New Spotify Playlist – XTC, Laurie Biagini, Neil Innes, Wild Man Fisher
Before I start, I’d just like to apologise for the lack of content for a week – work’s finally calmed down, but I’ve essentially spent the last week asleep as a reaction to the lifting of four months’ constant stress.
Anyway, I’ve decided that to start posting again I’m going to do another hyperpost like series, this one starting off with thoughts on authorship rather than canon. I’m going to talk about Cerebus, Smile, Wednesday Comics and Strange Adventures, Darkseid and Jack Kirby, and copyright law, among other things. I’ll also try, next week, to get more Beatles stuff posted.
But in the meantime, here’s a playlist I’ve put together…
Hand 19 by Andy Partridge And Harold Budd is from an album I only discovered existed through Spotify, a collection of somewhat new-agey jazzy stuff. I almost wondered at first if it was a different Andy Partridge, but it has his melodic fingerprints…
How Sweet To Be An Idiot by Neil Innes is probably Innes’ most famous solo song, thanks to appearing on a couple of Monty Python things (and being ripped off by Oasis for Whatever). It’s deserved though – Innes is a *shockingly* underrated songwriter, easily as major a talent as someone like Ray Davies, who gets overlooked because so much of his material is hilariously funny, so the craft (an the often very poignany emotions) underlying it gets lost.
Buttons Of Your Mind by The Scaffold is a rather lovely B-side to their novelty hit Lily The Pink. It sounds like a poor man’s Bonzo Dog Band – which is, of course, what The Scaffold essentially were – but they have their moments. (For those who don’t know, The Scaffold were a comedy group which featured the poet Roger McGough and Paul McCartney’s brother).
Stagger Lee by Mississippi John Hurt is still my favourite version of this – a completely different song to the more well-known one performed by everyone from Lloyd Price to Nick Cave, but containing many of the same lines.
Season Cycle by XTC is, amazingly, from the same album as Dear God. Rather amazing that the band capable of such a terrible song about atheism could also be capable of such a wonderful song about religious awe at nature. Rather obviously ripped off from Sagittarius’ version of My World Fell Down, but none the worse for that.
Mr Guru by Laurie Biagini is a fun piece of 60s pastiche from someone who does a lot of that sort of thing. It actually sounds rather like Bananarama, but in a good way, if you can believe that.
Good Sounds by Linus Of Hollywood is one of the best pure pop tracks of the last decade – an absolutely gorgeous, fun chorus with some rather disturbing lyrics – “I was just thinking/We were both drinking/So we should fool around/Things would be much easier if you’d just stay the night”, along with a promise to ‘play your favourite record if you promise that you’ll stay’ is rather too creepy to be an effective pickup line, or at least so I hope…
Cross Hatched World by Chewy Marble is by far my favourite song from last year’s Modulations, their first album in several years, a Beach Boysy track about drawing.
Loveland by The Mello Cads is a fantastic piece of lounge music pastiche, based around Come On In by The Association (which if I remember rightly was the theme music for lead Cad David Ponak’s radio show for a few years) but with some rather incongruous Indian stylings and backwards guitar on top. The Mello Cads are one of about a million bands with Probyn Gregory and Nelson Bragg in, always a sign of excellence.
I’ve Loved Her So Long by Neil Young is from his eponymous first solo album, which I still consider the best thing he ever did. Jack Nitzsche’s arrangements, and the more melodic stuff Young was doing then, place this firmly in ‘interesting LA pop’ territory with The Monkees, Love and Jimmy Webb, rather than the hippie singer-songwriter or proto-grunge furrows he spent much of the rest of his career in.
Flaming Carrot Theme Song by Wild Man Fisher is a theme for the great surrealistic 80s indie comic.
Don’t Make Me Over by The Swinging Blue Jeans is one of the great late-Merseybeat singles, obviously no match for Dionne Warwick’s original, sung as it is by a slightly flat Scouser, but that in itself is its charm – when Ray Ennis sings “Accept me for what I am”, it’s a flawed human doing so, rather than a vocal goddess.
Killing Floor by Howlin’ Wolf is the song which Led Zeppelin… er… homaged in The Lemon Song. However, good as Led Zep are, Howlin’ Wolf is roughly ten quadrillion times better – he sounds like he could bite Robert Plant’s head off between phrases.
And Long Black Limousine by Elvis Presley is a masterpiece of resentment and nastiness. She went off and said she’d be in a fancy car – well look at her now, she’s in a limousine all right – a hearse. That’ll teach her for wanting to do something with her life, won’t it, the stuck-up bitch? She’s dead now and everyone can see her funeral. It’s a thoroughly unpleasant song, as so many of those in this playlist are, but dear god Elvis’ voice in the last verse after the key change… what a singer…
Spotify Playlist – Jake Thackray, Arthur Alexander, Incredible String Band, Dudley Moore
This week’s playlist doesn’t have a theme as such, but is just some music I like.
