November 22nd 1968 The Beatles

 

The White Album. Released today in 1968.

Record Sleeves # 5 Peter Gabriel

 

Great sleeve and a record I've become quite fond of over the last few months.

Song of the Day # 308 The Shop Assistants

'I guess I'll never know...'

 

A wonderful single, (so assured), from my first year at university.

The Beatles

Song of the Day # 307 Vampire Weekend

 

Just been to another Record Player after a while away. Vampire Weekend's latest this time and  surprised myself by quite liking it along with most of the back row of regulars. A notoriously difficult bunch to please. Not wholly convinced. It feels younger than me somehow in a way I'd find difficult to explain and I'm not sure the New York they sing about is the one of my memory and imagination. But I did enjoy the evening partly thanks to an enhanced slide show which seemed like a particularly effective extended promo for the band and the city that I'm planning to visit next year. This was the song that stood out at first play. 

 

 

Songs Heard on the Radio # 18 Pontiak

No idea who Pontiak are. Or what Lack Lustre Rush is on. But I just heard it on the radio, it has a great title and sound and here it is.

 

 

Record Sleeves # 4 Patti Smith - Horses

 

The Robert Mapplethorpe image of her first album cover. As much a record of their own relationship, as documented in Just Kids as a statement to the world outside. Such an inspirational sleeve to so many people and rightly so. As discussable as a truly great painting.

Jimmy Ruffin

 

Jimmy Ruffin has died aged 78. This seems appropriate and poignant. Cheers for the tip Norman!

 

 

 

Song of the Day # 306 - Miaow

 

Debut single from Manchester band from December 1985. As 'independent' as they come. Never released an album though they were compiled retrospectively. Led by Cath Carroll, an NME journalist who later married Big Black guitarist Santiago Durango. Played by Peel and now on evening 6 For Music programmes.

James Brown & his Famous Flames

Forty Songs I've Found on the Jukebox at Rosie's in Newcastle

This series may run and run. So long as my liver's up to the task. The jukebox certainly won't run dry. Here's the first forty.

1.  Sly & the Family Stone - Stand
2. The Hombres - Let It All Hang Out
3. Burning Spear - Marcus Garvey
4. The Sonics - Strychnine
5. Petula Clark - Don't Sleep In The Subway
6. Howlin' Wolf - Smokestack Lightning
7. Lou Reed - Wild Child
8. Toots & the Maytals - When I Laugh
9. Dion - I Was Born To Cry
10. The Flamingos - I Only Have Eyes For You
11. The Rezillos - I Can't Stand My Baby
12. Gil Scott Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
13. Beck - Loser
14. Wire - Fragile
15. The Go-Betweens - Sound Of The Rain
16. PiL - Poptones
17. Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five - White Lines
18. Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood - Some Velvet Morning
19. Chet Baker - My Funny Valentine
20. The Who - Call Me Lightning
21. Eric Burdon & The Animals - Good Times
22. Funkadelic - Can You Get To That
23. Big Star - September Gurls
24. The Gun Club - Sexbeat
25. Gram Parsons - She
26. Urge Overkill - Sister Havana
27. Creedence Clearwater Revival - Someday Never Comes
28. The Miracles - My Baby Must Be A Magician
29. Black Uhuru - Youth Of Eglington
30. Bow Wow Wow - I Want Candy
31. Jim Croce - I Got A Name
32. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Jubilee Street
33. Al Green - Belle
34. Jane's Addiction - Been Caught Stealing
35. Stereolab - Percolator
36. Jacques Dutronc - Le Responsible
37. Donald Fagen - I. G. Y.
38. The Rolling Stones - Child Of The Moon
39. The Saints - This Perfect Day
40. Python Lee Jackson - In A Broken Dram

Record Sleeves # 3 David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders From Mars

 

Of course...

Song of the Day # 305 My Morning Jacket

 

To my ears the stand out song from their most feted album. 2005's Z. Spectral!

November 18th 1983 R.E.M.

