Song of the Day # 2,180 Billy Swan

A Number One hit in 1974. Written on a RM organ which Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge had given to him as a wedding gift.

Julie Driscoll

Songs About People # 1,039 Lana Turner

Something of an oddity this one. A French band, called...erm...The Frenchies, with their takes on things Stooges and Doll-ish. They also had a prolonged obssesion with Lana Turner. This track is ten minutes long and the album is called Lola-Cola.

Memories # 10 Big Audio Dynamite - E=MC2

On reflection I decided to put this particular series on hold for a while, lest it turn into a session of prolonged navel gazing. Will return intermittently. Here's one last one in the meantime for a first love.

Bowie's Books # 10 Money - Martin Amis

Song(s) of the Day # 2,179 Theatre Royal

Another for which I'm in debt to Pjggledy Pop, which tipped me off to them.

A band like they used to make bands. This longstanding Medway quartet, named after a Chatham theatre that is now demolished. Listening to their singles compilation, which came out last year, it seems as if they're also fluent in a craft of songwriting that is also barely existent anymore. Time and again demonstrating the kind of easy songwriting artistry that was commonplace when I was making my way through my late teens and early twenties as the Eighties advanced but has seemingly been slowly dying on the vine ever since.

Theatre Royal are masters of these almost forgotten arts.The early Beatles are probably the original reference point for what they do. Lennon and McCartney knocking out new songs together early morning in hotel rooms, fuelled by tea and cigarettes as they made their way from one small town Odeon to the next in '63. Impressions of The Jam, The Housemartins, The Pale Fountains, The Go-Betweens, New Order, Jasmine Minks and The Railway Children abound elsewhere.

Theatre Royal are by no means shamed by being mentioned in such illustrious company. They're that good. Virtually every song is assured and crafted and crying out for a far larger audience than the band have managed to garner for themselves in ten years of churning out singles, albums and touring the circuit.

 The band has an immediate, radiant charm. Oliver Burgess and Robbie Wilkinson take turns to write the songs and take the lead at the mic, Brendan Esmonde and Jon Gibbs provide solid bass and drums support. There's something quite winningly unpretentious and pure about what's on show here.  Theatre Royal. Another of this nation's saving graces.

Songs About People # 1,038 Dirk Bogarde

One for perhaps the suavest British film star of them all. From The Pace's 2014 record The Sane Society of which I can tell you little more. Except that it's excellent.

Memories # 9 The Doors - LA Woman

Four years in Riga. 2004-2008. White Russians at De Lacy's, and slightly inadvisable singing of this song.

Bowie's Books # 9 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Song of the Day # 2,178 27 Mars

Thanks to Marie-Agnes writer of Piggledy Pop, listed on the right hand side of this page for her kind words about this blog and drawing my attention to the stuff she posts herself. This is the first of several posts coming up highlighting great stuff that she's brought to my notice.

Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 447 Neil Innes

One for the late Neil. On Bowie's birthday coincidentally.

Herman's Hermits

Memories # 8 Prefab Sprout - Bonny

First year at university. Important friendships. Discussing books and ideas over late night coffee. Listening to records. Lots of literary guitar music was in vogue. The Smiths, R.E.M., The Go Betweens, The Triffids, Lloyd Cole & the Commotions. And these.

Songs About People # 1,037 Christopher Hitchens

Appropriately angry, shouty song for the old iconoclast.

Bowie's Books # 8 The Trial Of Henry Kissinger

Song(s) of the Day # 2,177 Mogadisco - Dancing Mogadishu (Somalia 1972 - 1991)

Quite funktastic! A wondrous compilation of Mogadishu club sounds from the days when 'both men and women sported huge afros, bell-bottom trousers and platform shoes. James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and The Temptation's funk were the talk of the town.' .

Not every song on here is revelatory but the best of it truly is.  Inevitably conjures thoughts of what the dancefloor scenes must have been like in Mogadishu at the time. As with the Habibi Funk compilation I wrote about on here a couple of weeks ago this is quite essential.

