Julee Cruise

And for no other reason other than that I can and it seems utterly appropriate after Beach House and that I can, here is Julee Cruise and some Twin Peaks music.

Song(s) of the Day # 639 Beach House

Back in the day kids any self-respecting band would release an album a year as a matter of course. Nowadays, groups who put out one every couple of years might be considered prolific. Perhaps time is slowing down. Or maybe we're all getting lazy.

Baltimore based duo Beach House buck the trend by releasing their second record of the year shortly. And it's magisterial. Not, I imagine the first time I've used that adjective on the blog. But it's fully appropriate here.

Beach House do the twirly, 'Here we are, we're here in this strange enormous universe. Isn't it odd?' thing that seems so prevalent of so much modern music. But they can also get much more immediate, as they do on second track here All Your Yeahs, which is underpinned by that steely Suicide synth sound that still sounds utterly fresh all these years later. Alternative anthems.

Really something special this record. Like many of the best albums, these songs sound like you've always known them while also remaining totally fresh. There's a dash of David Roback backed bands Opal and Mazzy Star as well as all that floaty, David Lynch soundtrack music of Julee Cruise and the like but singer Michelle Legrand has an uncanny knack of being at once remote and then suddenly quite immediate on alternate tracks which makes the record consistently interesting. I also imagine it's a grower, though I only heard it for the first time yesterday. Clearly another of the albums of the year hot on the heels of Deerhunter's Final Frontier, which is in some ways a slightly similar post from an alternate reality. Dream baby dream! 

, s

Betty Ringma and the CBGB Scene

with Patti

An incredible set of photos of Dutch artist Betty Ringma photographed with virtually all of the leading lights of the mid seventies New York, CBGBs scene. From here.

Talking Heads

Richard Hell & the Voidoids

The Ramones

The Dead Boys

The Dictators

Debbie Harry

October 19th 1944 Peter Tosh

Mix Tape Songs About Trains # 18 Robyn Hitchcock

Side 2 Track 4 2 mins 23 secs. Robyn Hitchcock sings about Basingstoke and Reading satellite towns to London, which to American ears may sound incredibly romantic, but I can assure you it's not.

Song of the Day # 638 Martin Courtney

Super melodic start to the new week from Real Estate member doing a solo thing. From an album on Domino Records. Out soon.

Songs About People # 90 Howard Hughes

And while I'm reposting, off to see Ride play tonight so here's another thing I wrote from a few months back.

Ride are an odd one. Their recent reforming and series of gigs has taken me back to the original records and made me think about them in a way I never bothered to first time round. Writing this blog might also have something to do with it. To me at the time, though I enjoyed the noise that they made, they seemed like a bunch of nice and slightly fey Home Counties boys with little to say and a vast array of effects pedals to help them disguise that truth with waves of sound.

Perhaps age had something to do with it. I was pushing my Mid-Twenties when they first emerged which was probably a few years north of their main constituency. The band themselves were nearer their early Twenties when they broke big and their core audience a few years younger than that. These few years meant a lot. I'd already given my heart to R.E.M., The Smiths and The Velvet Underground in the Mid-Eighties and had limited emotion to impart on a set of reticent middle-class introverts who seemed vaguely wet behind the ears even if I liked the tunes.

I'm probably more disposed to them strangely twenty years on. Just as Shoegazing, a scene which was at least partially ridiculed at the time by the British Music Press has gathered a measure of respect and even reverence it never had first time round in the years since. Now Ride seem vaguely like older statesman, partly because it seems apparent now that were they a British guitar band to emerge now with the set of songs that they released in their first few years together they would absolutely sweep all before them.

In retrospect it seems clear that Ride were one of the very last British bands to really arrive and proceed to let out an absolute avalanche of notable tracks during the course of their relatively short career. In the tradition first established by The Beatles, Stones, Who and Kinks and maintained by The Clash, The Jam and most obviously The Smiths, theirs was an incredible work ethic and sense of urgency despite the apparent lethargic edge to some of their recorded output. It seems inevitable given the way the music industry and the way we all live and consume in general  has changed in the intervening years that we may never see the like of these bands ever again in the UK. It feels like a shame somehow, as if a certain sense of popular, shared communal excitement and release has gone forever in exchange for the comparative mundanity and introversion of  settee, Internet and boxsets. 