 

R.E.M. performed live on The Tube 31 years ago today. In Newcastle, the town I now find myself in. Jules Holland announced them as hailing from Atlanta when of course they're from Athens. Michael Stipe corrected him after their first song. Note the almost entirely static audience. They, like me had no idea what the were watching. The band played one fast song and two mid-tempo ones including the then unrecorded So. Central Rain, so sure were they of what they'd got. They went on in some way to change my life.

Courtney Barnett

 

The latest picture of the blog poster girl! In Berlin.

Record Sleeves # 2 Mott The Hoople - The Hoople

 

I vaguely remember a book I used to leaf through at Richmond Junior Library when I was 10 or 11. It had pictures of classic record sleeves like this and the Procol Harum sleeve I posted yesterday. From the 'Golden Age' five or more years before. I knew nothing of the records themselves but the mystical allure of the sleeves was immediate. There was a world out there which I was unaware of. I'm still catching up.

Great Lines # 9 Kurt Vile

'Life is like a ball of beauty that. Makes you wanna just cry. Then you die.'

 

Kurt Vile's wonderful album Wakin on a Pretty Daze has kept me company this morning. Is he actually related to J. Mascis? If not he should be. Every song deserves posting, but this line made me smile. I much prefer it as a statement about life to that greatly overrated Flaming Lips line. Plenty more great ones besides on the album.

Jake Thackray

That bloke, who'll you'll remember if you're British and a certain age and remember That's Life! on the TV on a Sunday night when you were growing up. An Independent article.

The legend of Jake

Jake Thackray? Wasn't he that chap who sang saucy songs on That's Life in the Sixties? Yes, says our poet-in-residence Martin Newell, but this anarchistic Yorkshireman was also the country's finest chansonnier - and one of the great tragedies of British popular music

Sunday 08 May 2005

I can't remember how we got onto the subject of old light entertainment shows on TV. Perhaps it's just something that chaps of middling age do. But suddenly, a light went on in my companion's eyes and leaning towards me with the air of a connoisseur he said: "You remember Jake Thackray, do you? I've got loads of his recordings. I can make you copies of some if you want - many of them aren't very available anymore."

I can't remember how we got onto the subject of old light entertainment shows on TV. Perhaps it's just something that chaps of middling age do. But suddenly, a light went on in my companion's eyes and leaning towards me with the air of a connoisseur he said: "You remember Jake Thackray, do you? I've got loads of his recordings. I can make you copies of some if you want - many of them aren't very available anymore."

A few days later, when a CD compilation arrived, I was still only mildly curious. I remembered Thackray from my young teens in the late Sixties, as the musical relief on popular TV shows such as That's Life and its forerunner, Braden's Week. He sang witty, sometimes near-the-knuckle songs about randy cockerels, country buses and libidinous gorillas. A dark, saturnine-looking Yorkshireman, he played a nylon-string guitar held upright on his knee and blinked into the camera as he enunciated his lyrics in a gulping velvet baritone. To me and to most of my Who 'n' Kinks-obsessed mates he was that bloke off the telly that sang the funny songs - a bit unhip but well worth watching.

Now though, listening back to this collection of his songs - a few of which I half-remembered - I was struck by how affecting many of them were, how deft and unusual his guitar style was and, chiefly, how ingenious were his lyrics. What I heard when I began to listen to his words... There were rhymes, internal rhymes, neatly tailored codas and all manner of rule-breaking, scansion-defying curlicues. This was a master songwriter. How had I missed out on him? Why had I never heard him on Radio 2 - especially now that other "neglected" properties such as Nick Drake and Clifford T Ward had all been so carefully renovated? One or two of my other contacts came out of the closet as Thackray fans and furnished me with further missing pieces of the jigsaw, until finally, in one crackly over-recorded form or another, I'd amassed 75 songs. And so began my tentative attempts to unravel the ball of string that was Jake Thackray, English chansonnier.