Songs About People # 1,036 Malcolm McDowell

One of the most distinctive actors of all gets grim, Gothy tribute.

Things Found on My Local's Jukebox # 446 Jacques Dutronc

Back in Toon!

Memories # 7 Echo & the Bunnymen

From college days. January 1983. The Bunnymen with one of the most outfield songs every to reach the Top Ten.

Bowie's Books # 7 Selected Poems - Frank O'Hara

As a New Yorker Bowie was drawn to the languid, comic perfection of Frank O'Hara, unofficial laureate of everyday life in the city.O'Hara transfigures the humdrum so that a lunch break spent walking the sidewalk where 'laborers feed their dirty/ glistening torsos sandwiches/ and coca cola with yellow helmets/on' glows in the memory.'

Song of the Day # 2,176 Brenda Russell

Fela

Memories # 6 Gary Numan - Are Friends Electric?

Thursday evening and watching Top of the Pops was such an absolute ritual shared with most of the country throughout my time growing up. Then the next day discussing what we'd seen in the playground. This made a particular impression. Quite stunning song and delivery, which I'm sure contributed to it ending up at Number One.

Bowie's Books # 6 Yukio Mishima - The Sailor Who Fell From Grace From The Sea

Song of the Day # 2,175 Mulatu Astatke

Another from the Q Magazine end of year playlists. This time from Kevin Morby who amongst the Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed selections you might expect, also chooses this. Apparently an influence on his Singing Saw and Oh My God albums.

Memories # 5 The Manic Street Preachers

The end of a relationship. Always one of the most painful moments. Crying at a window. Smoking a cigarette. Listening to this. I'd say Manic Street Preachers most moving song.

Bowie's Books # 5 Junot Diaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Song of the Day # 2,174 The Ashenden Papers

Features Jason Dezember also of The Plastic Shoelaces. Now he's back with The Ashenden Papers who haven't put out a record since 2011. This I imagine precedes an album which should be good going by this. It jangles all it wants to.

Eddy Current Suppression Ring - All in Good Time

Australia's Eddy Current Suppression Ring, truly one of the best bands of the current century, are nothing if not demonstrative. Every song it seems blasts off with major chord riffing, intent on suggesting to the listener, 'So you think the last song was good'. Every one is played as if it's their last, as if they're five of the Magnificent Seven, haring hell for leather back into town for their final hurrah. There's something truly heroic about this.

They're back, with All in Good Time, an album released at the end of last year, their first for eight years, to little public acclaim. Does the world not know how good they are? I visited a friend in Nottingham a couple of weeks ago, went into a record shop with him on the Saturday morning and this was playing. It took me about five seconds to ask the guy behind the counter who it was and I wasn't remotely surprised when he told me.

All in Good Time doesn't really tell us anything about them that we didn't already know. They've laid down enough markers in their time. 'We're the gift that keeps on giving. Vicariously living...' they declare in erm Vicariously Living. When was the last time Noel Gallagher wrote a lyric anywhere near as good as that. Almost twenty five years, that's how long. Eddy Current Suppression Ring come on as idiot savants but they're actually saviours. If the recipe is this simple, how come so few bands cook up anything as good as this?

In many respects this is old school, untutored Punk Rock at its finest. But Punk at its rawest and smartest. The kind of stuff Stooges, Saints, Wire, Gang of Four and X specialised in back in the day. Cocksure, both barrels loaded. Virtually every track here astonishes. Sure they work from a formula but frankly it's one in no need of re-invention. 

This album comes too late and too soon. Too late to be in my best of rundown for last year and too soon to be in this year's. Pitchfork just gave it between 6 and 7. Ha! Pearls before swine. It's a quite glorious record. Utterly without restraint or reserve or safety net. If it's taken as a John the Baptist for what's in store musically for 2020 this is going to be quite some year! 