Of course I'm aware that I'm a middle aged bloke spouting on! So back to Ride and one of the tracks released on the several excellent EPs they released over the course of their career. In this case in a supporting role to Twisterella, the second single from their second album Going Blank Again. Like so many of their songs, the vocal is vaguely nondescript, barely there in this case, but once the instrumentation kicks in, particularly the organ (Hammond I imagine), it makes a pretty strong case for itself. The connection with Howard Hughes? I guess they were feeling a little sorry for themselves. Even reclusive. Trust me, it happened quite a lot in the South of England during the early Nineties. 

Album Review # 37 Lloyd Cole & the Commotions - Rattlesnakes

A heartfelt review of a record from my youth. Written about a year ago...

This is pretty much a perfect record. There aren't that many in my collection. I've got a great deal of history with it as do a lot of people of my age and background. My own copy is worn and approaching a stage of vague decrepitude as I am myself and jumps irretrievably on occasion like my own slightly irregular heart but I'm reluctant to replace the copy I bought on its release in 1984 just yet, because it's seen me through more than half of my given span and I'll  be listening through to it, whether this copy or another, 'til that span expires, whenever that is. Because, perhaps more than any other album it speaks of the emotions and experience I was going through while first listening to it.

A good friend of mine, who follows this blog, said something along the lines that it was amongst the best records ever made by a minor league artist. I'd agree with that. Cole himself has I imagine seldom reached these heights since, (though he still puts out very good stuff and is excellent live by all accounts). I guess he knows the truth of this very well. It was an album and a statement he could never possibly trump because it was so much of its time. It defined forever a moment, an age of life and a perspective on it better than almost any record I know

I bought it at the time when my life was changing, more quite than it has ever done, before or since. I was eighteen, finishing off my A Levels and thinking about university. I knew very little idea about relationships, the opposite sex or pretty much the world. Records coming out at the time like Rattlesnakes, Murmur, High Land, Hard Rain and The Smiths were the stuff I constructed my identity around along with books, films and politics they referenced and drew on. I could make a list but I wouldn't want to bore you. It was stuff to aspire to and identify with, to construct yourself around in terms of the things you wore and I bought into it. I was far from alone.

Cole suffered slightly at the time from being bracketed with R.E.M, The Smiths, Aztec Camera and also Prefab Sprout who were coming at things from a similar angle. He seemed a minor talent by comparison as perhaps in retrospect he has proved. But it was a perfectly formed minor talent. He also meant a lot to quite a lot of people. I imagine many of those who fell for this record, what he was saying and the way he was saying it have never entirely grown out of it. I haven't.

Fast forward a couple of years from the record's purchase to the Summer term of my first year at University. There's a girl there that I'm falling for and something is starting to happen with. It's a university disco. She lives on campus and I'm at residences a few miles away. It's coming to the end of the night and I have to get on the pre-arranged minibus with the others who stay there. Perfect Skin comes on. We close dance to it, an odd song to close dance to, it's more of a giddy jig really. I go get the bus without a kiss but she's taking me over. We start going out together shortly afterwards, do so for the next four years. I fall completely in love with her. There's talk of marriage but with one thing and another it doesn't happen. Lloyd and the Commotions were there at the start of it all. I'll never hear Perfect Skin without being transported back to that brief pocket of time as it all began. She had a teddy bear called Bloomingdale and eyes like sin. She went into journalism. Wrote something for The Face. But not Cosmopolitan.