 

Jake Thackray died in Monmouth, Wales on Christmas Eve 2002, aged 63. His life had ended in straitened circumstances, for a man who'd notched up more than 1,000 radio and TV appearances during his maytime. The singer-songwriter, who'd been declared bankrupt two years earlier, was reportedly ill with alcoholism. At some point during the two decades preceding his death, he'd begun to lose all confidence in his playing, his songwriting and, by the sound of it, himself.

Shortly before his death, a group of his fans, made the pilgrimage to Monmouth, where Jake gamely posed for photographs with them. In his youth and well into early middle age, Jake Thackray had been a moodily handsome man with a strong bone-structure. Although he was Yorkshire born and bred, anyone might have been forgiven, having been shown a picture of the dark-eyed young singer, for guessing that he was southern French or possibly Spanish. The pictures that I studied now, however, showed a man who might have been a roofer with a drink problem. His once-strong jaw was blurred by a classic alcohol oedema; his once-upright posture was stooping and painfully apologetic. Worst of all and most shocking in close-up, were his eyes, now craters of deep-seated melancholy. He was almost unrecognisable. I found the pictures unbearably sad.

Born in Leeds, shortly before the onset of the Second World War, Thackray was brought up a Catholic and remained so throughout his life. In some ways, he was a typical beer-drinking, rugby-loving Yorkshireman, holding political views which were left-wing bordering on the anarchistic. These views later broke surface in the content of some of his songs - pomposity-pricking tales of cuckolded policemen and Blimpish old army officers. Where other songwriters might have veered into ranting stridency, however, Thackray's songs were always lent elegance by his sharp and sophisticated wit.

 

In another life, a bright lad such as he might have remained in Leeds, to become a popular schoolteacher - which he briefly was - and a better-than-average stalwart of his local folk club. Yet he didn't do that. He studied modern languages at Durham, spent two years teaching in Lille, and then later went to Algeria. It was France, though, that turned his head. It was there that he discovered chanson, that arcane and definitively French music form which is capable of encompassing storytelling, poetry and humour, often within the same narrative. More importantly, he discovered the work of Georges Brassens who became his hero, musical inspiration, friend and mentor.

Brassens, an anarchistic southern Frenchman from Sête was 18 years Thackray's senior and already a well-known star in France. It was said that every French home possessed at least one Brassens record. The young Frenchman, having left home in his late teens to seek his fortune in Paris, had spent part of the war in a German labour camp. After the war, he gradually made the transition from anti-establishment outsider to household name, without ever compromising his ideals. The young Yorkshireman was captivated by this chansonnier who had stayed close to his roots, even after he had achieved the fame of which he appeared so disdainful. It was said that Brassens once asked a radio station not to play his songs too frequently, lest they become cheapened by ubiquity.

 

In the early Sixties, while other young musicians of his age became intoxicated by music from across the Atlantic, Thackray fell head over heels for French chanson. When he returned to England, so fluent in French that he could successfully translate Brassens songs into English - Thackray had become to all intents and purposes, a chansonnier. When Brassens finally came to the UK for a single concert in 1973 - not to London but to Cardiff - Thackray described supporting Brassens there as the pinnacle of his career.

However fervently he flew the flag for the genius of his hero, Jake Thackray almost certainly didn't realise that during the process of his apprenticeship to the master chansonnier, he had actually developed a style of his own. In the mid-Sixties, his songs began to attract attention - at first in the folk clubs and then, with a regular slot on local regional TV - though Thackray, being Thackray, continued to teach. By the end of the decade, however, he was appearing on Saturday nights on national TV, and filling venues the size of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where his audiences would cheer him to the rafters. Typically recalcitrant, he refused to play the encore game: "That was my last song - now here's another one." And on being bathed in overhead stage lights: "These lights... D'you know, I feel like a Lancaster bomber."

Thackray was a funny man. Which made it all the more moving when he waxed serious - for instance, singing a wrenching song about a young shepherdess who froze to death, counting in Cumbrian dialect while she did so. It was the sucker punch. You were laughing along with him and suddenly he might deliver a touching song about married love, or about a widow whose malicious neighbours had cut off her hair. Jake could do serious. Jake could tell a story. And therein may have lain one of his main problems.

