Every line is a short story. A realised dream. The best night out of your sad unfulfilled existence. Ot mine for that matter I don't mean to be cruel. But Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars makes life sound unbelievably exciting. There aren't very many albums twhere every single line is impossibly thick with possibility. Spin it and weep !
Val Doonican. Where to start with Val Doonican. Saturday nights growing up in the late Seventies is one place to start. Val had a show oo BBC One on Saturday evenings. Mid evening. Not going out and hanging on street corners like the cool kids in your class. Not where the action was. A Stranglers concert somewhere. Out in the night....
Val in his comfy sweater and hus comfy slippers on his comfy rocking chair. Everything was comfy and safe. Val, Vickty and Lavinia his dreamy backing vocalists swaying over his shoulder. Somehow it all felt like the saddest thing on earth. Now of course you'd do anything to get back there. Two Streets is as wholesome as you could possibly want.
Arlo Parks puzzles me. She seems unwilling to nail her colours to the mast three albums in. Ambiguous Desire is neither here nor there. 'I kind of wish I wasn't me' she wonders at a certain point/ ' Whyever would you feel like that Arlo? Life is good and you have a record deal. She seems caught between the heaven and the deep blue sea.. Alright, but surely there's more to life than embracing the bland. This is a hymn to the colour beige
'I don't want to lose this good thing. That I've got.'
I brought a record the other day. Listened to it. I'm listening to it again now. I'm in a good moment in life at the moment. I have space. I can really listen to records and that's what I try to do most days. Really listen to them. Try to enter into the spirit and times they were made in. Appreciate the craft. Today's Song(s) of the Day is a prime example of the value of taking time out of your day to make an effort to do that,
Eddie Floyd is primarily remembered now as a mid ranking Sixties Soul journeyman. He put out a number of albums, a clutch of singles on Stax Records. He hit one big bullseye. Knock On Wood. I've got his debut album which bears the same name and was recorded in sessions take took place between July and December 1966. Perhaps you prefer to listen and wonder at Revolver or Pet Sounds. They're incredible. No criticism intended of either. But sometimes I like to sit down and listen and think. And try to write about something like this.
Floyd had the Stax house band Booker T & The MGs playing and writing with him on the record. Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Booker T Jones, Al Jackson Jr . It has Isaac Hayes on piano. We're talking the elite here. A band and set of musicians who played on any number of the best known Soul and Rock and Roll records ever made. They're no mere backing band. They punctuate the records they appear on. Ingest them with heart and poetry as well as backbone. Such is the case here.
The singer provides the narrative. Floyd is no Otis. no Aretha. But the songs and his vocals provide storylines that you don't require a PhD or a streak of genius to follow and appreciate. On Knock on Wood you get songs that anyone who ever had a heart. Had it broken, or broke someone else's or made up the peace and kept soldiering on. Working on the seam. Anyone with ears can read or relate to this.
Over the course of the album you get; I can't believe you're stepping out with me. I can't believe my luck. But I don't plan to take this for granted. We're all working at a seam. On the mystery of love.. And that's just in Knock On Wood itself. Elsewhere Eddie and the boys work on related seams in the goldmines of love, pain, desire and heartbreak. They keep things simple. If you want something more showy there are plenty of Sting records for you to listen to. This by contrast is simplicity itself. .But if it was that simple everybody would do it. That's enough from me. Track down the record and try to work it out for yourself. This is a universal language. The best kind ever invented
I immediately warm to Maya Hawke's latest album MAITREA CORSO as soon as I perch my headphones over my head and sail into opening track Love of My Life.Maybe I'm in a good mood but she's good company with her soothing approach to the curveballs mid Twenties living throw at the sensitive.
Maya parents are Ethan Hawke and Una Thurman and you've got two options. Either to hold her good fortune against her or concede she may have had experiences you're not entirely familiar and cup an ear to try to discern what they might be. I'd like the record regardless of knowledge of her lineage.
