Very noisy B-Side from James from the Seven sessions for one of the great Rock and Roll literary touchstones.
Sunday, April 9, 2017
Songs Heard on the Radio # 197 Black Box Recorder
Partially spoken songs always have something going for them.
Song of the Day # 1,176 Cold Beat
A track from the excellent new Cold Beat album Chaos by Invitation.
Saturday, April 8, 2017
Songs About People # 343 Garrincha
A song named after perhaps the best dribbler that football has ever seen, Brazilian winger of the fifties and sixties Garrincha. Here's a link to the 'little bird' at work. The song meanwhile is an interesting update of the baggy thing from Turin band Smoke the Bees.
30 Days of Wes Anderson # 8 Nico
In many ways Royal Tenenbaums is Anderson's ultimate pop culture soundtrack. This song is used just beautifully over a shot of Margo, (Gwyneth Paltrow), getting off a bus in New York City.
Friday, April 7, 2017
Thursday, April 6, 2017
30 Days of Wes Anderson # 6 Devo
Truly wonderful song from the first Devo album where you are led to draw the conclussion that you're listening to an instrumental before the vocal emerge in a burst of spluttering, frenetic rage two minutes in. Features in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a film also noticeable for sudden bursts of spluttering, frenetic rage.
Song of the Day # 1,173 Mahotella Queens
A couple of songs from South African township legends The Mahotella Queens. Wozani Mahipi (Hippies Come to Soweto) features on the soundtrack of the great eighties cult film Something Wild.
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
Original Soundtrack Selections # 2 John Barry
Perhaps the bongos are slightly intrusive but nevertheless it's distinctively Barry! Here's the scene it soundtracks.
Songs About People # 342 Marshall McLuhan
Truly odd tribute to a great thinker from Canadian comedy troupe The Vestibules.
Covers # 74 Vitamin String Quartet
And while we're here. From a 2012 Vitamin String Quartet album devoted to songs featured in Wes Anderson films.
April 5th 1980 R.E.M.
R.E.M. played their first gig this day back in 1980 at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Athens, Georgia under the name Twisted Kites. A Searchers link, they covered Needles and Pins, along with numerous others and some tentative originals. Here is an estimated set list.
Song of the Day # 1,172 The Searchers
The Searchers in 1967 fell under the spell of The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and the new Country Rock coming out of the States which had, in turn, been informed by their own early hits. Their own chart success began to die out at round about this time. But this, a cover of a Five Americans original which had hit the American Billboard Singles chart at # 5 the year before, was pretty great.
Tuesday, April 4, 2017
Songs About People # 341 Lyndon B. Johnson
Tom Paxton, who has just released a new record, back in the day singing about the great myths about the Vietnam War sold to the American people and their inevitable human cost.
30 Days of Wes Anderson # 4 The Kinks
The Kinks are mainstays of Anderson's taste and sensibility, popping up on several occasions in various films over the years. Here you get an assembled video of many of the memorable moments of Darjeeling Limited. soundtracked by This Time Tomorrow.
Song of the Day # 1,171 Aimee Mann
Aimee Mann, an artist who's been putting out records in various guises for more than thirty years now, has a great new album out, teasingly called Mental Illness, released a few days back. A friend, who's recently been bereaved posted it as a point of consolation and listening to it I can see how it might be. The record is full of wise, warm and crafted songwriting.
Monday, April 3, 2017
30 Days of Wes Anderson # 3 Hank Williams
The nearest thing I could think of to sync obviously with a mini-Clint Eastwood cowboy theme on this particular series. This song is reprised throughout the course of Moonrise Kingdom.
Songs About People # 340 Clint Eastwood
Clint, of course, was a major source of interest to reggae and ska artists of the sixties and seventies. Here, The Upsetters pay tribute.
Song of the Day # 1,170 Clint Eastwood
Paired with Lee Marvin's Wand'rin Star, (also from the Paint Your Wagon soundtrack), on its release as a 1970 single which spent a long time at number one on both sides of the Atlantic . Two great actors of course, neither of whom were bound to set the music world alight. It's pure corn too but nevertheless, the song alone here makes it worthy of a post.
