Scott Walker, The Zombies, Edgard Varese, Small Faces, Serge Gainsbourg… Spotify Playlist For This Week
This week’s playlist, which I’ve titled Misty Rosary, doesn’t have an organising theme like the other ones I’ve done recently, it’s just seventeen songs I really like right now. I hope you will too…
Misty Roses by The Zombies is a live performance from the Odessey And Oracle 40th Anniversary CD/DVD, and actually only features Colin Blunstone of the Zombies, plus touring band member Keith Airey and a string quintet, recreating the arrangement of the Tim Hardin song from Blunstone’s first solo album. One of the most gorgeous things ever in pop music, seriously.
Mr Bellamy by Paul McCartney is the best thing by a long way from his most recent solo album proper, Memory Almost Full, and the most interesting thing he’s done in a long time – it sounds like nothing so much as Sparks, but Sparks covering Love In The Open Air (the love theme from The Family Way, which McCartney wrote in 1965).
Guilty As Charged by John C Reilly is from the film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. I was put off that film for a long time by its promotional material, which made it look like the kind of thing that Will Ferrel would be in, but in fact it’s a very sharp, funny film – a parody of rock biopics, but particularly Walk The Line. But the music’s what makes it – it has the best original soundtrack since A Mighty Wind. This one’s a spot-on Ring Of Fire Johnny Cash with a spot of Secret Agent Man thrown in. Reilly is a great vocalist – not just ‘for an actor’, he’s an astonishing singer by any standards – but what makes this soundtrack is the attention paid to production details. All the songs sound like they could have come from the time they’re set, and that’s a much harder thing to do than people realise.
Ionisation by Edgard Varese is a wonderful piece of atonal percussion music, hugely influential on everyone from Pierre Boulez to Frank Zappa. The present day composer refuses to die!
If I Could Have Her Tonight by Neil Young is from Young’s eponymous first solo album, still my favourite of all his albums. Back then, Young had quite an unusual sound, somewhere halfway between the psych-pop of Love and the country-pop of the Byrds or solo Mike Nesmith, and while much of his later stuff’s good, it’s less interesting than the music he was making then.
Tin Soldier by The Small Faces is possibly the best rock (as opposed to pop) single ever made. Everything about it – the dynamics, Steve Marriot’s vocal, those Jaws piano chords at the start, is about as perfect as it gets.
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Serge Gainsbourg is a fairly straight rendition, but from an album, Rock Around The Bunker, which was pretty much what it sounds like…
Do Nothing Til You Hear From Me by Billie Holiday is a cover of the Duke Ellington song, originally titled Concerto For Cootie.
Take Me In Your Lifeboat by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band features Del McCoury and two of his sons, making it essentially a Del McCoury Band track. Which means it’s by some of the best bluegrass musicians today.
High Coin by Harpers Bizarre is written and arranged by Van Dyke Parks, in a very similar style to his work on Song Cycle (which I must write about at some point).
You Don’t Know Me by Ray Charles is from Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music vol 1 (my copy of which, bought second-hand, was the best 50p I ever spent). One of the greatest vocal performances of all time, this is one of a very small number of songs that can reduce me to tears.
Golden Days by William Grant Still is an excerpt from The American Scene, one of Still’s last major works. For those who don’t know him, Still was ‘the black Gershwin’, going from arranging for WC Handy and playing with James P Johnson to being the first African-American to conduct a symphony orchestra. He’s a sadly underrated figure in American music, and fans of Gershwin, Ives, Copeland et al could do worse than check out his stuff.
Another Time by Curt Boettcher is a lovely gentle soft-pop song. In the mid-60s a sort of informal collective of people centred round Boettcher and Gary Usher recorded about six albums worth of soft-pop stuff which mostly remained unreleased til the 90s, and has since been released on several different labels under several different names – the same tracks can be found as by Curt Boettcher and/or the Ballroom and/or The Millennium and/or Sandy Salisbury and/or Sagittarius, depending on the reissue. These are all worth getting, but the stuff released as by Boettcher or Salisbury solo tends to be the best.
Oh Bondage, Up Yours by X-Ray Specs is here for three reasons – firstly that there are too many slow songs in this list, secondly that there aren’t many women, and thirdly because it’s fucking great. “Some people think that little girls should be seen and not heard, but I say… OH BONDAGE, UP YOURS!”
Lyke-Wake Dirge by Pentangle is actually only my second-favourite version of this old song (after that by The Young Tradition), which is surprising because Pentangle were one of the most interesting bands of the late 60s, fusing traditional folk and modern jazz. It’s an old Yorkshire song to be sung at wakes, and the lyrics (which can be found here) talk about ordeals of purgatory, saying that after you’re dead you have to go through various trials, and will only have to protect you the things you gave to the poor in this life – you have to walk over thorns and can only wear shoes if you gave shoes to the poor, and so on. Quite an inspiring, hopeful but earthy take on things, as tends to be the way with Yorkshire religion.