MAITREA CORSO is warm and endearing and unexpected from the off . I could make a lot of comparisons to other female artists working in the same neck of the woods but it would be lazy. It's funny, sharp and constantly surprising.
A ghastly cover. Like one if those appalling Seventies Pop Art images where everybody thought they were the spawn of Salvador Dali. I liked it as a teenager. But I'm not a teenager anymore. The record's a bit meh! Just my taste. Nit particularly Deep purple. Fans of the Oh Sees form an orderly queue.
An album that takes me back, The years fall away and I'm eight years old . It's yesrerday once more. One of seven again. In a large house in Nottingham called Private Road. A little boy in short trousers with a proud head of curly hair. Two older brothers. Two sisters. One older . One younger sister. A mum and dad. Struggling with money and a new life. But all very happy together. In the Seventies. One of the strangest but most wonderful decades of all.
We were just back from Zimbabwe. Where we'd returned from in 1972. Adjusting to a different climate and a different world. My mother retraining as a Social Worker. My father had a job with Boots. One of the most prominent employers in Nottingham. Dad travelled off to Eastern Europe every few months. Trialling Nurofen behind the Iron Curtain.
Enough of my Family. Back to Family. They came from neighbouring Leicester. Where my father had been born in 1934. But had long since decamped to London where they were surrounded by glamorous women and dressed in gowns, beads and saffron. Patchouli oil and incense sticks. They were much feted. The next big thing
Their first album was produced by Dave Mason of Traffic who has recently passed. Jimmy Miller was also in the mix. The record was called The Doll's House which reputedly led The Beatles to change the name from the same name to The Beatles (yeah, The White Album).
The Doll's House is a staggering, evocative album . Like so many of its time. It's a world that's effectively gone now. But AI and The Internet can recover and carry you back apparently, This effectively is the very reasin I started thus blog 13 years and counting back. And why I continue working in the seam. So let's put Bandstand on and spin back in time.
It's their sixth album, bands worked hard back in those days and this one came out in 1972. The exact year the seven of us departed Africa and arrived in England. The original sleeve was a Die-Cut in the shape of a Bush TV22 screen. Family are going straight. Or as straight as they can. Utilising more conventional song structures and arrangements. Wistful sentiments and stylings.
Vocalist Roger Chapman is the only Family constant. This is John Wetton's last album with the band. He's off to King Crimson. But first there's My Friend The Sun. One for the ages. I turn over the sleeve. Gaze down at the valves and wires on the back sleeve of the sleeve. 'I know that you're waiting. Come out from your shell... although there's been rain and it's coming again. Change has to be here. Obviously...'
Pigeon, Margate's finest . Latest album OUTTANATIONAL rocks. Spacey cover. Post Punk. Psyche, Krautrock, and Afrobeat all stirred into the mix. . Also the Kitchen Sink. Leftfield meets WITCH on the way round to Tracy Emin's .I imagine you'd expect nothing less. But it's disciplined, cool. martial. A great listen for Friday morning spring to summer flat cleaning.
There are worse ways to spend 50 days thtn listening to 50 Joni Mitchell songs. Starting wuth the last collection of new material. One of the great things about Joni is her use of space.
I'm listening to an album from 2002 called These Were The Earlies by The Earlies. It came out in 2004. It's already clasped me close to its chest and I've taken off my headphones, gone off and made myself a cup of tea. Returned to my desk. Put my headphones back on. Now I'm going to listen to the rest of it. I've found another one.
It's immediately obvious that the record has a strong sense of self mythology. This is a strong essential component of the DIY independent mythology which has always been a component of Rock & Roll alternative culture. A SUB culture. A hidden universe.
This is a band from Texas. But I felt sure they must feature membes of The Flaming Lips or Mercury Rev because the DNA of the record seemed so immediately familiar. Like my own skin. .The instant familiarity of records becomes one of its essential attractions with time.