Back from myself to the record itself. All in all it's a flawlessly constructed album; track-listing, arrangements, lyrics, length. Nothing outstays its welcome. It's tasteful. Refined. It speaks of an ingrained love of all things America. Lloyd half sings half speaks in immaculately assembled American Beat prose hip-speak throughout. He and the band's sound yearns for the open road and also New York in particular in all its Sixties glory. America as dreamed of in youth spent in Buxton, Derbyshire and nailed into achievable reality as a university student, meeting and mixing with the right people, soaking up the sights and sounds of Glasgow, a city forever in thrall to the States. It's no great wonder that Lloyd ended up moving there permanently himself. Rattlesnakes is chock full of namedrops. Eve Marie-Saint, Greta Garbo, Leonard Cohen, Simone De Beauvoir, Grace Kelly, Norman Mailer, Arthur Lee, Truman Capote. The kind of people and culture that you were gobbling up at this point of life, so desperate to impress, with the youth to get away with it sometimes but without the raw and real experience or knowhow to really back it up. It's a life learned, soaked up through books, films and music.

But there's pain there too. It's marrying these books, films and this music against the intense, brief, rites of passage experience you were actually going through. About wasting  precious time as he says himself at one point. It's about first and failed relationships. The ones that hurt the most. It's about trying to understand women that are impossibly attractive, elusive and unobtainable, or even if they are obtained, the moment of possession is sure to be only fleeting. Because you're only twenty one once. It's about being flippant and eager to impress with surface cool and charm whilst all along underneath beats a desperate, yearning heart. 

The playing is remarkably tight. I'd pick out Neil Clark the lead guitar but the whole band are hugely adept. Because really they're grounded in Soul. They know their Stax and incredibly they pull off a truly astonishing approximation of its gleam, spark and sheer discipline. And it's in this understanding of the essence of great Sixties American music, not just Dylan and The Velvet Underground but The Temptations, Staple Singers, Aretha and Booker T & the MGs that's the foundation of the record's success. They have the chops. Three of the band were in a Soul group before the Commotions formed. They made a point of playing with vintage equipment and using basic recording techniques rather than letting Eighties sounds and effects leak into the mix. These are some of the reasons the record has lasted.

There are five songs on either side of the album and they all fit as snug as can be. There's not a note too many, a line that doesn't work or a hook too laboured. They can speed it up and slow it down. It's funny and smart and touching by turns. It's a record of ten potential 45s. Lloyd is centre stage of course. The band took his name and it's his artfully constructed self that defines the record. Observant, wry, cynical, but really you suspect beneath the veneer, bruised and hurting.

The band had their brief moment in the sun. The record was feted and they had chart and critical success. They made follow up records, some of which recaptured the glory, most of which in retrospect didn't. Because they'd already made their statement. I played second record Easy Pieces a lot when it came out as it was part of the soundtrack to the great romance I talked of earlier which I was busy experiencing.  I'd recommend a few songs from it that would fit right in on Rattlesnakes, Why I Love Country Music, Pretty Gone, Grace. Some of it doesn't work though. It tries too hard. Or else not enough. I didn't bother with the third. The band seemed to care less themselves by this point and split shortly thereafter. They'd run their course. They split shortly before the relationship of mine which they'd played their small part in did.

This is over thirty years ago. Lloyd is back. His latest album got his best reviews in years and his songwriting has aged gracefully. He has a silver flock of hair, barely receded from where it sat in its prime. He's not trying to be twenty, hasn't lost his looks  and the man could certainly always write a lyric. He still can. He's always asked about Rattlesnakes of course and answers patiently and honestly. He seems like a good bloke though he still seems to find it hard to suffer fools. But he knows his place in the scheme of things.

So listen to his and his band's first record if you don't know it already. It's forever somewhere amongst my Top Thirty. It always makes me slightly lovelorn and nostalgic, for obvious reasons. I haven't gone into the songs individually here because they speak for themselves and are of a piece. I'd be here forever if I did but it would be all description and not enough feeling. Like I said it speaks for itself. A perfectly assembled row of books on a bookshelf. It's a record which within the dimensions and parameters it constructs for itself, frankly could not be bettered.

