Songs Heard on the Radio # 52 Blossoms

Excellent. Their debut single. Out round about now. Again I have Mike Joyce to thank for this.

Song(s) of the Day # 481 Bill Fay

A friend has died. Always time to pause for thought. Here's a song from Bill Fay's new album. Recently re-activated musically and making records for the first time since the Seventies. This is for you Ray. God's speed!

Album Reviews # 43 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Hits Album # 10 Keep on Chooglin'

Keep on Chooglin'  is total nonsense forty five years down the road. After two days of struggling with Born on the Bayou, one of Creedence's  greatest songs, this is easier. On vinyl, it's hopeless. The sentiments don't last. It makes greater sense as the last song of Creedence's last song at Woodstock, where there was far too much white blues that doesn't particularly travel, and the audience was asleep, It has to be said though that John's harmonica playing makes it make some kind of sense. Time to turn the record over.

Song(s) of the Day # 480 Gal Costa

Leading light of the Brazilian Tropicalia movement of the Late Sixties. Incredible arrangements. Here are the first couple of songs from her breakthrough debut album of 1968. Hunt down the rest if you care for this.

Jimmy Page in 1957

From the skiffle craze of 1957. Taken from the Huw Wheldon Show on the BBC. He wants to be a biological researcher. A remarkable clip! The second song they do is Cotton Fields, a standard which Creedence, who seem to be the flavour of the day round here covered twelve years later.

Covers # 3 Little Richard

And while we're with Born on the Bayou, ere's Little Richard's version, recorded in 1971. I imagine the band were glad to hear it. Certainly the best cover of this I've heard, certainly better than the versions Etta James and The Foo Fighters put out

Songs Heard on the Radio # 51 The Beastie Boys

A selection from Smiths drummer Mike Joyce just now. Very nice too!

Album Reviews # 43 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Hits Album # 9 Born On The Bayou (Part 2)

'I can remember the fourth of July runnin' through the backwood bare. 
And I can still hear my old hound dog barkin' chasin' down a hoodoo there.' 

“I would sit in my little apartment – which was very sparse – and stare at the wall. That’s how I wrote. I would stare at it all night. There was nothing hanging on the wall, because I didn’t have any money for paintings. It was just a beige wall. It was a blank slate, a blank canvas. But it was also exciting. I could go anywhere and do anything, because I was a writer. I was conjuring that place deep in my soul that was me.”
John Fogerty

Born on the Bayou is an evocation of the dream state. The song expresses the freedom Fogerty talks about in the quote above. The members of Creedence were not from the Bayou or the Southern States but that's where they wanted to be, the traditions and mindset, the music, literature, culture and oral tradition far richer and more nuanced than anything they came across growing up in Suburban California. The well that they determined to draw on. This song, along with Proud Mary which was the other side of the band's real commercial breakthrough single in early 1969, was their moment of realisation as well as their moment of differentiation from everything around them.

For me, it takes me back to my own childhood which was spent in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia, at the end of the Sixties while unbeknown to me Creedence were climbing to prominence in The States and elsewhere.Walking down my back garden path to the swimming pool, at the age of five, in a world awash with brilliant sunlight, past chameleons on trees and chungalulus, (millipedes), snaking away ahead of me across the paving. Alive, as only a child really is to the mesmirising sensations of living existence. I commit to my own trance of memory whenever I hear this just as Fogerty and his band are committing to theirs.

The hum as the track kicks in is almost avant gard, something the band could not really have been accused of thereafter. But when John Fogerty's voice starts to roar and the drums particularly kick into momentum while bass and rhythm guitar provide the undertow for the melody and drive Fogerty layers on top, it's clear the band are establishing their signature.

What Fogerty's saying here is I think quite profound. In its simplest sense it's music as a channel of indescribable magic. An understanding and deep rooted longing for what's past, the strange unreality of living in an eternal, shifting present, the anticipation of what's to come, the knowledge of what will endure long after we are no longer here to experience it. All life is here. 