This is a cute record. Coy. But with boundless and vaulting admirable ambition. Like many great records an incantation. An invitation back to childhood. The low door in the wall.
2026 seems to be a slightly enchanted time music wise, What magical time and place to you want to be transported back to today? The early Seventies? The late Sixtues? Encased in now. Why not. Juni Habel and her third album Evergreen In Your Mind. The slow, deliberate act of becoming according to The Line of Best Fit. That sounds as if it will do,
And so the album proves . It's elfin twinkle toes delight. Tenderness and playfulness meet in a Norwegian meadow and frolic and gambol to their hearts content as the sun decsends. It makes your mind go back to the likes of Vashti and Sandy. Forward to the arrival of the bew Aldous Harding album which is due soon. This will do,
A record I play that never fails me. Best listened to
as the sun goes down.
I never mind listening to The Stone Roses. It's such a glorious record. Ever! It's such a fundamental record. It's why people like me listen to records so much. It takes me back and guides me forwards. It genuinely changed things.
Perhaps Brown Horse's are Norwich's finest. They're certainly a horse of a different colour. Third album Total Dive might at first seem like an open invitation for doomscrollers of the world to unite and feel sorry for themselves.But persevere. For there's much here for lovers of Neil Young, The Band , Springsteen and the open road to celebrate. I'm not quite sure what Alan Partridge might think of it really. But frankly, what dies that guy know,
This is a band that must be growing used to being compared to artists and records that came out over fifty years ago. This is tonally not necessarily the cheeriest record you're likely to hear this week but it may well be one of the best. I went to university in Nowich but it certainly doesn't remind me of The Fine City. It probably reminds me of somewhere like Omaha, even though I've never been there and am probably unlikely to ever get there. Good recirds do things like that to you. This is a very good record !
I just listened to Let It Be. Naked. On my television. No that's not what I meant. I'm not that kind of person.This is a record which us so incredibly of its time. You can't help but visualise The Beatles. Feel the tension between them. Feel the Sixties become The Seventies.
This seems a world away from where I'm sitting now. But maybe it's not. The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band feeds on an energy that is reborn with every succeeding generation. An urge to get back to the garden. A fear of what might germinate and grow.
Heavenly harmonies and vibes. A sense that this album might not actually be bought by that many people but it will be loved by those that make the effort and spread the word.
I listened to Jesse Ware's latest album Superbloom last night. I'm listening to it again now. She takes the heady essential ingredients of original Seventies Disco. Distuls them to the essence and then unleashes the cork and allows you to rise to the ceiling like Uncle Albert in Mary Poppins. So you're floating up towards the ceiling. With all your favourite people. The helium fuelled staircase to heaven !
We all miss out on essential lives. Our essential vocations. My essential vocation was to dream I suspect. Mu 91 year old parents sit together in the living toom with a set of pictures of their children to their right. There's a photo of me which I think is the essential photogtaph of my lifetime .
It shows me walking down a garden path in Zimbabwe towards the swimming pool at the bottom of the garden. Chameleons in the trees. Banana tree ahead of me. Africa in all its verdant majesty and vibrant life all around me. I have a far away look in my eyes. A dreamer. I doubt if I will ever escape my essential self. I doubt if anyone does really.
My other essential selves are. Working in record shops. I've never done that so. I haunt them instead.I lack ambituin except to live. Collecting records. Collecting experience. Teaching now online. Reaping the rich harvest of life abroad. Experience life. As i said teaching. Learning .First in class. Now online. Every class is dofferent. Every time you play a record the experience is never the same
I should have been in a band. I would have been in a band loke The Clean. Minor Cult players. Not the big boys. Velvet Underground, Doors, Roxy Music, Joy Division. Essentially happy. But aware that life is a mountain path and the road is the long and winding one and we could trip and fall at any moment. Don't point that thing at me!