Memories # 4 Haircut 100 - Favourite Shirts

The second memory in a row partially inspired by my good friend Philip, who came along at just the right time late into my secondary school days. Walking there one morning, (the buses must have been off for some reason), across the utterly beautiful Petersham Meadows. Philip said at a certain point. 'Where do we go from here? Is it down to the lake I fear.' A deeply stupid quote from an equally stupid Haircut 100 song that was riding high in the charts at that point in time. The moment has stayed with me forever for some reason.

Haircut 100 were not a particularly good thing. They scooped up everything that Orange Juice might have but didn't achieve chart wise, just as Duran Duran took what Japan gave them and did the same. As Alex Petridis wrote sagely about the former: ' the Smash Hits audience opted instead for Haircut 100 and their David Cassidy version of Orange Juice's sound: all of the tweeness, none of the intelligence or grit.'

Songs About People # 1,036 Dante Alighieri

While we're here, a jaunty piece of Irish music for the man himself.

Bowie's Books # 4 Inferno - Dante Alighieri

Probably the weightiest choice in here. Widely considered the Daddy of Italian literature.

Song of the Day # 2,173 Merton Parkas

In the Christmas edition of Q Magazine, there are a whole set of wonderful playlists from musicians who feature in their end of year album rundown which I'll plunder here over the next few weeks. Here's a selection from Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods. He chooses this, by prime movers of the late Seventies Mod Revival for its 'unexplored territory of yobbiness.'

Television - Little Johnny Jewel

From 2014 on here. for no other reason that I like the post, like Television and like the song.

'Television's seismic year zeroin classic.' Luke Haines. 

 

'Live in person, where your eyes and your groin and your undercover Sigmund Freud connections to the realistics of rock'n'roll can all be engaged at once. Television put out the kind of energy and mania hat must have permeated Marquee Club on Who nights circa '66. Trying to describe TV in print has sent rock-print luminaries like James Wolcott & Lisa Robinson scurrying to their thesauruses for words like 'dissolute' and 'chiaroscuro'. Trying to play with each other has caused Tom Verlaine and his various partners (one of whom for a week was me) all kinds of hyper-tense fall down the stairs scenes but brother,  IT WILL STAND!

This is the best band in America right now. It's like a subway ride thru a pinball game, like coming and puking at the same time, and they don't sound like The Velvets and they don't sound like Stooges. THEY DON'T EVEN SOUND LIKE NEW YORK BANDS ARE MEANT TO SOUND... And problematically enough they don't sound AT ALL like this single. But you should buy it, the least of reasons being that someday you will have it to show to yourself and your friends and say, 'See...'. Peter Laughner, Creem Magazine (February 1976)

This extraordinary single was the starting off point for American Punk and New Wave along with Patti Smith's 'Piss Factory' and Pere Ubu's 'Final Solution'. It was released in early 1976 on manager Terry Ork's Ork label, brought into being for the sole purpose of doing just that.  Guitarist Richard Lloyd apparently left the band as a result wishing for a more commercial release and was replaced momentarily by former Pere Ubu and rock journalist Peter Laughner who was to die of an overdose shortly thereafter. Possibly partially due to his disappointment in failing to secure a permanent role in the band he revered more than any other.

Television were a deeply mysterious proposition to those who had never seen them play and relied on reports of their growing legend coming out in fits and starts from the New York and British music press. This was their first release and the first fruits of their labour after Richard Hell's forced exit and his replacement with Fred Smith. Less of a star but a proper musician who allowed Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell and Billy Ficca to play as they'd wished to.

The record was surely not intended as a shot at charts of any sort but to fan the flames of the legend. The band had been playing regularly at CBGB's, Max's Kansas City and other New York underground haunts. They eventually secured a major deal with Elektra. But debut album Marquee Moon which came a year later was quite a different proposition. Far more practiced and polished if no less out there.