After an introductory snippet, we start with Anyone But You by The Mumps. The Mumps were a late 70s art-rock/punk band led by reality TV star Lance Loud (who takes lead on this) and musician Kristian Hoffman (who sings lead on the middle eight). In this form, this song sounds like a very rough demo for the version on Hoffman’s 2002 duets album &, possibly the best album of the last decade, which is near-identical to this but tighter and with Stew singing Lance Loud’s part (other people Hoffman duets with on the album include Darian Sahanaja, Van Dyke Parks, Russel Mael, Rufus Wainwright and El Vez). Unfortunately, Hoffman’s solo work is not yet on Spotify, but this will give some idea of how it sounds. But buy Hoffman’s album, seriously. Best album of the last ten years.
Where Have You Been All My Life? by Arthur Alexander is, shamefully, the only track by the great soul singer on Spotify (not only that, he’s not on eMusic either – a definite argument for the continued existence of CDs). Alexander is mostly known now for his influence on British bands like the Beatles (who covered many of his songs live) or the Stones, but he really deserves much more recognition.
I’ve had a minor obsession with the Threepenny Opera since LOEG: Century was released a few months ago, especially Pirate Jenny. I usually listen to the version by Nina Simone because she interprets the English version of the lyrics best, but Lotte Lenya singing it with Kurt Weill’s original orchestration is the definitive version in the original German.
Suzy Creamcheese by Teddy & His Patches is not, strangely, a cover of the Zappa song, but a totally different song, obviously inspired by the spoken bit and percussion jams at the end of Freak Out! but sounding far more like the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, with a bit of the Count Five thrown in. A marvellous garage rave-up.
Lady Lynda by The Beach Boys is included because I’ve always felt that Al Jardine was a horribly underrated vocalist – being in a band with Brian and Carl Wilson would let anyone get overlooked, but I actually think he was at least on their level, and while this song (a hit for the band in the UK, written by Jardine about his then-wife, based around Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring) isn’t one of their best, it does really showcase his vocal abilities. In fact more than that – when the ‘live’ album and DVD this is from came out, it was claimed that there were no vocal overdbubs after the fact, in which case (as you can hear here) Jardine must be the only man in the world who can double-track himself live, while simultaneously singing a totally different backing vocal line – sometimes without even moving his lips…
Baby It’s You by The Shirelles is the first of two Bacharach songs on this playlist – in fact the backing track here is Bacharach’s home demo (as you can tell from the dropped-in solo, awkward and out of place). What always gets me about this song is the ‘cheat, cheat’ in the second verse. She knows that ‘what they say about you’ is true, but has chosen to forgive, but not to forget…
Little Miss Britten by Dudley Moore is Moore doing Little Miss Muffet in the style of Britten’s settings of folk songs for Peter Pears. Absolutely *cutting*. Moore never really got to develop his talent for musical comedy after choosing essentially to become Peter Cook’s straight man, but while these early pastiches are a little glib he could easily have become as good as Tom Lehrer or Flanders & Swann in his own right, rather than being the assistant to an even greater genius…
I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself by Dusty Springfield is another Bacharach/David song. This one has been covered by Elvis Costello (where I first heard the song) and The White Stripes, but this is the definitive version. I was reading someone (Bob Stanley quoted by Jonathan Calder, who I also just realised isn’t on my blogroll, something I will rectify forthwith) recently talking about how at the time, Dusty Springfield was only seen as one of a number of interchangeable vocalists like Cilla Black, Lulu or Sandy Shaw, but now she’s the only one who is still an influence on many, many new singers.
Ride The Wild Surf by Jan & Dean is a fairly formulaic J&D/Brian Wilson early surf song, appaling vocals and all (these records are a lot more dissonant than people remember), but I love the ‘gotta take that one last ride’ hook, the ‘ride ride ride’ at the end of the middle eight (with that throbbing bass staying on one note while the vocals go up and up) and especially the end of the track. Those elements are all things that either Wilson or Jan Berry (probably Wilson) almost certainly lifted from the Beatles (compare the end of every other Jan & Dean or Beach Boys single up to that point, with their fades, to the ‘one-two-three, one-two-three, CHORD!’ ending of both this and I Want To Hold Your Hand).
A Very Cellular Song by The Incredible String Band is a thirteen-minute multi-sectioned song with gospel and folk elements, featuring organ, harpsichord and crumhorn. The album this was on went top ten in 1967… (relistening to this recently, I was annoyed to discover that one of my own new songs bears too much resemblance to this – I’m rewriting it in my head at the moment).
Brother Gorilla (Le Gorille) by Jake Thackray is Thackray’s loose translation of Georges Brassens’ chanson. It actually sounds just like one of Thackray’s own songs – the only clue to it being a translation is the rather forced ‘swinging lissomely out of his cage’ and ‘the judge intoned with tranquility’, both of which have too many syllables for their lines. But how many other songwriters could manage to get ‘paleolithic’ into a song and have it scan? (Incidentally, a warning – this is a comedy song about a hanging judge being raped by a gorilla. Some of you might find it offensive or triggering).