I may have got to that age. The age where I can happily gaze at a fly wnadering across a pain of glass facing out on the street below While listening to Bill Orcutt's Music In Continuous Motion on my television set as the sun goes down. Then going over and cooking my tea. There are wirdse ways to spend a Monday evening in April,
The record is like something that Tom Verlaine and Tichard Lloyd might have dreamed up. Otcutt has been round the block more than most. He was apparently initually unspired to create by seeung Muddy Waters perform on The Last Waltz.. He's supported Sonuc Youth. He has nothing left to prove. But Music In Continuous Motion proves it. Just the facts !
Shocking ! And not in the Hitchcock as in the classic dig your nails diwn your boyfriend's palm sense. But in the this is really, really piss poor car crash respect. The Cure meets Bauhaus meets the worst of The Scream OSTs. Go back to Drama Scool lads. Do not pass go. Ever again !!!
Half of my record collection is in the process of being moved. To the museum . Graded , listed , ranked and codified. These are times I lived through. It doesn't really feel like ancient history but that seems to be the current approach.
There was a sense when Lexicon Of Love camd out that it was a record of note. For us at school it felt a bit silly but we didn't fully appreciate the reference points.We didn't approach the greatest of The Temptations, and Bacharach & David. We needed Mojo for that. ABC I now realise did know how good that stuff was and they appreciated Semiotics too. Respect .
'I miss the village green. With all the simple people . I miss the village green. The church. The clock. the steeple.....'
Nostalgia's not what it used to be. It probably never has been. Or will be again. The Kinks were always very good on its comforts and tiger traps. Look out your window. That's what I'm doing as I type this. I sit at my desk on the second floor of a picturesque listed Georgian building of flats near the Central Station . It's a lovely day and I have a glorious view of the street below .I glance down at the pavement opposite my flat and can watch as people pass by below and can speculate on where they're coming from and where they're heading to. And what are the thoughts in their heads. .
And all the time as I do so Village Green Preservation Society by The Kinks spins on the turntable in the corner of my flat, It's an album whuch came out when I was three years old and had little awareness of the existence of the UK. I was born in Zimbabwe . We all came back when I was 60 yo the land where my parents had grown up .
I've never forgotten that I was not born here. That I was born somehwere else and that some might consider me an immigrant. An outsider. As they do others. Now at 60 I'm more aware of this strange and troubled country. In many ways I'd prefer to be somewhere else. But this is where I've made my home and I love Newcastle.
I also love The Kinks and Village Green Preservation Society. It has 14 songs. Not a dud amongst them. Sweet pop songs wuth hodden depths. About railway trains and village greens. And sitting by the riverside and staring at the sky and dreaming of escape .
Nostalgia's not what it used to be. But the people are still prone to being rather simple from where I sit. I do not except myself from that judgement We're easily swept by simple narratives and easy solutions to complicated problems. But so long as we like the Kinks !
'It's a shame about Raye...' This morning I was listening to Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds . An important record from my youth. I like it, and am glad I bought it last year on the day I went to see The Loft at Cluny 2. . They're putting out a second album soon and returning to Newcastle. I'd like to see them again next month.
But in the meantime This afternoon I'm listening to RAYE. It's not really a shame. This is about as far away from the Leminheads as you could possibly get. RAYE.second album THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE is not actually a million miles from The War of the Worlds. Because what is music really? It's escapism. Entertainment. Sustenance fror the brain, soul and feet.
I confess I don't really speak THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE's language or walk its streets .It's not really aimed at me. I don't have any children. I'll never completely live in this world. But it strikes me as not too dissimilar exercise as The War of the Worlds in essence. It's tuneful. It's huper theatrical, t's incredibly ambitious and it's surely destined for the West End.
I imagine any number of people are listening to this on permanent rotation and I can quite understand why. It's rather kitchen sink, but let's face it we're living through the kutchen sink age good as dammit.. Thimbs up from me!