Part 1

Little Johnny Jewel is a truly odd document. A message from the underground, speaking a completely different language to its times, when such a thing as an underground genuinely still existed. A seven minute song split over the two sides of a seven inch single. It must have sounded outlandishly weird to the curious on its arrival in the UK in mid-76. On the surface a tribute to James Jewel Osterberg (aka Iggy Pop). Its narrative is odd and other-worldly, a proclamation of difference. Of individuality.

"Johnny Jewel is how people were maybe two hundred years ago," says Verlaine. "Back then, when people got up in the morning, they knew what they had to do to get through the day—there were 100% less decisions. Nowadays, we have to decide what we want to buy in grocery stores, what job to take, what work to do. But not Johnnie. For him, it's all right there—it's a freer state, and that's what my music is looking for.
"To understand Johnny, you should think of William Blake. He was the same kinda guy."

 

Part 2

 

'I put on Television's 'Little Johnny Jewel' and couldn't believe that they had the nerve to record it.. It made the New York Dolls sound like Yes - the bass had no bass, the guitars had no power at all and the singing was awful. In fact the whole record was awful. And epic. And completely brilliant and we never stopped playing it.' Julian Cope, Head On

 

 

'Now Little Johnny Jewel,
Oh, he's so cool,
He has no decision,
He's just trying to tell a vision.
Some thought that this was sad,
And others thought it mad,
They just scratching the surface,
JJ can do the floor kiss.
Was he on display?
No, no, not today.
All that guy ever said,
He said, "I want my little wing-head".
He half-asleep at night
Over his head, sensation of flight.
And he wake up dreaming,
Dreaming...
And he run down to the airport,
The rush, the roar,
And he crouched down behind a fence,
With a chest full of lights,
Then,
He loses his senses...
Oh Little Johnny Jewel,
He's so cool,
But if you see him looking lost
You ain't gotta come on so boss!
And you know that he's paid,
You know that he's paid the price,
All you gotta do for that guy
Is wink your eye.'

 

Verlaine 1976

Buffalo Springfield

Songs About People # 1,035 Kathleen Turner

Rock Me Amadeus guy does slightly frightening and frighteningly long song about Eighties femme fatale Kathleen Turner.

Memories # 3 Rolling Stones - Sympathy For The Devil

This song is an invitation to adulthood. In many respects Rolled Gold is the one Rolling Stones album you really need. It was one of the first records I bought. I can remember this booming out on my parent's tinny Fidelity music system in the front room of the family house in Richmond one afternoon when my friend Philip came round, as Sebastian Coe ran in a European Championship Final on the TV in the Living Room.

18 Larkfield Road, Richmond. 1975-1983.

Nik Cohn

My own review of that particular book from a few years back. The first in a series about Pop Culture books.

My favourite book of all in this respect. Nik Cohn was way ahead of the curve as a commentator on pop music and culture. First published in 1969, this book understands the core appeal of the form. That it's thrilling, immediate and ultimately disposable but at the same time incredibly important. It's also highly prescient, anticipating that something is going wrong, something has been lost from the initial rush and that pretentiousness was in danger of setting in.

Cohn has highly individualised tastes. He's writing before the canon has been established and can be critical of those that are now almost beyond reproach, Buddy Holly for example. He's also not sure that The Beatles were actually a good thing, despite acknowledging their talent. He's much more taken by The Who and The Stones. Oh and he loves P.J. Proby, a figure now almost entirely lost in history's mists. Proby gets a chapter to himself.  Occasionally the prose, very much of its time, grates against modern political correctness, his portrait of Otis Redding for example, borders on racism at points, (again from a modern perspective). 

Still, Cohn can really write. The book was set down in seven weeks in a rented cottage in Connamera, West Ireland in 1968. Ten hours a day at the kitchen table and sometimes halfway through the night too. His writing is immediate as the subject matter it writes of. There's no artifice, his sentences are quite brilliantly constructed to replicate the sheer thrill of what it's talking of, his judgements are absorbing. Altogether compelling reading it's an education, because it gives you a real idea of what it must have been like to experience the sixties, still pop's most important decade, from the inside. From my perspective it's the best there is and not simply because it got there first.