Liebster Jesu, Wir Sind Hier by Dr Albert Schweitzer is, yes, that Albert Schweitzer. As well as his missionary, medical and theological work, for which he’s more widely known, he was also one of the world’s foremost interpreters of Bach on the organ in the early 20th century, even inventing several new mic-positioning techniques for recording Bach more accurately. While this has some surface noise, it’s still a lovely performance.
Wishing Well by The National Pep is one of a very small number of songs where I wrote the words as well as the music (Tilt rewrote two lines of this). In fact the song came to me, words and music, on the bus and I had to scribble it down and work out the chords later – I still can’t actually play it on the guitar, having written it without an instrument. (The last couple of lines were added later, as the bus stopped before I could finish writing, and I still don’t think they fit particularly well). Tilt and our engineer Steve managed to take my tinkly MIDI file (which Gavin R said sounded like the music from Super Mario Brothers when he heard it on its own) and Joe Meek it up enough to be usable (basically they played the MIDI file backwards through a good sampled harpsichord with reverb on it, then reversed the recording, plus a ton of other stuff), and Tilt and Laura Denison provided vocals.
C-H-I-C-K-E-N spells Chicken by The McGee Brothers is another song that some may find offensive – with good reason, as in its very first line it includes two racist epithets. Unfortunately, pre-war rural music like this (a song originally written, I believe, by the phenomenal banjo player Uncle Dave Macon) often has these elements – and I’m very grateful for Van Dyke Parks’ cover of this (unfortunately not on Spotify) for changing those lyrics while preserving the wonderful song itself.
Speaking of cover versions by Van Dyke Parks, Donovan’s Colours is a ragtime-ish instrumental version of Donovan’s 60s hit, with some lovely percussion and cello bits to it. Just gorgeous. Remind me to do several more blog posts about Parks at some point – he’s one of the unsung greats.
And Will You Remember Me by Janet Klein is a lovely little solo performance, just voice and ukulele.
This Week’s Spotify Playlist – Great Golden Hits Of The Sixties!
Yes, it’s all your favourite 60s classics, right here in one playlist, including…
(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction by Manfred Mann. This is an instrumental cover that alternates seemingly at random between a straight fuzzed-up guitar version and freewheeling hammond-organ-and-tenor-sax led jazz. Absolutely great.
Surfin’ USA by Melt Banana is a noise-rock cover version by the Japanese alt-punk band, who I first discovered through their other Beach Boys cover Well, You’re Welcome (which also included a big chunk of this song). Gavin R, you might like this one…
You Really Got Me by Tom Baker Says… is an electro cover of the Kinks song by these people, who used British Telecom’s automated text-to-speech facility, while Tom Baker was the official voice of it, to record Baker saying all sorts of things. This works surprisingly well.
I Saw Her Standing There by Anthony Newley & The Baker Twins is a lounge cover of the Beatles song. For those of you who don’t know Newley (primarily Americans), Newley was a songwriter (he wrote Goldfinger, Feelin’ Good (the Nina Simone song) and most of the songs for Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory), actor, celebrity husband (married to Joan Collins) and soap star, among many other things, and a huge influence on David Bowie. No, honestly…
(Theme From) The Monkees by The Benzedrine Monks Of Santo Domonica is the Monkees theme as Gregorian chant.
Hello Little Girl by The Stool Pigeons is the first song John Lennon ever wrote, and a hit for the Fourmost, here done by Lisa Jenio’s other band, a Merseybeat covers group.
Mrs Robinson by Frank Sinatra is exactly how you think it sounds, but more so. Especially ‘good’ is the way Sinatra refuses to sing ‘Jesus’ or ‘God’, so it becomes ‘Jilly loves you more than you can know’, before he just starts making up his own words…
You’re No Good by José Feliciano is surprisingly dark and funky for him – it sounds a lot like I Just Popped In To See What Condition My Condition Is In, actually…
Twist And Shout by Ike And Tina Turner is closely based on the Isley Brothers’ version, but sped up, and shows what a great R&B screamer Tina used to be before she started making terrible 80s pop records.
Speaking of terrible 80s pop records… Beach Boys Medley: I Get Around/Good Vibrations/Barbara Ann by Russ Abbot… the title really speaks for itself here, at least for Britons over the age of about 25. For the rest of you… just be glad you don’t understand. Trust me.
Ferry ‘Cross The Mersey by Pat Metheny is a multi-tracked acoustic guitar performance by the noodlesome Kenny G-baiting jazzer, and actually manages to bring out the rather lovely melody in this horribly sentimental song.
Telstar by Duke Ellington exists, and that in itself is enough to make me very happy indeed.
Unchained Melody by The Goons was actually banned for many years – the composer withdrew his permission for the record to be released, and it was withdrawn from sale. Many of the things that George Martin did with the arrangement here would later make their way into Beatles records (compare that piano sound to the end of Tomorrow Never Knows, for example).
Sweets For My Sweet by The Sweet Inspirations is a pretty decent straight soul performance by the greatest female soul backing group of all time (they backed Aretha Franklin and Elvis among others).
And Can’t By Me Love by Peter Sellers is my personal favourite of Sellers’ Beatles covers (again produced by George Martin).