There it is. Always sitting there silently in the assembled ranks of albums stacked in boxes on my living room floor demanding to be played again. And again. From the first song, 'When she smiles my way. My eyes go out in vain,' to the last, 'Are you ready to be heartbroken.'  I decided at the end of my first Lloyd Cole & the Commotions phase and the end of that relationship that I wasn't ready. I've learned since that the heart always finds a way to miraculously mend itself, work once more and need to love again. Meanwhile, Rattlesnakes plays on in the background. Never changing because it doesn't need to. It will outlast Lloyd. And me.

101 Favourite Albums

Reposting this because I can. From this April.I have all of these in vinyl form. Would stand by most of these though. Have popped in Nevermind for Tim Buckley's Hello & Goodbye which I've decided is a slightly flawed record. Still hoping to own Blue Afternoon which would make the list one day.

In no particular order. Though the best are naturally shuffled to the top in the order that I thought of them. The criteria became one artist, one record. They also had to be vinyl I own. And not any objective account of the best records ever made. Most of this is filtered by my own experience and memories.Just a personal judgement at this point in time. Top 5 will probably always stay pretty much the same.

1. R.E.M. - Murmur

2. Television - Marquee Moon

3. Marvin Gaye - What's Going On

4. Miles Davis - Kind Of Blue

5. Van Morrison - Astral Weeks

6. Love - Forever Changes

7. Patti Smith - Horses

8. The Smiths - Meat is Murder

9. Sly & the Family Stone - There's a Riot Goin' On

10. The Clash - London Calling

11. The Beatles - Abbey Road

12. Talking Heads - Fear of Music

13. The Specials - The Specials

14. The Velvet Underground - Live '69

15. Pere Ubu - The Modern Dance

16. Gang of Four - Entertainment

17. Massive Attack - Blue Lines

18. The Byrds - The Notorious Byrds Brothers 

19. Dexys Midnight Runners - Searching For the Young Soul Rebels

20. Can - Tago Mago

21. Steely Dan - Pretzel Logic

22. The Ramones - Leave Home

23. The Modern Lovers - The Modern Lovers

24. Gram Parsons - Return of the Grievous Angel

25. Big Star - Record # 1

26 Husker Du - Zen Arcade

27. The Triffids - Born Sandy Devotional

28  David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars

29. Iggy & the Stooges - Raw Power

30. Elvis Costello & the Attractions - Armed Forces

31. The Cowboy Junkies - The Trinity Sessions

32. Frank Sinatra - Cycles

33. The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers

34. Echo & the Bunnymen - Heaven Up Here

35. The B52s - The B52s

36. The Go-Betweens - Spring Hill Fair

37. Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation

38. The Violent Femmes - The Violent Femmes

39. The Pogues - Rum, Sodomy & the Lash

40. Misty & Roots - Live at the Eurovision 1979

41. Bob Dylan - Blonde on Blonde

42. Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band - Safe as Milk

43. Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure

44. Aztec Camera - High Land, Hard Rain

45. Otis Redding - Otis Blue

46. Gil Scott Heron - Reflections

47. The Slits - The Cut

48. Prefab Sprout - Steve McQueen

49. Os Mutantes - Os Mutantes

50. The MC5 - Back in the USA

51. Magazine - Real Life

52. Grace Jones - Nightclubbing

53. Courtney Barnett - Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit

54. Pixies - Surfer Rosa

55. The Gun Cub - Fire of Love

56. Lloyd Cole & the Commotions - Rattlesnakes

57. The Kinks - Are the Village Green Preservation Society

58. Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures

59. Bobbie Gentry - Touch 'Em With Love

60 The Doors - LA Woman

61. Aretha Franklin - I Never Loved a Man

62.Dusty Springfield - Dusty in Memphis

63. Japan - Tin Drum

64. The Who - The Who Sell Out

65. Adrian Crowley - Some Blue Morning

66. Dr. John - The Night Tripper

67. Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin I

68. Sparks - Kimono My House

69. Phosphorescent - Muchacho

70. Nico - Chelsea Girls

71. The Bhundu Boys - Shabini

72. Public Enemy - Fear of a Black Planet

73. The Cramps - Psychedelic Jungle

74. Funkadelic - Maggot Brain

75. The Undertones - The Sin of Pride

76. The Everly Brothers - Roots

77. The Feelies - Crazy Rhythms

78. Brian Eno - Here Come the Warm Jets

79. Fairport Convention - Unhalfbricking

80. The Teardrop Explodes - Wilder