Much of Creedence's music is haunted with a sense of otherness but this, for me more than anything else they ever did is immersed within that other world like the moment at night when we shut down reality and surrender to dream. It's myth creation, one of the most powerful acts that Rock and Roll music can achieve. Illusion which becomes solid, shared experience the moment others buy into it. As good as it gets. At least the way I look at it!

Song of the Day # 479 Jackson C. Frank

Where Nick Drake and a fair bit apparently of where Tim Buckley's influence come from. Not all of his lyrics stand up but I think this one and the accompanying song do.

May 12th 1965 The Rolling Stones

 

Recorded 50 years ago today.

Album Reviews # 43 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Hits Album # 9 Born On The Bayou

This is the most important and best Creedence song of all. Just watch this clip from Woodstock where the band had to play at 3 O'Clock on Sunday morning after a terminally dull two hour Grateful Dead set which had sent the crowd to sleep before they arrived. I've been thinking about this song all week and trying to think how to write about it. I'll have to get back to you for the full review. One of the very greatest songs the Sixties came up with!

Song of the Day # 478 The MC5

The MC5 do Soul. And very well. From their second album Back in the USA.

May 11th 1941 Eric Burdon

Still one of the finest music videos ever made. Eric Burdon, 'the leader' as Alan Price called him at their Hall of Fame inauguration speech where Burdon himself was notably absent. Chipped tooth and surly as hell. But also Price himself, taciturn and almost completely still throughout, The three front men going for a walk. Chas Chandler, big as can be and Hilton Valentine's wonderful smile at the end of the song. Their bow. As for that song itself, apparently Dylan drove off the highway onto the roadside to give it his full attention and compose himself when he first heard it being played on his car radio.

Album Reviews # 43 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Hits Album # 8 Fortunate Son

'And when the band plays 'Hail to the chief. Ooh they'll point the cannon at you.'

Back on track. This one fairly zips along. Less than two and a half minutes and the stand out track from Creedence's third album of 1969, Willie & the Poor Boys. Inspired, partially at least, by the wedding the year before of David Eisenhower, Ike's Grandson to Julie Nixon, Richard's daughter.

'When I wrote "Fortunate Son," Julie Nixon was hanging around with David Eisenhower. And you just had the feeling that none of those people were going to be involved with the war. In 1969, the majority of the country thought morale was great among the troops, and like eighty percent of them were in favor of the war. But to some of us who were watching closely, we just knew we were headed for trouble ... It was written, of course, during the Nixon era, and, well, let's say I was very nonsupportive of Mr. Nixon There just seemed to be this trickle down to the offspring of people like him. You got the impression that these people got preferential treatment, and the whole idea of being born wealthy or being born powerful seemed to really be coming to the fore in the late-sixties' confrontation of cultures. I was twenty-three years old, I think. I was mad at the specter of the ordinary kid who had to serve in an army in a war that he was very much against. Yet the sons of the well-to-do and powerful didn't have to worry about those things. They were fortunate. I thought, all these guys were running around saying, "It's good for America" — Nixon or whoever was saying this. Yet their kids ain't going.'John Fogerty

                             

Like much of Fogerty's writing a specific emotion leaps out of the song, on other occasions, joy, fatalism, dread. But in this case pure fury. Not by any means unpatriotic, in a way the track it most closely aligns with is Springsteen's Born in the USA, which came fifteen years later. It's probably the most specific song ever written about the Vietnam draft and what it actually meant to those most vulnerable to it. The song itself matches the lyric's sentiment in terms of lack of compromise.'John Fogerty... rasps out the lyrics... in a voice filled with bile and uses his guitar as a weapon to run machine-gun stitches right through everybody who's ever abused a privilege.'
Dave Marsh, The Heart of Rock and Soul

Worth comparing with The Jefferson Airplane's Volunteers, which sounds next to this as if its skipping along at an anti-war demonstration. Fortunate Son doesn't whole back for a second and in two and a half minutes it's gone.Its message is abundantly clear and like all of Fogerty's greatest statements holds equally true today.

Song of the Day # 477 Sly & the Family Stone

From Fresh. For the melody, the voice, the bass line and the groove.

Album Reviews # 43 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Hits Album # 7 Commotion

    'Rushin' to the treadmill.'