 

A chansonnier can sing a funny song, sing a serious song, declaim a poem or tell a story - all of them at once if needs be. It's what a chansonnier does. But the job description doesn't exist in our country. Comedy over here is a cul-de-sac out of which it is almost impossible to reverse. Take Billy Connolly, for instance, an excellent musician and a good actor. Could he fill the Albert Hall, seven nights on-the-trot for a music concert? Or Jasper Carrott, a good guitarist, songwriter and former mainstay of folkclubs in his younger days? Or Victoria Wood, a fabulous musician and great songwriter? Could they do it? So it was that Jake Thackray for a wider TV-viewing public who had never seen him live, remained that bloke off the telly who did the funny songs - or even worse, a novelty artist.

In the platinum-shifting musical age of the late Sixties and early Seventies, Thackray's albums sold steadily, if not hugely. It was easier to say what his music wasn't, than what it was. He was a Yorkshire chansonnier with a folk/flamenco guitar style who utilised jazz-chords. But he wasn't jazz. Nor was he, in the strictest terms, folk. And he certainly wasn't rock. Veteran producer Norman Newell (no relation) did his valiant best with much of Thackray's recorded output. Some of the studio recordings, to modern ears at least, might now sound slightly dated, straying tweedily close to easy listening in places. And yet, by virtue of his lyrics alone, easy listening was the one thing that many of Jake Thackray's songs could never be.

Fortunately, a reasonable amount of live recordings exists and it's with these that the essence of his wayward genius can be appreciated. The closer in the listener gets, the sharper the details of his songs become. There's a very good case, on some inspired future day, for someone, somewhere, to put together a definitive, celebratory Jake Thackray compilation, à la Heaven In A Wild Flower, the album which posthumously brought Nick Drake closer to the mass appeal he missed out on in his lifetime.

 

In the meantime, a musical based round his work, Sister Josephine Kicks The Habit, which Thackray was working on at the time of his death, will open at Helmsley in Yorkshire on 24 May and then go on to the Swaledale Festival before touring nationally. His hardcore fans run yearly "Jake-fests" in various parts of the country and Thackray's songs continue to be played in folk clubs by anyone brave enough to take on the fiendish challenge of learning the guitar parts.

"The strange thing is," says David Harris, from the main Thackray-dedicated website and archive, "Jake didn't think he was any good at all. He'd tell people he was rubbish. And he really believed it."

In his last years, Thackray led a solitary life in Monmouth, semi-estranged from his family, his despairing fans and the people who wanted to help him. Whatever shadows closed in around him, they remained private ones. Occasionally, rock musicians working in nearby Rockfield Studios would relate poignant tales of sighting him coming out of a shop with a carrier bag full of the alcohol with which he buttressed himself during his long "retirement".

 

Jake Thackray was a man of piercing intelligence and wit who was possessed, in commercial terms, of a huge but difficult-to-market talent. Georges Brassens his French mentor and counterpart, died nationally cherished, conferred with the Légion d'Honneur. That Jake Thackray died in relative ignominy by comparison is a peculiarly British tragedy. In "The Poor Sod", a short and ineffably sad song about an impoverished old farm labourer, Thackray sings:

"The bramble bush catches his sleeve, the blackthorn catches his cheek. When will the north country leave the poor sod alone?"

In a way, perhaps it never did.

 

Song of the Day # 304 Villalog

 

Thanks to com padre Andy for directing me towards this. We know where it's coming from but that doesn't make it any less great!

Stories in Song # 8 Cowboy Junkies

 

Sun's coming up. It's Tuesday morning. From the part of my life when the end of an important relationship felt like a death. As I realised in time, life went on. The Cowboy Junkies never fully got their due.