You Set The Scene by Love is an alternative mix of the track from Forever Changes. The amount of invention in this song – the number of different melodies, and the strength of them – is astoundng. Just listen to the section starting ‘this is the time in life that I am living’ without shivers going down your spine. I DARE you.
And Rosary by Scott Walker is from Tilt, his ‘comeback’ album, and (along with his more recent The Drift and …And Who Shall Go To The Ball? And Who Shall Go To The Ball?) possibly the strangest records ever made by a major figure.
Albums You Should Own – Del And The Boys
I know exactly at what moment I tired of irony in my music for good. It was in 2006, at a small festival of acoustic music, and I was watching Hayseed Dixie.
I’d quite enjoyed their album, which consisted of bluegrass-tinged performances of hard rock songs, especially those of AC/DC, and thought for a joke band they were quite fun, but I found their live performance horrifying. While they were quite reasonable musically, their entire act was based around mocking ‘rednecks’ (in other words, working class people), performing in dungarees and essentially acting like Cletus from The Simpsons.
This wouldn’t have been so bad had I not seen the Del McCoury band earlier that day. Del McCoury is one of the bluegrass greats, and one of the two or three people who originated the type of music they were mocking, and the difference in the performance was staggering. The Del McCoury band were polite, well-spoken (with strong Kentucky accents, but still well-spoken), dressed in very formal suits, and very disciplined and dignified. It was rather like watching Paul Robeson and then seeing a blackface minstrel show immediately afterwards, and it left me feeling rather soiled – Hayseed Dixie weren’t even a caricature, they were a caricature of an inaccurate stereotype.
Luckily, McCoury himself gave a much better performance, and gained at least one fan that day, and since then I’ve picked up a couple of his albums, of which my favourite is Del and the Boys.
I know many people automatically dismiss country music – and with good reason, as anything that has appeared on US country radio for at least 35 years is the worst kind of pabulum. I’d rather be boiled alive in a vat of my own excrement than ever listen to an album by Shania Twain or Doug Supernaw or their ilk. But real country music – the tradition that runs from Jimmie Rogers through Hank Williams and Bill Monroe to Johnny Cash to Steve Earle, the anti-authoritarian, blues-based, folk music of the rural poor – that music is as good as anything out there. (Jon Swift recently posted a satirical ‘handy guide to pro- and anti-American things’ which had Hank Williams Sr in the anti-American column and Hank Jr in pro-American. That pretty much sums it up).
The Del McCoury band are a family – McCoury and two of his sons make up three-quarters of the band – and they stick very much to ‘traditional’ bluegrass (traditional in quotes because the form is only about 60 years old). The line-up has no rhythm section, consisting of guitar, mandolin, banjo and violin, and the harmonies (which are superb) are all high, keening bluegrass harmonies. But within that traditional sound, there’s a wealth of different possibilities which the band remain open to.
The first song on the album is a testament to that – a cover of Richard Thompson’s classic 1952 Vincent Black Lightning with Thompson’s rippling guitar arpeggios turned into furious mandolin picking. The song’s done entirely straight (apart from changing the destination to which ‘they did ride’ from Box Hill to Knoxville), and it’s an adventurous choice for a country band, but it works perfectly in this style.
Much of the album’s subject matter is more traditional country-music fare – it’s bad when your dad’s dead, it’s also bad when the woman you love cheats on you, it’s not much good when you’re alone and heartbroken, it’s lonesome when you’re far away from Kentucky and that bluegrass home of yours, and Jesus is better than a life of sin and debauchery. But the difference is that unlike much commercial country music, these songs don’t appear to have been written in order to appeal to a demographic, but from the heart.
The religious songs, for example, aren’t the insipid pap memorably parodied in South Park’s last funny episode a few years back (“I want you Jesus, baby/Why you cryin’ Jesus baby?”) but are very strong songs. All Aboard is a blazingly fast, almost screamed, exhortation, a combination of those two country music staples the gospel song and the train song (“And the train keeps rollin’/And the world keeps turning/All aboard/everybody’s gotta get on board”).
The strongest song by far on the album though is another of the religious songs, Recovering Pharisee. This song is almost unique in American popular Christian music (at least that I’ve heard – it’s far from my favourite genre, as you might imagine) in actually dealing with the hypocrisy of the singer:
I’m a Pharisee in recovery
With new eyes I can see the great sinner in me
It’s the way of my human heart to confess other people’s sins
Reluctant to accept my part and the deeper problem within
Whether you agree with American revivalist religion or not – and I don’t think anyone will be hugely surprised that I don’t – it’s encouraging to hear someone trying intelligently to deal with the idea of failing to live up to their own moral standards, rather than just judging other people.
The highlight of the album is probably the instrumental Goldbrickin’, which is a roaringly fast showcase for the band’s picking and fiddling skills, and without the vocals it’s apparent how close this music is to traditional English folk music – that track could easily be on an album by Waterson: Carthy or a similar trad-folk band.
This music is definitely traditional country music, and definitely deals with traditional country-song concerns, but it’s from the heart, and played by musicians with tremendous skill and enthusiasm, and I can recommend the album to absolutely everyone.
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