1970 album, Cosmo's Factory was given its name by drummer Doug 'Cosmo' Clifford in reference to John Fogerty's ceaseless, unflagging work ethic, an expectation he applied to the rest of his bandmates as well as himself.  But not every day on the production line was a fruitful one. Here's the first dud on the record. Very occasionally Creedence found themselves sinking into their own swamp of sound. No surprise really considering that in 1969 they chose to release no less than three full studio albums. Here they cave in to the worst tendencies of the time. More specifically, the jam. While most of their material sounds refreshingly apart from the time and place it came out, fittingly immersed in clear water, this I'm afraid is knee deep in 1969 urban mud. Fogerty is stuck in city traffic, never a place he wants or ought to be. Not his natural element and it shows.It all leads to an ugly outbreak of leaden and unprepossessing riffing. The irony is that for a song that seems to be about ceaseless, aggravating modern noise it only succeeds in adding to it. Only three minutes long but it feels much longer. B Side to Green River, a far more lucid, graceful statement.

Song of the Day # 476 Elvis Presley

After a week of being immersed in Creedence music and story I found my way back to this. Where their sound comes from.

The Cure

Simply because at 10.15 on a Saturday night by some act of kismet I chose this song to listen to on my iPod while sitting on my windowsill drinking a bee. And it sounded pretty good.

Album Reviews # 43 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Hits Album # 6 Lodi

'Things got bad and things got worse. I guess you know the tune.' 

Creedence were criticised at the time and have been ever since for being repetitive, samey. I guess if you listen through to their albums there is a point to be made. But the songs I've written about thus far from this hits album have successively drawn their inspiration from Rockabilly, Rock and Roll, Rock Music, Soul, music and here with Lodi. pure Country.They had strings to their bow.

'On “Lodi”, I saw a much older person than I was, ’cause it is sort of a tragic telling. A guy is stuck in a place where people really don’t appreciate him. Since I was at the beginning of a good career, I was hoping that that wouldn’t happen to me. '

John Fogerty

Some song for a twenty three year old. This one is life viewed from the bottom of a glass. Pure self-pity, never the greatest subject matter for Rock and Roll but the very lifeblood of blue collar Country Music which the band was also steeped in. The song is about a down on his heels musician and the place he winds up in. A kind of imagined, Earthly purgatory for those without the talent or luck to back up their dreams. In this case in a nondescript, and real town in San Joaquin County, California.

Fogerty had apparently never actually visited the place and picked it because its name sounded right which it very much does. Lodi itself has understandably made the most of what potentially could come across as a snub and uses the song's kiss off line 'Oh lord, I'm stuck in old Lodi again....' as its calling card and tourist catchphrase. It's in the heart of Californian wine country and looks like a good place for a Sideways stop judging by its Wikipedia page.Not as bad as Fogerty paints it. He was really, surely only after the name.

More than any song I can think of, this describes a depressed, defeated mindset. Its lyric is clearly not about John Fogerty himself who had talent to burn and knew it. A great writer, (which Fogerty surely was in addition to his skills as a musician), draws ruthlessly on the material around him and you have to wonder who exactly he had in mind for his model for this one. The tale of a mid-grade musician hitting a brick wall might apply to a greater extent to his bandmates and what might have happened to them had they not met him. The more I read of them researching this, they, particularly Cook and Clifford, come across as waspish and mean-spirited in their attitude to Fogerty, certainly never quite appreciative of the talent they hitched themselves a ride with at High School and the life his abilities and drive allowed them despite the graft they obviously put in themselves and their own talents. Perhaps I'm being harsh. In any case, the Creedence story would make a great, tragic American novel or movie. All life is there.

Still, who's to know the truth about musicians relationships with one another, both as musicians but also as people. Most long-serving bands generally come across as doomed, dysfunctional marriages to a lesser or greater degree. This one more perhaps than any other. Ultimately, Creedence's story will always be most of all about the music. And that's as should be. In any case, another beautifully crafted moment. A narrative, done and dusted in three and a half minutes and twenty eight lines. Not an inch of fat on this one, no repetition or chorus either. The B Side to Bad Moon Rising. Its lyrics speak for themselves.