81. Curtis Mayfield - Curtis

82. Procol Harum - A Salty Dog

83. Pulp - Different Class

84. Al Green - I'm Still in Love With You

85. A Tribe Called Quest - Peoples Instinctive Travels & the Paths of Rhythm

86. The New York Dolls - The New York Dolls

87. The Human League - Dare

88. The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Electric Ladyland

89. Scott Walker - III

90. Mazzy Star - She Hangs Brightly

91. Fela Kuti & the Africa Express- Sorrow, Tears & Blood

92. Kraftwerk - Trans Europe Express

93. The Auteurs - New Wave

94. Nirvana - Nevermind

95. Buzzcocks - Love Bites

96. Suicide - Suicide

97. Toots & the Maytals - Funky Kingston

98. Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

99. Kate Bush - The Kick Inside

100. Prince & the Revolution - Sign of the Times

101. The Thelonius Monk Quartet - Monk's Dream

Songs Heard on the Radio # 89 David Bowie

For many reasons. But most of all this morning for that searing guitar solo that runs throughout the fade out of the song.

Mix Tape Songs About Trains # 17 Crosby, Stills & Nash

Side 2 Track 3 2 mins 40 seconds. So of its time.

18th October 1926 Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry. 89 today.

Album Review # 45 Deerhunter - Fading Frontier

I don't generally buy albums on or around their day of their release nowadays. Hey, we're all getting on. But something about Deerhunter's recent activity had piqued my interest and convinced me that this was worth owning so I dutifully trooped my way down to my local record store yesterday morning. It had come out the previous day.

I was right. It's a bit of an event. A record on 4AD, the most graceful of all record labels, with a cut out sleeve featuring a glossy shot of the ocean. An album that will doubtless feature high on the end of year polls that are probably in the process of being written as we speak. Christmas comes earlier every year. There definitely sounds like there's something going on here that's worthy of attention.

It's a pop album though not of the standard sort and a shimmering one. Whereas previous Deerhunter records have been much more conventionally underpinned by guitars, this one seems awash with a queasy synth sound that maintains its buoyancy throughout. It's not long, less than forty minutes, it comes and say its thing and then its gone and you're pretty tempted to just turn it over to the first side and listen to it again. As I'm in the process of reviewing it that's what I'll do.

It's a musing on mortality, the quite incredible fact that we're alive which we're inevitably confronted with every day from the moment we wake to the moment we retire to bed again. In some ways it sounds middle aged, which suits me, as that's what I am, but lead singer and clearly guiding star of the album, Bradford Cox is only thirty three. But he's just experienced a near death experience having survived being run over a while back which has clearly led him to confront the awkward fact of his own existence. And then confront it again. In fact again and again for the course of the whole album. It's that dreaded thing. A concept record.

'I'm living my life. I'm living my life...' he intones repeatedly in the album's second track, not coincidentally entitled Living My Life. 'Will you tell me when you find out. How to conquer all this fear,' 'The amber waves of grain. Are turning grey again.' There are Deerhunter, caught in the  enormous eternity of an American landscape, (this last quote is lifted from the great patriotic poem 'America the Beautiful'), making their seventh studio album, certainly middle aged in band terms. And not quite happy with the state of things.

Fading Frontier is a constant musing on mortality. A record between life and death and a slightly disquieting  album to listen to as a result, 'Between the stars that are slowly dying,' 'wave bye bye,' and so on. Snippets of lyrics jump out at you as it spins its merry way onwards.It seems like it's a conscious attempt at a big artistic statement and Cox has pared his writing style down to the very basics in order to make it.

Not all of it is available on YouTube yet. But the three songs I've posted here give a fairly good impression of what it's about. Cox has elsewhere written an influence map of things that inspired its gestation and while he picks plenty of leftfield and plain odd selections, Pharoah Sanders and Japanese ceramics and so on, INXS and Tom Petty are also listed there.