Bowie's Books # 3 Nik Cohn - Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom

Probably my own favourite piece of Rock criticism. To quote Evelyn Waugh, as O'Connell does here, ' A panegyric preached over an empty coffin.'

Song(s) of the Day # 2,172 Absolutely Free

A couple of tracks from Toronto electronic trio Absolutely Free and last year. According to their Spotify page their music is a 'neoteric journey through analog electronics, minimalism, world music, krautrock and house'. This is less cluttered than that description sounds.

Songs About People # 1,034 Alasdair Gray

One for the great Scottish writer and artist who has just passed.

Memories # 2 Chicory Tip - What's Your Name

I was born in Zimbabwe in 1965. My parents returned to England and Nottingham in 1972. Some culture shock for a six year old boy. The weather, the football, the music. The music certainly made an impact. An older sister having to decide between David Cassidy and Donnie Osmond and having chosen Cassidy, between him and Marc Bolan. A brother succumbing to the delights of Wig Wam Bam by The Sweet. And the first record I remember that I took to myself. This one.

Our family home between 1972 and 1975. 28 Private Road, Mapperley, Nottingham.

Bowie's Books # 2 Albert Camus - The Outsider

Free will and personal responsibility. An indescribably exciting book to read when you're a teenager. Camus was something of a Rock star before such a thing existed. Bowie, as a young Mod, would naturally have been drawn to him.

Song(s) of the Day # 2,171 Frankie & the Witch Fingers

Frankie & the Witch Fingers are a Los Angeles band who sound like something The Strokes and The White Stripes might have done had they chosen to make a record together while in their pomp. Powered by the rocket fuel Proto Punk attitude and sound that first fuelled The Stooges and The MC5 way back in the late Sixties. Also some more Psychedelic flavours sprinkled into the mix stir up reminders of Blue Oyster Cult, Steppenwolf and Iron Butterfly

There's absolutely nothing remotely original about their latest double album ZAM but there is something decidedly fresh going on here. Perhaps not one you'll want to listen to in its entirety but in short sharp bursts it seems guaranteed to energise.

Songs About People # 1,033 Kip Keino

A track for the ground-breaking Kenyan middle distance runner.of the Sixties and Seventies by Hazards of Swimming Naked. Rather nice one too.

Memories # 1 R.E.M. - Losing My Religion

And for the New Year again, another new series. We'll see how far this one takes me which I imagine will be relatively far. Related to the Nick Cave quote at the top of the page about memory. So, songs that I remember and the memories associated with them. A simple remit. This might involve partial reconstruction of memories I've already documented on here so forgive my self-indulgence (in fact for the whole series, a massive act of self-indulgence altogether).

Starting with this, a song that's been plaguing me for reasons I can't account for over the last fortnight. R.E.M., as anyone who knows me or has read much of this blog are the really important ones. Because they were 'my band'. Because I discovered them pretty much right at the beginning. Because I constructed so much of myself around their first few records throughout the Eighties and into the early Nineties. Because they were mine and in some strange way in my mind they remain mine all these years later. Much the same as any first love does.

1990, when this came out, I was in Komarno, Czechoslovakia, in what was then a rather grim, unprepossessing town on the border with Hungary. It's apparently changed greatly since and I plan to return if I can in the next couple of years. I was there just after the momentous political changes that had taken place there. I worked for eight months or so in the town as an English teacher in a Primary School and the Hungarian Gymnasium.

There are many tales to tell about that time, this one is merely incidental. I remember watching the  video to this song just after it first came out on MTV in a bar with a couple of American teachers called Amy and Corinne who were my only 'Western' company during that strange academic year that I spent in Southern Slovakia. We didn't know what to make of either the song or the video. But R.E.M..knew as they so often did. Perhaps this is the moment that they first really started flirting with pretension but try to tell me honestly that the song's not wonderful in many, many ways. It was just one more remarkable moment in a quite remarkable career. Ignore the knockers. At their best, they were quite sublime.