This Week’s Spotify Playlist… And Thank You For The #welovethenhs Response
That last post of mine threw me off my posting stride a bit, because of the sheer weight of response, by email, on Twitter, in the comments here and in the comments to Debi’s repost of it (where our one troll went to hang out – I apologise, Debi, for getting a bit too angry there with someone who is, after all, a fellow human being, albeit one who wants to condemn millions of other fellow human beings to death because she doesn’t like them…).
The response has been, frankly, ludicrous – I was even interviewed by the Wall Street Journal today in my lunch break (I are big media pundit! I am the new Iain Dale or something), which is frankly surreal, given the content of that last post – I would have thought “The NHS isn’t designed to deliberately kill old people” was as uncontroversial a statement as one could make. I wonder what other misconceptions about cherished national institutions I’ll have to try to dispel in international media. Maybe next week I’ll be telling Le Monde that Last Of The Summer Wine isn’t a paedophile ring but a whimsical Yorkshire comedy show…
Anyway, thank you to everyone who retweeted, commented or linked that post of mine, and now I’ll get back to the stuff I *meant* to be posting this week. Tomorrow there’ll be a post on comics and the day after the continuation of my guide to my blogroll, but for now here’s a playlist.
My Mom Is Tor Johnson’s Mom by The Native Shrubs Of The Santa Monica Mountains is a fantastic song that my friend Tilt linked me to last week. For those who don’t know, Tor Johnson was the bald wrestler who appeared in many Ed Wood films, most notably Plan 9 From Outer Space. This song reminds me of my friend Blake Jones, but for a reference other people might get, the closest I can imagine is if The Dukes Of Stratosphear had done a Frank Zappa pastiche…
Think Carefully For Victory by The National Pep is one of two songs by my own band I’m including here (yes, Spotify even has *us* on it now) because I think they genuinely fit. It’s a jangly pop song for which I wrote the music and Tilt the words. The lineup on this one (TNP has a *very* fluid membership) is me on guitars and keyboards, Tilt on vocals and drums, Gavin Robinson on mandolin (which we mixed too low, I think), Laura Denison on one line of vocal and Albert Freeman (of Wilful Missing) on some African instrument I forget the name of Đàn Bầu.
Save The Last Dance For Me by “Ike And” Tina Turner is a Phil Spector-produced, Jack Nitzsche arranged version of the Doc Pomus/Mort Shuman classic. Brian Wilson very obviously ripped off the backing track for this for Heroes & Villains.
Bicarbonate Of Chicken by Ivor Cutler is about ordering bicarbonate of chicken in a restaurant.
Just One Look by Doris Troy is better known, in Britain at least, for a vastly inferior version by the Hollies, but this is the original. This was actually originally a demo, but it was released unchanged and made the US top ten. In the intro, you can definitely hear the influence this record and others like it had on early reggae…
Through The Net by Glenn Tilbrook & The Fluffers is from Pandemonium Ensues, probably Tilbrook’s strongest album since East Side Story. This one’s very Kinksy.
Common People – Live by Pulp is a recording which always brings back memories for me, as I was at the Glastonbury where this was recorded, and saw Pulp quite by chance, having no intention to see them perform (I’d seen them on some late-night Channel 4 thing and dismissed them as crappy electropop based on a couple of minutes, and hadn’t heard this, which was a huge hit single at the time). But it was the most astonishing experience of my life. I’ve seen Pulp and Cocker solo live quite a few times since, and they’ve always been good, but at that gig Cocker was simply the most astonishingly charismatic performer I’ve ever seen, and every moment is etched in my brain fourteen years later. (Christ, fourteen years? That can’t be right, surely? 1995 was only a little while ago…). This recording was originally a b-side to the Mis-Shapes/Sorted For Es & Whizz CD single, but is now a bonus track on the reissued Different Class.
Baby Please Don’t Go by Big Joe Williams is another song that’s usually much better known in a beat-group cover version (the version by Them), but I prefer (just) the original, just vocal, sparse guitar and harmonica.
Beat Head by Candypants is included in this as part of my ongoing campaign to get Lisa Jenio recognised as one of the real greats in rock/pop music. I think this one might be about something naughty…
Hominy Grove by Van Dyke Parks is one of many great songs from Jump!, his album loosely based around the Uncle Remus stories.
Nasty Dan by Johnny Cash is another one from The Johnny Cash Children’s Album. I always liked Cash doing this sort of material at least as much as the dark ‘man in black’ stuff for which he’s better known.
Time Will Carry On by The Wackers is a nice bit of 70s harmony pop that, to me at least, stays just the right side of Bread or America.
I Got You Babe by Tiny Tim is Tiny Tim being both Sonny and Cher, accompanied by his ukulele.