It's apparent why they are although Final Frontier is not going to rush and make me listen to Need You Tonight. But the album is awash with what sound to me like eighties production values. I was reminded of Psychedelic Furs and their big glossy pop record Mirror Moves at points. On Snakeskin, just into the second side Iggy Pop and David Bowie are the more immediate touchstones and we find ourselves in the mid seventies rather than that later decade. It's an incredible funk moment and it's probably only Cox's resolutely ungainly presence in the promo video that will prevent it from being the huge commercial breakthrough moment for the band it clearly should be.

Elsewhere, the record is full of electronic noise, like static on the line, which reminds the listener that we are in fact in 2015 and all of these moments obscure and otherwise of pop history are just that. Becoming ancient memories at that. Thirty years and counting. As Rock and Roll becomes older and older still it will have to take stranger journeys to recover and maintain its vitality. Deerhunter are embarked on their own and they're doing a great job of it and setting a fine example that very few are following. Make a point of hearing this record.

Song of the Day # 637 Mariah

A just re-released album from 1983. Read the backstory here. Very much in the same vein as David Byrne and Brian Eno's Life in The Bush of Ghosts.

Songs About People # 136 Bruce Lee

Sometimes only a bit of late seventies Post Punk will hit the spot. Bristol based The Glaxo Babies from their 1979 EP This is Your Life. Great gong sound at the end of the track. Great song leading up to it.

Covers # 28 Aztec Camera

Aztec Camera's take on Blue Orchids marvelous 'hit in an alternative universe' Bad Education. Roddy Frame, with his innate gift for melody tidies up the original where Martin Bramah's rendering of it is almost atonal and it comes across as less caustic and angry. However, Frame probably understood where the song was coming from having been famously keen himself to leave school and enter the 'real' world.

Mix Tape Songs About Trains # 16 Tom Waits

Side 2 Track 2 3 mins 53 secs. A just wonderful lyric.

Jazz # 2 Don Cherry

B Sides # 43 Blur

From the 12 inch on Popscene, the band's fourth single. Has that weird psychedelic edge that they shed as they headed towards Parklife and convinced themselves that they were actually cockneys and not in fact from Colchester.

Song of the Day # 636 Chastity Belt

.

This is from a couple of years back but time has not withered it/ Wondrous!

Mix Tape About Trains # 15 The Seekers

Side 2 Track 1 2 mins 33 secs. The Seekers, more than anything else, is the music of my childhood. Subsequently I go rather mushy every time I hear them no matter how many years later.

Song of the Day # 635 Holly Golightly

From her latest album Slowtown Now!

B Sides # 42 Pulp

 

An interesting slice of history. The song itself melodically is pretty much as lazy a rewrite of Common People as it's possible to imagine. Perhaps it was deliberate. But the lyrics are something else. A wonderful reminder of that cynical time when New Labour under Tony Blair had just taken office and were desperately courting pop stars in order to give them some cache with youth and the music industry pitched in with full and slightly vile abandon. B side to A Little Soul.

Mix Tape About Trains # 14 The Impressions

Side 1 Track 14 2 mins 38 secs.

Song(s) of the Day # 634 Moose

The early nineties London based, 'Shoegazing' scene has had a surprisingly notable legacy. You can hear its influence everywhere now, strange given that it was pretty much mocked at the time as the product of a ragbag of uncharismatic and often indistinguishable musicians who hid in shyness behind long fringes and covered over their lack of songwriting skills with swathes of guitar pedal effects.

Moose were one of the lesser remembered bands from this scene who I was vaguely interested in at the time without actually investing in the records. Fronted by two former employees of London Tape and Record Exchange shops, establishments that music obsessives from that time would remember as being staffed by slightly surly and definitely superior shop assistants.