 

'Sun comes up, it's Tuesday morning
hits me straight in the eye
guess you forgot to close the blind last night
Oh, that's right, I forgot, it was me

I sure do miss the smell of black coffee in the morning,
the sound of water splashing all over the bathroom,
the kiss that you would give me even though I was sleeping,
but I kind of like the feel of this extra few feet in my bed
Telephone's ringing, but I don't answer it
'cause everybody knows that good news always sleeps till noon

Guess it's tea and toast for breakfast again
maybe I'll add a little T.V. too
No milk! God, how I hate that
Guess I'll go to the corner, get breakfast from Jenny
She's got a black eye this morning, `Jen how'd ya get it?'
she says, `Last night, Bobby got a little bit out of hand'

Lunchtime. I start to dial your number
then I remember so I reach for something to smoke
and anyways I'd rather listen to Coltrane
than go through all that shit again

There's something about an afternoon spent doing nothing
Just listening to records and watching the sun falling
Thinking of things that don't have to add up to something
and this spell won't be broken
by the sound of keys scraping in the lock

Maybe tonight it's a movie
with plenty of room for elbows and knees
a bag of popcorn all to myself,
black and white with a strong female lead
and if I don't like it, no debate, I'll leave

Here comes that feeling that I'd forgotten
how strange these streets feel
when you're alone on them
Each pair of eyes just filled with suggestion
So I lower my head, make a beeline for home
Seething inside

Funny, I'd never noticed
the sound the streetcars make as they pass my window
Which reminds me that I forgot to close the blind again
Yeah, sure I'll admit there are times when I miss you
Especially like now when I need someone to hold me
but there are some things that can never be forgiven
and I just gotta tell you
that I kinda like this extra few feet in my bed '

Record Sleeve # 1 Procol Harum - A Salty Dog

 

This arrived today. Sometimes owning a record is as much about the sleeve as the record inside. In this case the album is just great too!

Things I Found On My Local's Jukebox # 44 P.J.Harvey

Listened to this album at work today for the first time in a couple of years and found it scary. So found this particular song on the jukebox at Rosie's after work and played it. Just before the Under-21 International. The most recent record of the English doing battle on a foreign field. An unwavering indictment of the blood on English hands. The song not the Under-21 match. One hell of a record!

Magazine

November 17th 1944 Gene Clark

 

                                             One of the great cult heroes. Born this day.

Song of the Day # 303 The Delgados

 

Named after Tour De France winner Pedro Delgado which is a great thing in itself. The greatest band to ever come out of Motherwell. I spent last Thursday morning immersed in their two great albums from way back, Peloton and The Great Eastern. I could have chosen any number of songs but this one caught my ear from the latter.

Ian McCulloch

Things I Found On My Local's Jukebox # 43 Roxy Music

This song inspired a couple of moments. A few years back at my birthday party where I was DJ-ing above the Jazz Café in Newcastle that used to be my second home. My boss, a Liverpudlian Scouser who'd seen Roxy a couple of times in their early days asked for a song by them. I played this and he wasn't happy as it was from after Eno had left the band. No satisfying some people. I'd still maintain that this is as good as anything they did while he was there. Then, last Saturday getting drunk in Rosie's I had a conversation about Bryan Ferry, with regular and friend Norman. Ferry of course is a local boy though he has come a long way fro his roots and now seems utterly gentrified and has a son, Otis, who is a pretty repellent Fox-Hunting lobbyist. I'd still maintain that Ferry is great despite his conservatism. Here's an interesting recent article/ interview with the man from The Quietus.

Blondie

The Boys Next Door

 

A quite astonishing clip with Nice Cave, Mick Harvey, Tracey Pew and Phil Calvert, from 1978 pre-Rowland S. Harvey and The Birthday Party in all their New Wave glory doing Nancy Sinatra.