Don’t Smoke In Bed by Peggy Lee is a song that, I’m ashamed to say, I first got to know from k.d. lang’s vastly inferior cover version. I could listen to Peggy Lee sing anything…
And Jaded by The National Pep is another of my collaborations with Tilt (I’d say the writing here is about 55/45 in his favour), and the closest I’ve ever come to realising the sound I hear in my head in a recording studio. It’s a shame that Tilt didn’t find our musical collaboration a particularly happy one, as I think the results were superb, if I do say so myself. On this, Tilt and Laura share the vocals, Tilt does drums, Blake Jones does the theremin and melodica on the tag, my wife Holly adds woodwinds, and I played guitar, all the keyboard parts, and ukulele (and mandolin? I know I had a mandolin in the studio but don’t remember recording a mandolin part, but I *think* I can hear one on one of the choruses). I’m very proud of this one, and I don’t think you’ll hear music like it anywhere else.
(As Tilt says in the comments “Blake Jones is just the BEST – http://www.myspace.com/trikeshop Buy his music, make him rich: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/blakejones and http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bjtts “)
Tomorrow, comics.
Spotify Playlist for 27/07 – Scott Walker, Bach, Os Mutantes
A couple of things about today’s Spotify playlist. Firstly, I’m starting to lose track of what I’ve posted before, so if some tracks come up more than once, forgive me. I’m assuming no-one’s listening to *all* of these, anyway, just the ones that sound interesting to them.
The other thing is the notable lack of female artists. This is partly because my record collection is male-dominated, but also a lot of my favourite female performers (Carolyn Edwards and Joanna Newsom to name two) aren’t on Spotify yet. Anyone know of any really good female singers/songwriters I’d like?
Anyway, today’s playlist
Cossacks Are by Scott Walker is the opening song from his most recent (and to my mind best) album, The Drift. I have absolutely no idea what it’s about, but it sounds astonishing. Remember, this is someone who started his career in a boy band doing Four Seasons covers…
The Knife by Genesis is included after reading Gavin B’s post about it – it’s almost good enough to forgive them for Phil Collins.
Pale And Precious by The Dukes Of Stratosphear is XTC in their guise as a fake 60s psych band doing a perfect Beach Boys pastiche, while still managing to be a truly great song in its own right. Gorgeous stuff. Just listen to the “Don’t care what the others might say” section – it’s got *exactly* the same unexpected chord progression – and indeed the same distrust of other people in general and wish they’d disappear attached to an absolute adoration of one person in particular – that would happen in a Brian Wilson song at that point.
At this point, the playlist is a little proggy, so there’s a couple of simpler songs.
I’m Leaving It All Up To You by Don & Dewey is a song I found on a wonderful compilation called Frank Zappa’s Jukebox, which consists of stuff that Zappa listened to as a teenager, and so is a mixture of ‘difficult’ modern classical, skronking jazz and greasy blues and doo-wop. It’s an absolute treasure of a compilation.
Shakin’ All Over by Johnny Kidd & The Pirates is one of those records that was an absolutely massive hit in Britain in the early ’60s but almost no-one outside the UK knows. It’s a shame as it’s one of the great records of that period between Elvis getting drafted and the first Beatles record, which is generally regarded as a dead period in music but in fact produced people like Roy Orbison, Del Shannon and others who were far more influential than people now realise.
Movie Magg by Carl Perkins is a great record in its own right, but also a window into a time that seems a million years ago – this is a song about taking a girl to the cinema, but on the back of a horse. And recorded in the 1950s. The weird juxtaposition of the modern (the electrical kinematograph still seems modern to me, I am afraid) and what feels like the ancient, a song about a lost way of life that is still in the memory of many living, in a song that was a modern pop song at the time my Dad was born, seems very strange to me…
You Don’t Have To Walk In The Rain by The Turtles is from one of the very great overlooked albums of the 60s, Turtle Soup. This was the Turtles’ attempt to make their own Village Green Preservation Society and was produced by Ray Davies, and is a halfway house between the Kinks’ English pastoral and the Turtles’ California pop whose closest comparison is probably Odessey & Oracle. This was the single from the album, and the most conventional track on it, but I love the line “I look at your face/I love you anyway”.
Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball? by Buddy Johnson is for my wife, who’s spent most of the last few weeks watching rounders over the internet rather than talking to her long-suffering husband ;)
Opening Titles by Don Preston is another of Preston’s orchestral pieces. I’m becoming more and more convinced, the more I hear of Preston’s work, that he had the potential to be a true great had he not spent the last forty years in the shadow of his old boss. Shame.
The Prelude to the first Lute Suite in E Minor by Bach is just here because I like Bach’s lute pieces. So should you.
Lady Came From Baltimore by Scott Walker is as different from the opening track as you could get – a cover of a folk-pop song by Tim Hardin – but is still a lovely little track, overlooked in comparison to the darker stuff on Walker’s first few solo albums.
Arnaldo Said by the Wondermints is the only Wondermints track on Spotify at the moment, unfortunately. Weirdly, this is on an Os Mutantes tribute album, even though it’s a Wondermints original. But speaking of Mutantes…
Bat Macumba by Os Mutantes is my favourite track by Brazil’s greatest psychedelic band – not much of a song, but just listen to it as a *sound*, the way the totally different sonic environments are laid on each other…
Everyone Says I Love You by Janet Klein is a lovely little acoustic performance of the Marx Brothers song from Horse Feathers (and if I lent any of you my box set of Animal Crackers, Duck Soup, Horse Feathers and Monkey Business, could I have it back, please? I’ve completely forgotten who I lent it to…)
Wonderful/Song For Children by Rufus Wainwright is a stunning performance of the first half of the second movement of Smile, and shows that Smile wasn’t just a great record, but the songs were great songs. Wonderful, especially, deserves to be regarded as part of ‘the great American songbook’.