'Just about a year ago

I set out on the road

Seekin' my fame and fortune

Lookin' for a pot of gold

Things got bad and things got worse

I guess you know the tune

Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again

Rode in on the Greyhound

I'll be walkin' out if I go

I was just passin' through

Must be seven months or more

Ran out of time and money

Looks like they took my friends

Oh Lord, I'm stuck in Lodi again

A man from the magazine

Said I was on my way

Somewhere I lost connections

Ran out of songs to play

I came into town, a one night stand

Looks like my plans fell through

Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again

If I only had a dollar

For every song I've sung

Every time I had to play

While people sat there drunk

You know, I'd catch the next train

Back to where I live

Oh Lord, stuck in a Lodi again

Oh Lord, I'm stuck in a Lodi again'

Songwriters

JOHN C. FOGERTY

Published by

Lyrics © CONCORD MUSIC GROUP, INC

Song of the Day # 475 Les Troubadours Du Roi Badouin

The most beautiful piece of music. Stop for a moment and listen to this. Belgian missionary Father Guido Haazen leading a 45-strong Congolese children's choir. An African interpretation of a Catholic Mass and all the weirder and eerier for that  with its echoes of colonialism and power. Recorded in 1958. Later co-opted, incredibly in Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film If about British Public School rebellion. It's Fifty Eight minutes in here. I was directed to this by Jimmy Page and an old Mojo Magazine article.

8th May 1951 Chris Frantz

Song of the Day # 474 Pins

From Manchester though you wouldn't know it. New single coming off the back of a tour supporting Wire.

Album Reviews # 43 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Hits Album # 5 Who'll Stop The Rain

'Five year plans and new deals. Wrapped in golden chains...'

John Fogerty was much more on the money politically than pretty much everyone around him on the music scene on the cusp of the Seventies. While others rattled sabres and talked of impending revolution he understood to a greater degree exactly what the counterculture were up against. A corrupt and bitterly aggressive administration and behind them a systematically  organised and effective secret service and an unassailably formidable military machine. Events proved him right. Nixon swept the 1972 election. The right kicked back.The Vietnam war raged on.

Woodstock proved a false dawn. The Hippie elite retreated behind gates in the Los Angeles mountainside following the Manson Murders and Altamont. None of the early, great Psychedelic Bands from LA and San Francisco remained a commercial  force as the Sixties turned into the Seventies. Hendrix, Morrison, Gram Parsons and Janis Joplin died. Crosby, Stills & Nash's success heralded an age of introspective and largely self-satisfied singer songwriters. The energy of the counterculture shifted from music to film with the advent of the New Hollywood and the emergence of Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, Friedkin, Rafelson and Bogdanovich. Creedence meanwhile rode high in the charts for the next couple of years until band politics and Fogerty's dictatorial grip and the discontent it bred finally pulled them too apart.

Who'll Stop the Rain is to some degree a wake, though a transcendent and melodic one. Fogerty better than anyone else at the time understood the power of weather as the most appropriate metaphor to describe politics and change.Dave Marsh in his book on the 1001 best singles ever made The Heart of Rock & Soul posted this song as the best thing Creedence ever released and he may have a point. Where Fogerty is actually directing his gaze within the song though remains vague.

'The mourning in John Fogerty's voice and the elegant guitar figure on which it rides make it seem he's expressing some specific, tangible grief or grievance. But what's it about? Woodstock, where it poured as Creedence played? Vietnam, with America mired in mud?The clues in other Creedence songs lead to a different conclusion: Fogerty is rock and roll's version of an Old Testament prophet, preaching pessimism rather than damnation. "Long as I remember," he begins, with an intonation that implies he forgets nothing, clear back to the beginning. Alternately furious and heartsick, he spins a tale that includes political events, rock concerts seen from both sides of the stage, and private attempts to make sense of his life and the world.With his band, particularly drummer Doug Clifford, working at peak efficiency, Fogerty magisterially draws upon a broad knowledge of American music: The lyrics, the beat, the guitar line, the melody allude to folk songs, country tunes, old R&B hits, Stones-style rock and roll. Yet what draws you back is the grain of his voice, the things it contains and expresses but cannot speak. And this voice is as far from the assurance of Elvis or Aretha as you can get. Fogerty seems confident of only two things: his doubts and his powerlessness. Hooking his audience as firmly as he's hooked himself, Fogerty makes his worries ours. The final chords ring out anthemically without resolving anything at all.The idea that rock and roll is lighthearted good time music stops here, at the gateway to its heart of darkness.'
Dave Marsh, The Heart of Rock & Soul