Song(s) of the Day # 302 Eleanor Friedberger

 

Eleanor Friedberger makes all of the cheesiest moments of 1970's pop culture and  music sound like a great idea. Listening to her music makes me feel like I'm watching an old episode of The Brady Bunch or Banana Splits and that strange decade is never going to end. She used to be in The Fiery Furnaces who were a fine band but just too defiantly odd to ever break big and now she's not. Here are two songs from her latest album. She's as eccentric as they come and as a result I find it difficult to get through a whole record at a sitting because she never stops jumping around but in short bursts she's difficult to beat. She makes music that makes it feel like the sun is always shining. This first one here seems to be a love song to another girl. It's about four minutes long, manages to mention Soft Machine and Come On Eileen and is pretty much perfect.

 

'I could see the tops of her white socks
Just beneath the desk
Her pants didn't reach all the way down her legs
And you know what happened next
I said hi politely and we went to time for coffee

Yeah yeah yeah that was when I knew
That was when I knew I was wrong wrong wrong all along
That was when I knew, yeah
That was when I knew

They said we both write weird music
And she played me Soft Machine
And lent me a record that badly warped which screwed up everything
I was broke, just fifteen
I scoured London for a replacement
I found it cheap in an Oxford Street basement

Yeah yeah yeah that was when I knew
That was when I knew I was wrong wrong wrong wrong
That was when I knew, yeah
That was when I knew

I met her in my bedroom
Oh at a party, Halloween
And she was wearing a pair of overalls
So I sang "Come On Eileen"
I was being slightly mean
And that just made her smile
Which made me feel childish

Yeah yeah yeah that was when I knew
That was when I knew I was wrong wrong wrong
That was when I knew, yeah
That was when I knew

We played a song from scratch that night
And when she done up singing
She just took off, stage left
And left us there winging it
The band went down swinging
As she made her exit, arms in the air
I caught her eye, I was unprepared

When I couldn't get her out of my head
So I got her out of hers instead
No I couldn't get her out of my head
So I got her out of hers instead
I know I couldn't get her out of my head
And then we ended up in...

She glided by on antique roller skates
And overtook our car
Just down the street
Up from where we parked
Just south of Market
In the Castro sun she seemed to glisten
And when she spoke I listened

Yeah yeah yeah that was when I knew
That was when I knew I was wrong wrong wrong
That was when I knew, yeah
That was when I knew'

 

 

The second is about staring at the sun which is a bad idea and trying to be happy which is a very good one. Have a nice day! Meanwhile, here's The Brady Bunch to help you along.

 

 

Mott the Hoople

Album Review # 29 The Zombies - Odessy & Oracle

A repost for a review I wrote while watching a World Cup Semi Final in July with the sound turned down. And clearly getting steadily drunk.
________________________________________________________________________________

 

A warm summers evening. 2014 World Cup drawing to a close. Argentina and Holland in their beautiful classical strips set out on a field of green somewhere in Brazil in the second semi. Summoning memories of sixteen years ago when Bergkamp curled an impossible volley into the far, top corner in the dying minutes of extra time in France to help The Netherlands progress to the last four. Or twenty years before that when Kempes streaked through tickertape in spell cast, dictator driven Buenos Aires to win the trophy in the dead end of the drab, dark seventies. Is that enough d's for you?

 

I've got the sound turned down though my fingers are crossed for Messi. The last heroic, point of principle I can see in this World Cup. Though it's small hope. I'm listening to The Zombies last, posthumous album from almost fifty years ago. It's a record that has increased in terms of reputation  since it was released and the group split. Barely acknowledged when it came out and still not well-known when I was coming of age in the mid-eighties, it's since mutated into a British Forever Changes or Pet Sounds to stand beside Sgt. Pepper. At least in terms of reputation Let's see.

 

 

The cover is pastoral whimsy, which you'd hope and wish for and first song Care of Cell 44 strikes all the right chords. Pastoral, greet the new dawn mid sixties optimism, entitled public school boy harmonies, organ driven, tasteful musicianship, making some kind of stiff-upper lipped, very English stand against The Beach Boys.