Send Me To The ‘Lectric Chair by Bessie Smith is another track by one of the all-time great blues singers, but to be honest I’ve included it for the horn playing.
And Over The Reef by Duncan Browne is a song I’m not even sure I like, but there’s something to it… it’s a very twee, folky thing which could smack of James Taylor, but there’s a sort of Incredible String Bandness about it that makes it work… I think… what do you think?
Anyway, I’m off til a week on Tuesday. Don’t turn this place into a tip while I’m gone…
Spotify Playlist – The Boy Can’t Dance
This week’s Spotify playlist is not particularly themed or anything, and in fact was put together in two chunks – before and after I lost my net access. So it’s more varied than most, although overall more downbeat than usual.
Little Hands by Skip Spence is a song I discovered in Robert Plant’s quite gorgeous cover version a few years ago. This song – and the album it comes from – sounds like the missing link between Arthur Lee and Syd Barret, and is an obvious influence on people like Robyn Hitchcock.
The Girl Can’t Dance by Bunker Hill is my very favourite Little Richard soundalike record (yes, even better than Larry Williams or Don & Dewey). Hill doesn’t have Richard’s camp or falsetto, but the performance here is absolutely rabid. Wonderful stuff…
Appropriately, Holly was earlier watching a documentary on the Russians sending dogs into space. I say appropriately because I’d already included Russian Satellite by Mighty Sparrow in the list – a calypso song about how “I am very sorry for the poor little puppy in the Russian satellite”.
America by Van Dyke Parks is an arrangement of God Save The Queen (yes, yes I know he’s doing it as My Country ‘Tis Of Thee, but it’s our national anthem, not theirs) that makes the horrible dirge actually listenable, using elements of Japanese tonality and orchestration, from an album all about connections between the US and Japan.
Shortenin’ Bread by The Ready Men is a track I first heard on the CD version of Pebbles Vol 4 (the vinyl version has a very different tracklist – both are essentials for lovers of surf music) – a version of the old song done in the style of Surfin’ Bird with a blistering Dick Dale style surf guitar solo. Sublime.
Sarah Lee by Esquerita is a good example of the man whose visual style Little Richard stole completely. Musically, though, he’s closer to the New Orleans strolling R&B of Fats Domino or someone of that type. This is actually an astonishingly sloppy record, but it manages to work.
Solar System by The Beach Boys is a classic from The Beach Boys Love You, an album that I always describe as sounding like “Tom Waits singing Jonathan Richman lyrics, over a background by Bach, played on a Moog set on fart sounds”. This one would make a perfect kids song, and I’m quite surprised it’s never been covered on one of those “Rock songs for kids” type albums like They Might Be Giants make. The middle eight of this is just lovely.
September Gurls by Big Star is unfortunately not the studio version, which isn’t on Spotify, but is a very decent full-band demo which sounds almost identical except for the harmonies. One of the best pop songs ever written.
Rolling Sea by Eliza Carthy is from Rogues Gallery, a compilation of songs about pirates and sea shantys put together by the great Hal Wilner. Anyone who likes good music should check out the compilation, which features everyone from Jarvis Cocker to Richard Thompson to Van Dyke Parks.
Red Wine Promises by Victoria Williams is from an album of cover versions of the songs of Carthy’s late aunt Lal Waterson. Waterson was always an underrated songwriter because her family were so well known as interpreters of traditional song, but some of her stuff is as good as any of the better known songwriters of the British folk movement, and it’s nice to see her getting some recognition, albeit posthumous.
Rain Stops Play by The Duckworth Lewis Method is from the duo’s eponymous album – an album of songs all about cricket, from Neil Hannon and someone I’ve never heard of before. I think the album tries a little too hard to be ‘arch’ and ‘eccentric’ for its own good – it’s the album of people who desperately want to be like Vivian Stanshall or Ivor Cutler, but aren’t, quite. But still, being like Stanshall or Cutler is a laudable aim, and everything on there’s listenable, but I do think this is the best track.
Once I Had A Sweetheart by Pentangle is a lovely little version of the traditional folk song by one of the most interesting bands of the 60s. Also one of the best examples of Jacqui McShee showing what she brought to the band – listen to the way she’s double-tracking herself in very different voices.
Hard Time Killing Floor Blues by Skip James is the second song by a Skip here, but I presume everyone knows this one. But sometimes things become classics for good reason…
The Cruel Sea Captain by Bryan Ferry is absolutely shocking, because you couldn’t imagine a vocal performance further from Do The Strand or In Every Dream Home A Heartache than this wispy, ancient-sounding croak. A really astonishing performance, that almost makes me forgive him for being a fox-hunting aristocrat-suckup Tory arsehole.
