Song of the Day # 93 - Cornershop

 

'Ice cream is running down the cone...'

 

Pop Music, Rock and Roll, whatever you want to call it, has always provided a haven for maverick, oddball eccentrics. In fact, for the most part the essential fabric of it has traditionally been made up by a collection of those types, the ordinary seems somehow out of place, almost objectionable there. Off the top of my head, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Gene Vincent, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Pete Townshend, Sun Ra, Ray Davies, Sly Stone, Arthur Lee, Syd Barrett, Roky Ericson, Lou Reed, Nico, Iggy Pop, Tim Buckley, Nick Drake, Jonathan Richman, David Bowie, George Clinton, Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, Vic Godard, Edwyn Collins, Mark E. Smith, Kevin Rowland, Morrissey. This is a list that could go on and on but seems to get slightly thinner as you get to the here and now. But you do have some current exponents. Like Cornershop's Tjinder Singh, and even he's starting to get on a bit.

 

 

 

 I'm sorry to pick on them, but who really needs Coldplay when you have fridges, pipes, sinks and cars to provide that mechanistic normality by which the rest of the world works. Cornershop could never really be a consumer durable. If they were a machine they wouldn't work properly. As a pop band they work perfectly even if most of the general public still haven't noticed them apart from their one wonderful Number 1 hit. Here's only one example of their greatness. From reasonably recent album Judy Sucks a Lemon for Breakfast (perhaps on reflection there's a reason why more people plump for Coldplay though it's still a pity). I'll need to write more about them at some point.