Moose had something of this air about them. They knew their music too, a sure sign of people who'd spent their apprenticeship plotting in just such an environment. Here are some songs from their early EPs which got some attention from the music press without quite garnering enough sales to make the actual charts. They're products of their time. You can tell that the band probably favour black clothing. The vocals are that particular under the breath, muttered, throwaway delivery, so common at the time,  that owe a clear debt to The Jesus & Mary Chain and beyond that The Velvet Underground. The swathes of guitar sounds are more interesting and evocative. Suzanne even has a pinch of genuine drama about it. The band's other records are also worth cupping an ear to.

Covers # 28 Rocket from The Tombs

One of the more interesting comeback turns in the offing at the minute is Rocket From The Tombs. Fronted by David Thomas as ever, with to my knowledge, original member Craig Bell also involved and augmented by the mighty Richard Lloyd from prime time Television. Here they are covering The Sonics' wondrous classic Strychnine.

13th October 1979 The Police

Came out today 36 years back. And I bought it shortly thereafter. One of my earliest albums.

Songs Heard on the Radio # 88 LoneLady

I know nothing of LoneLady. Perhaps I should!

Instrumentals # 40 The Ventures

From a Ventures record called Super Psychedelic which I bought today. 'Far Out!' might not be an unreasonable response.

Mix Tape About Trains # 13 Simon & Garfunkel

Side 1 Track 13 2 mins 30 secs. One for the platform. Apparently born on a scrap of paper when Simon was at Widnes Railway Station on tour in 1964.

Song of the Day # 633 Meilyr Jones

Former Race Horses, (no, me neither) singer goes solo. I think this is his second single. That's all I can tell you though I would hazard a guess that he may be Welsh.

Things Found on my Local's Jukebox # 85 Nirvana

I enjoyed this tonight. I imagine you might enjoy it too. Kurt and the rest of the band take you places!

Mix Tape About Trains # 12 The Triffids

Side 1 Track 12 3 mins 38 secs. Beautifully strange song from 1984's Treeless Plain. Posted recently but hey, it's a good song!

Song(s) of the Day # 632 Mercury Rev

As a music fan in the eighties and nineties you did what the weekly papers told you to do. As a result in 1991 I found myself trooping out to buy a copy of Mercury Rev's debut album Yerself is Steam which was being raved about by all and sundry. In blue vinyl. It's hardly been among my most played records since but I gave it a spin last night and was rewarded. In opening song Chasing a Bee the band sing about attempting to do just so by trapping the poor thing in a jar. It's a good a description of their sound as any. I care less for the records I've heard of theirs since but will be returning soon to this strange, particular album.

Covers # 27 Courtney Barnett

It's been a while since I posted any Courtney. Here's her cover of Rowland S. Howard's song for The Boys Next Door. Before The Birthday Party became The Birthday Party.

Songs Heard on the Radio # 87 The Stooges

The Stooges on early evening radio no doubt in tribute to saxophonist Steve McKay who's just passed. Another Stooge down! Hear him blow!

Carey Lander

Carey Lander, keyboardist and vocalist with Camera Obscura has just died in her early thirties after a long struggle with cancer. Here's one of the bands many lovely songs, at least partially a response to Lloyd Cole & the Commotions Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken.

Covers # 26 Lush

Both Lush and Vashti Bunyan are on my mind at the moment. Lush, I'd say one of the more underrated groups of the nineties have recently reformed and will be playing gigs soon. Meanwhile I've been enraptured by Bunyan's 1970 album of late, have placed an order for a vinyl copy and will be reviewing it soon. In the meantime, here's Lush doing Vashti!

Mix Tape About Trains # 11 Gladys Knight & The Pips

Side 1 Track 11 3 mins 13 secs. Oh yes! Genuine 'woo woos' here.

Song of the Day # 631 Atlas Sound

With a new Deerhunter album imminent, I'm revisiting something from leader Bradford Cox's solo project and their album from 2011. A particular talent.

Things Found on my Local's Jukebox # 84 The Jungle Book

And from that to this. Sounds good in a quiet pub on a Sunday afternoon.