Sunday, April 2, 2017
Grandaddy - Hoult's Yard, Newcastle - March 26th 2017
It made sense for me to discover today in preparation of writing this short review that Grandaddy share a hometown, Modesto, California with George Lucas. Hence perhaps the fascination with machinery, plaid shirts, (see American Graffiti), and beards. They're a haunted band, spooked by technology, the receding Western frontier and our shared disappearing youth.
They were great last Sunday, in a sold out gig close to the Ouseburn Valley, part of Newcastle's glorious industrial heartland which became a wasteland on its decline from the sixties onward and then rose again as a music, arts and drinking district thanks to an injection of lottery money twenty years back . The venue was oddly fitting, not one I'd been to previously, a glorified pig shed with portacabin toilets outside the front doors that flushed automatically while you were mid-pee, The friend I went with asked 'Is it Auschwitz?' when we first turned the corner. Fortunately it was not. The venue was fine, so were the acoustics, and so very much, were the band.
Grandaddy are fittingly, (given their name), a band that make increasing sense with the passing of time. The Sophtware Slump, their 2000 album, (and probably the record of that year), is their definitive statement, Half The Beach Boys decide to form a band with half of Kraftwerk and forge the legacy of the quieter more reflective side of Grunge onto the union. But despite this record being so good that it says all they really need to, they continue to make excellent ones seventeen years on. Their album from this year Last Place is mighty fine. They also played a sterling set last Sunday, which told the whole story of their recording history from their earliest days to now, all to a filmed backdrop of American nature, the whole thing one of the most beautiful eerie experiences of estranged, joyous modern nostalgia you could possibly hope for. It was also Jason Lyttle's birthday which felt nice!
30 Days of Wes Anderson # 2 Love
Love's still explosive sounding single from 1966. used by Anderson on Bottle Rocket.
Songs About People # 339 Don & Dewey
And an instrumental tribute to Don & Dewey from the second It's a Beautiful Day album.
Song of the Day # 1,169 Dewey Terry
This is a rather wonderful small classic from 1972 solo album Chief, by one half of rock and roll duo Don & Dewey.
Saturday, April 1, 2017
Songs About People # 338 Wes Anderson
To continue the theme, a song by Melburnian Alex Lahey. Nothing quite like going to the cinema holding hands with someone when you're young.
30 Days of Wes Anderson # 1 The Rolling Stones
Wes Anderson more than probably any other film-maker of the last two decades has popularised a certain kind of retro-chic musical, cinematic, literary and aesthetic taste. This chimes very much with the kind of thing I'm drawn to and in appreciation here are thirty songs from his films for April. To set off with a track that The Royal Tennenbaum's virtually recovered to popular consciousness, a fine example of the early Stones deft and very English balladry from Between the Buttons. Here's the tent scene between Margo and Richie where it features. For muso types who like this kind of discrepancy, (OK, trainspotters), it should be noted that the moment where She Smiled Sweetly clicks on to Ruby Tuesday in the scene this is actually a moment of disjoint. The latter song in fact precedes the former on the first side of the original American LP release, (where there's also another track on the running order between the two).
Song of the Day # 1,168 Suburban Reptiles
Seventies New Zealand who seem to be bemoaning the lack of things to do on a Saturday night. Life's tough all over! They don't half seem cross about it though.
Friday, March 31, 2017
Songs About People # 337 Franz Mozart
'Meet the new Mozart. He's in the bed where commerce sleeps with art..'
From Paddy, to Ronnie Spector and back to Paddy. A slightly heart-rending tale of Mozart coming back for a second go at things having learned from the errors he made first time round and aiming for a more modest and altogether less inspired success this time round.. From Prefab Sprout's 2009 album Let's Change the World With Music.
March Review
This month, as Britain transitioned rather wonderfully from winter to spring there was plenty of new stuff musically that caught my ear. good new albums from The Shins, Valerie June, Moonlandingz, Real Estate, Spiral Stairs and on this last date of March the new Goldfrapp record which does the crunchy, cinematic dancefloor things we already know they do rather nicely. Also promising tasters of forthcoming albums from Fleet Foxes and Benjamin Booker, Grandaddy, just fabulous live at the Hoults Yard in Newcastle on Jason Lyttle's birthday, and a wonderful album from Mount Eerie called A Crow Looked At Me, which almost acts as a self-assistance manual, to help listeners cope with personal loss.
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