 

Second song A Rose For Emily lets down the already established mood. A sad song for the very same Emily who went through life without ever once being being courted, snogged or perhaps even yearned after. 'The sky is overcast. And no-one brings a rose for Emily.' I'll spare you the details. It trickles on in this gruesome vein for the best part of three minutes. It's a sickly, sorry tragic relative of Eleanor Rigby, strangely and surely coincidentally the second track on its own record Revolver.

 

 

Things pick up from here. Odessey slips easily into a classical, bucolic groove. It 's one of the great English pastoral records. Maybe After He's Gone and Beechwood Park seal the deal. It's walking down the lane with the posh boy from the school on the hill or the rosy cheeked blond girl you hope might give out a little if you persuade her to lie down beside you in the grassy, deserted meadow. Whichever you fancy most. It's strangely sexless, well-mannered and unthreatening in that respect.

 

 

The album never really lets off from this point on. The Zombies are in their element. If they're not in walled town parks, they're trudging down cobbled lanes fringed by rose gardens. They're enclosed in visions, harmonies and musical approximations of the great British outdoors. It's all effortlessly tasteful. Made for the ages. It encloses you in sights and familiar smells. For anyone partial to Traffic, Nick Drake or Syd's Pink Floyd it's instantly familiar territory. Not authentic folk by any stroke, or seriously druggy and visionary like Strawberry Fields Forever but a persuasive Southern precinct town approximation of what it feels like to be English amongst all that lovely nature.

 

 

Meanwhile Holland, Argentina draws to half-time, predictably goalless, despite the pleasant dreamlike colours emanating from my screen. Time to listen to mindless ITV chat orchestrated by the charmless Adrian Chiles before giving Side 2 its turn.

 

 

They're lined up again on the grass field in Brazil. I lower the needle onto its own black sea. Side 2 starts with Changes but really there's no change from the steady, confident order established on Side 1. Nature is by no means a violent threat of any sort. Quite the opposite in fact. It's a bucolic, comforting, grassy bed to enclose yourself in. Comforting and immersive .

 

 

That's not to say I don't like the record. I do. I was brought up in this sure, secure other world perspective. It's certainly a lot less predictable and more three dimensional than this Holland Argentina stalemated game barely threatening to unfold before me on my TV screen.

 

 

The album's tenth song, Butchers Boy 1914 strikes a rare jarring chord. Of course it's all trench warfare, clichéd visions of them and us, death and decay and vague dissent from the perspective of privileged musical youths. Still, it's nicely done and kept as brief and melodic as the other more easeful material it's bedded in.

 

On to Friend's of Mine which re-establishes the happy mood. And from there to Time of The Season. The great posthumous American hit which sounds just like a British approximation of The Doors just as The Doors sounded like an American approximation of She's Not There. It even seems to have a Ray Manzarek solo. Really, I can't discuss it here. Good a pop song as it is, it really doesn't belong in this context. I'll post it and hope you agree.

 

 

 

There's nothing wrong with Odessey & Oracle. It's actually got a lot going for it. It's a perfectly good approximation of English pastoral though most of the nature it depicts seems to be tastefully parcelled and restricted. It's attractive for this very reason. It's certainly better company than this bloody game which seems as tangled as a ball of wool after half an hour amongst a gang of frantic kittens. I'll take it off. The record I mean. Put Bitches Brew on instead. I'll place the album back in the rack. Amongst the Z's. Pretty much alone amongst the Z's. I own no Zappa. But I'll play it again. Every few months. Much less than Astral Weeks. But that's no crime. Probably more than Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

 

Things I Found On My Local's Jukebox # 42 David Bowie

A rough early Friday evening at Rosie's. A baying pack of Irish blokes  had taken over the bar and were howling incoherently at the top of their lungs waiting for the Ireland, Scotland game. They took over the jukebox, played a series of anti-social songs, (seven in a row by some noise band is my view of anti-social), in the build up and then asked for the jukebox to be turned off and the commentary on once he game started. The landlord, Ian, told them where to go and they left making wanker gestures. Good for Ian. I made my own anti-social stand and found and put this on. Still I'm a regular. I have some rights!