Vinyl Purchases # 22 Phil Harris

October 10th 2015 The Inkwell, York £1.00. The best of Phil Harris. A very enjoyable saunter back round York again on a Saturday. Breakfast at Betty's Tea Rooms. A wander round the walls and through the park. A couple of pints in a pub called The Lamb & Lion where they played The Velvet Underground, Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, Television and Buffalo Springfield and then a visit to a fine record shop, a true labour of love that I've written about on here before. The Inkwell, on Gillygate, where they had an instore DJ playing Gregory Porter and Baby Huey, at least when I was in there. What more could you ask for!

I chanced upon a 'Best of' Phil Harris, quite unmistakably the voice of Baloo from The Jungle Book although I personally wondered aloud whether he was King Louie, the propietor corrected me. Louie Prima  of course. Harris meanwhile, a maker of novelty records among other things but there's nothing remotely wrong with that. Pretty good ones judging by this best of. Always going to be great to hear Baloo's voice coming out of my record player. And it cost a pound. A pound!

Mix Tape Songs about Trains # 9 Pete Atkin

Side 1 Track 9 - 2 mins 52 secs. A nicely crafted, if ever so slightly voyeuristic song, lyrics by critic and writer Clive James, about eyeing up the girl sitting opposite you in a railway carriage as she reads Paul Verlaine.

Song(s) of the Day # 630 Evie Sands

Fittingly, a week in the blog which has focused largely on distinctive, female vocalists from Sibylle Baier, through Binky Shapiro, Vashti Bunyan, Jane Weaver and Nico we end up wending our way to Evie Sands. Singer and songwriter. Just what the ultimate music obsessive is always looking for. A soulful, brassy, lived in voice. A beautiful, incredibly expressive face. And kudos. For uncovering something a little bit more obscure. A cult.

I count myself among this number of incurable obsessives of course and point to the existence and archive of this blog as testimony of my right to be part of this club. We spend half of our lives searching through stacks of records in dusty shops,hoping to chance upon the likes of this. Not following the well trodden path with Dusty Springfield, Janis Joplin or Grace Slick. Great though they all are, they're ultimately just too well known and mainstream for us, we're really looking for something hidden from sight. We're all really looking to chance upon someone like Evie Sands.

 Evie's probably best known originally for Take Me For a Little While, a classic slice of early sixties girl band sound. Then there's the song posted above, I Can't Let Go, from 1965 which inexcusably was not the huge national hit it surely should have been. The Hollies had success with it a while later but their version is not a patch on hers. Sands had a long running career association with mighty American songwriter and producer Chip Taylor and between them they produced a series of beautiful and timeless recording in the sixties and early seventies.

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Leading to this, in 1969 which is surely her pop masterpiece. Another of Taylor's songs, much covered, originally by The Troggs, but also by the Liverpool Five and American Breed, but this is the version the world was waiting to hear. #53 in the American Billboard chart that year but a much more significant and slow burning local hit. And a classic.

Rediscovered in the early nineties by a bunch of British music obsessives. I wasn't aware of her until last night when Bobby Gillespie, the ultimate Rock and Roll librarian led me here with his online recommendation. Bobby knows! Evie's  records are pure drops of sixties and seventies perfection and as good a way as any for a lazy Sunday morning to kick in. 

B Sides # 41 Terry Jacks

This is not in all seriousness. Of course it's atrocious. B Side to another gloom-fest. Jacks smash hit Seasons in the Sun. But this is a treasured memory from youth when you'd play each and every b side endlessly and goes out to my big brother who brought it back to my attention a while back.

Mix Tape About Trains # 8 Nico

Side 1 Track 8 3 mins 20 secs. One of Dylan's most covered songs. But this is surely the version.

Song(s) of the Day # 629 Jane Weaver

Saw Jane Weaver and  her band play Newcastle last night. I have to say I was slightly disappointed. Perhaps my thoughts were slightly elsewhere, the band had some problems with their set up and there were times when I almost felt transported back to 1975, which is not altogether my favourite year musically such were the Hippie vibes. In any case it didn't quite get across the other-wordly glory of her latest record The Silver Globe which I'm much in thrall to at the moment and will write more of in due time. Here are just two moments from that fine album.