One of the first groups I taught at the Komarno Gymnasium in Czechoslovakia, (now Slovakia). I still remember the names of almost all the students in this picture almost thirty years on.

Neil Innes

I was very upset when my sister texted me while I was having a pint a couple of days ago to tell me that Neil Innes had died. As she said to me, a part of our childhood had died too but more than that, Innes was a very particular talent whose life deserves recognition, but first and foremost celebration.

He originally came to public notice as a member of Bonzo Dog Band, perhaps the greatest essentially comedic Rock band of all. Innes was content to play second fiddle for the most part to Viv Stanshall in the band, McCartney to his Lennon but was responsible for penning and singing many of their best songs.

His time there brought him into the orbit of The Beatles, The Bonzos performed Death Cab For Cutie in the nightclub scene in Magical Mystery Tour. At round about the same time he also started working with members of the Monty Python circle through their TV appearances on Do Not Adjust Your Set.

Innes career from that point on was almost inextricably linked with Beatles and Python. He worked with Eric Idle to produce the Rutles mockumentary and album. The latter is full of great Innes songs, parodies but also tributes to Beatles classics that find the perfect balance between whimsy and eulogy. Though McCartney apparently didn't like the project Lennon, and particularly Harrison, (who appeared briefly in it), approved.

My sister and I first discovered his talents through The Innes Book of Records, a late Seventies TV showcase series he wrote songs and appeared in a set of wonderfully judged promos for. It was a fabulous programme for kids to watch and enjoy, but also to learn from. Over the past couple of days I've watched clips from it and marvelled again at Innes' specific and wonderful gifts.

A writer whose metier was essentially a humorous one will probably always be thought of as a secondary talent by many. But Innes was anything but that. His songs were always about something. They mocked pomposity and arrogance and delighted in the good things in life in the most acute and insightful way. He, like so many of his generation when they go, is irreplaceable. I'm terribly sad at his loss.

Bowie's Books # 1 A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

New Year brings new thoughts. I'm not one for resolutions generally but having been doing this for almost eight years, do feel some sort of inwardly generated responsibility to start new series to help try keep this fresh. One of the best presents I received this Christmas was this, from my sister.

It's now almost four years since Bowie left the planet. It still feels a sore and poignant loss somehow. He made such a specific, inimitable contribution.  This, John O'Connell's documentation of his 100 favourite books is a reminder of that as well as some, scant consolation, reminding us what a great thinker he was if nothing else. Each selection has a chapter to itself, documenting the nature of the book focused upon, why it might have been important to Bowie and wonderfully, a track of his to listen to while reading it, I'll record them, one chapter, one day, at a time. By the time we're done it should be Spring.

To start with, A Clockwork Orange, an unsurprising choice. The parallels between Alex and Ziggy are clear as lurid, dystopian technicolor. The Kubrick film came out five months before the album. The chapter here about the book explores the differences between it and the film, why both cast an enduring spell on Bowie, (the song here is from Blackstar, his final album), and made me want to go back to the original one more time.

Song(s) of the Day # 2,170 Bifannah

Too cool for school grooviness for London / Madrid based collective Bifannah, (though they sing in Portuguese), who tick all requisite hipster boxes on their latest record Dancas Liquidas.

Loose and liquid limbed as you could possibly want, the album is one smooth, seamless ride, situating itself somewhere between Samba, Tropicalia and West Coast Psych.

Bifannah have supported Allah Las and Mystery Braves recently and this makes perfect sense. They slot in perfectly with both band's modus operandi. To call them laid back would be something of an understatement. They barely break into a sweat.

Judged by the terms and conditions it applies to itself from the off Dancas Liquidas is pretty much a flawless album. A California bachelor pad with pool party. Living the dream.