The first part of Deserts by Edgard Varese is Varese writing far more conventionally than he usually did – this could almost be Stravinsky or someone of that type – rather than his more extreme atonal electronic music. Zappa fans will note that this was clearly the *koff* ‘inspiration’ for Semi-Fraudulent/Direct From Hollywood Overture from 200 Motels, and indeed to modern ears this sounds like film music, but it was one of Varese’s last major works.
And to finish we have One Track Mind by The Knickerbockers. The Knickerbockers were a one-hit-wonder band in the US whose hit, Lies was such a perfect Beatles soundalike that many people still think it *was* the Beatles (and Holly was surprised just now when I told her they were American). But in fact they were jobbing musicians from New Jersey – Buddy Randell, the singer/saxophone player, had previously been in The Royal Teens (who had a novelty hit with Short Shorts) and their drummer later briefly replaced Bill Medley in The Righteous Brothers – who just managed to sound like whatever was on the radio. One Track Mind is probably a better record than Lies, because it’s less slavishly Beatlesque, though still with very Lennon-sounding vocals. I also like the segue between Varese and this…
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.
Spotify Superheroes
It’s been nearly two weeks since my last weekly playlist, hasn’t it? This needs to be rectified. Some of you may notice a slight theme throughout this week’s playlist…
Superman by R.E.M is a song that many, many people arriving at my blog through search engines are looking for. A cover of a 60s track by The Clique, this is a joyous bit of powerpop fun.
Wonder Woman by Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint is not, as Spotify thinks, by the Attractions, but is from the Costello/Toussaint/Impostors album The River In Reverse, an album they recorded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. This is an old Toussaint song from the 70s.
That’s Really Super, Supergirl by XTC is off what is possibly XTC’s most consistent album, Skylarking. Holly loved this one til she realised it really was about, as she put it, “Supergirl’s emo boyfriend”. I love it *because* of that…
“Batman” Theme by Neal Hefti is the 60s TV theme, in an arrangement that has an ocarina solo. Who could ask for more?
Sunshine Superman by Donovan is one of his better singles – a very enjoyable bit of pop-psychedelic 60s nonsense.
Sgt Rock Is Going To Help Me is our second XTC song, but given that they are both one of the best bands ever and bona-fide comic fans (Andy Partridge is a fan of Kubert and Ditko especially) it seems reasonable.
(Incidentally, one of my favourite facts from the About Time series, which I’ve read over the last couple of months, is that “Andrew Partridge of Swindon” was a runner-up in a 1968 ‘Design A Doctor Who Monster’ competition on Blue Peter. )
The Supreme Being Teaches Spider-Man How To Be In Love by The Flaming Lips is from the Spider-Man 3 soundtrack, though I don’t remember it from the film, and quite what Mohammed Ali has to do with anything I don’t know…
Boy Wonder by The Undertones is a classic bit of pop-punk from the late 70s. Annoyingly, Feargal Sharkey, the interestingly-named frontman of the band, went on first to record one of the most cloying, awful singles of the 80s (A Good Heart), and then to become an executive for ‘UK Music’ (the British equivalent of the RIAA). He was great as a teenager, though…
Superman by Benny Goodman is a surprisingly-raw sounding instrumental for the Goodman big band (Goodman usually saved the more dissonant stuff for the small groups). I don’t know any details of the recording, but that sounds very like Cootie Williams on trumpet, and he was only in Goodman’s band in 1940, after leaving Ellington, so we’ll say it’s from then.
Plastic Man by The Kinks is one of those attacks on The Businessman In His Suit And Tie that were so popular in the mid-60s, where rock stars attack people for daring to have jobs and live in suburbia. It’s a fun one though.
Barbara Allen by Lois Lane is a version of the old folk song by a Dutch band. Not my favourite version of the song, but a nice one.
Mr Sandman by The Chordettes is a song you all know. However it sounds stranger than you remember – those backing vocals almost sound sampled, a la I’m Not In Love/Star Me Kitten. Also, the Beach Boys fans among you could note that the ‘my children were raised’ section of Heroes & Villains was ripped off from it. The song definitely shows its age though in the line about “wavy hair like Liberace”…
1952 Vincent Black Lightning by Richard Thompson is a great song. And, well, Black Lightning’s a superhero.
Animal Man by Kim Fowley is as silly as you’d imagine.
And Wolverine Blues by Jelly Roll Morton is a great little track by the man who claimed to have invented jazz…
Spotify A Capella Playlist
It’s going to take me a little longer than I thought to get my thoughts together about Seaguy, so I’ll be posting about that and Cerebus Archive tomorrow, instead of today. In the meantime, here’s a Spotify playlist.
This one’s an a capella (almost entirely) collection, which happened by accident when I noticed the first couple of tracks I chose were already a capella, and I decided to go with it, and can be found here.
