Dean McPhee
Tim Peaks: Songs for a Late Night Diner
(Ace)