The Way I Feel Inside by The Zombies is a song I’ve been listening to over and over for the last few days – I picked up the Zombie Heaven box set after seeing them live and will be reviewing that soon (in brief my conclusion is that every original they did was astonishingly good, but the best Zombies album is still Blunstone’s first solo album, One Year). You might remember this from the funeral scene in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, one of the best uses of music in a film I’ve ever seen (I’ve not actually watched that film since I saw it in the cinema, but can remember huge chunks of it nonetheless). This shows what difference an arrangement can make to a song – there’s a demo version of this which is done in a Beatles-esque arrangement, and it does nothing for me at all, but this is great.
Old Molly Metcalfe by Jake Thackray is a gorgeous, beautiful pseudo-folk song, and the saddest thing that Jake ever wrote. Incidentally, Jennie, if you’re not a Jake fan already, you should listen to this. It’s the most Yorkshire song I’ve ever heard, and is also very obviously the basis for The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett.
I Hear Your Heart by Vocal Group Cosmos was Latvia’s entry into the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest. Despite that, it’s quite astonishingly good – pretty avant-garde and atonal in places, sounding just like Queen in others, and like a bad 90s boy band in yet others – all these styles mixing and merging in unpredictable ways. The bulk of the song unfortunately is generic boy-band, but the stuff surrounding that is just…weird.
Dido’s Lament by The Swingle Singers is a vocal-group-and-human-beatbox arrangement of the aria from Purcell’s Dido And Aeneas. Dido of course, as every Doctor Who fan knows, was really the Doctor’s companion Vicki, which means that this actually has something in common with Who’s Doctor Who? by Frazer Hines. Not much, but something…
God Only Knows (a capella mix) by The Beach Boys is a vocal-only mix (apart from some low instruments during the break) from the Pet Sounds Sessions box set. Carl Wilson takes the (double-tracked) lead vocals, while the backing vocals and the tag are Brian Wilson and Bruce Johnston (Brian taking the first and third lines on the tag, Bruce the second). Gorgeous.
Where Have All The Flowers Gone? by Pete Seeger is yet more evidence that actually the first people to do collagey, mix-and-matching of diverse influences were the folk singers. Practically nothing in this song is original to Seeger – the main text he took from an old Russian folk poem he found in a novel, just adding the ‘long time passing’ and ‘when will we ever learn?’ lines, while the melody is a traditional one – but it’s definitely Seeger’s song.
From Seeger we go to Black Betty by Leadbelly, Seeger’s friend and colleague. A medley of prison worksongs, this song gave hits to both Ram Jam (Black Betty) and Johnny Cash (I Got Stripes) – two more different records from the same source couldn’t be imagined.
Honest Work by Todd Rundgren is from his A Capella album, an album where all the ‘instrumental’ parts were Rundgren’s electronically-treated vocals. This one is one of the more traditional songs on the album.
Jesus Gave Me Water by The Five Blind Boys Of Mississippi (not to be confused with the more well-known Five Blind Boys Of Alabama) is a classic gospel song – I love the screamed “Yeeeaaah!”s.
One For The Boys by Brian Wilson is from his eponymous 1988 solo album, and has that 1988 sound to it, unfortunately, but it’s still a wonderful piece of vocal arrangement, and one of the best things on that album. It’s all multi-tracked Brian, except I think Andy Paley might be doing some of the low notes.
Country Life by The Watersons is from their classic For Pence And Spicy Ale album. The Waterson family are to English folk music what the Carters are to American country, and while Spotify unfortunately has almost no traditional English folk on there, it does have this album, which is as good an example of the form as any you’ll find.
Another Man Done Gone by Odetta is a wonderful track by a singer who is so horribly overlooked I had no idea until today that she died six months ago.
I’m Always Chasing Rainbows by The Four Freshmen is an example of what was called in the 50s ‘modern harmony’. While this stuff sounds odd or corny to our ears, as the style almost completely died out by the early 60s, it’s incredibly complex if you listen to the movement of the different parts, and this band in particular were a huge influence on Brian Wilson – the Beach Boys’ early attempts at harmony sounded almost like a tribute band.
Don’t Look Back by The Persuasions is a cover of the song Smokey Robinson wrote for the Temptations. This is from the 70s, but the Persuasions are one of the few a capella vocal groups still going – their tribute album to Frank Zappa in the 90s was particularly good.
Zilch by The Monkees is just an exercise in building up a sound from the cross-rhythmic repetition. Apparently one of the lines in this was sampled by Del Tha Funkee Homosapian, and caused a rumour that ‘mister Bob Dobalina’ was a SubGenius reference…
And finally Thomas Rhymer by Ewan Maccoll is some traditional Scottish folk to go with the traditional English folk from earlier. This song, about the supposed journey of 13th-century Scottish prophet Thomas Learmouth into the land of Faerie, was a huge influence on Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers (it’s quoted on the first page of issue zero). It’s also the source of the more recent Tam Lin ballad (itself also the other main source of Pratchett’s Wee Free Men, tying in nicely with Thackray’s song earlier).
Just a reminder for some people, incidentally – if you are in a country that says you can’t use Spotify, you can try the free software despotify client (which only supports the premium accounts, but imposes no geographic restrictions). It’s still so poorly-usable that even I, a free software supporter, choose to use the proprietary app and run it under WINE, but it’s definitely better than nothing…
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