x

Songs Heard on the Radio # 50 The Smoking Trees

Always something playing on the radio. Waiting with dread for how the UK General Election unwinds and this has helped some. The word 'groovy' springs to mind. From an LA based band. It seems some bands are intent on writing all the great songs that didn't actually appear during the Sixties. The Allah Las would surely approve.

Album Reviews # 43 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Hits Album # 4 Long As I Can See The Light

                                    'Put a candle in the window. 'Cos I feel I've got to move.'

It's easy to forget but these songs come from life or death times. This song gives a hint of the era's darkness at the same time as giving voice to an individual living through its determination not to lose sight of the light. It's there in the title and there in the song. I searched in vain today for background information on this. The lack of Internet results surprised me as I think it's among their very best despite being dimmed in popular affection on release by its cheerier double A Side Looking Out My Back Door. The single reached #2 at the end of 1970. Creedence, staggeringly, never achieved an American # 1 in the singles charts, instead hitting the # 2 spot a remarkable five occasions. This one's also the closing song on their last great album Cosmo's Factory. Stretching out almost lazily past three and a half minutes but the tale it has to tell requires it.

During their career they band tried their hand successfully at a lot of things. Rock and Roll, Country, Folk, Bluegrass, Blues,R&B,  even Weird Psychedelia on their first album but this was the closest they came to an authentic Soul record that would have slotted into place and more than that, jumped out at you from any Stax compilation from the Sixties or early Seventies.The playing is clipped and precise, particularly Doug Clifford's drumming which, as so often, provide the bedrock for the band's sound, but it's John Fogerty's extraordinary vocal performance that really drives this home.

'Fogerty sounded about as black as any Caucasian rock singer has any right to. Let's not mince words: along with Janis, Van and precious few others, Fogerty was a vocal freak, blessed with a larynx that defied genetic determinism. Fusing the influences of Little Richard and Solomon Burke - with a tincture of Tom Jones for good measure - he sang with an inflamed roar that raises the hairs on one's hands.' 
Barney Hoskyns

Inflamed roar is right. In terms of the song's sentiments it comes from a dark place but obviously is determinedly set to hang on in there. Fogerty was a man who was almost drafted in the Mid-Sixties but was spared to make his series of great statements and wasn't going to blow the second chance he had been given. Like a lot of his songs it sounds like something that needed to be written. It's among the most 'alone' lyrics Fogerty ever wrote, but even here he's certainly no nihilist. No Ian Curtis although he had an understanding and understandable wariness of the darkness. An essential optimism almost always shows through at least in song though his biography does tell us that he endured a couple of decades of darkness and no little bitterness when Creedence finally split up acrimoniously. This story at least seems sure to have a happy ending. The 'yeah, yeah, yeah, oh yeah' towards the end of the song indicate as clearly as possible that he'll get where he's going.

Ben E. King 1938 - 2015

A belated song for Ben E. King who died a week back. Not Stand By Me which great as it is has just been played into the ground. Here's the original of the tune that Aretha turned into possibly her greatest record eight years later in 1970. Both singles strangely reached # 11 in the Billboard charts. Starts with the Stand By Me shuffle for those that want a bit of that even now.

Song(s) of the Day # 473 Nadine Shah

There seems to be a lot of great upcoming musical talent in the area that I've landed up in. The North East of England.I first heard Nadine Shah yesterday evening in session on the radio. Quite immediate and with the same surety and poise of some of the great performers in the Rock and Roll canon. The bass, and drums on the track above are instantly gripping and then the voice comes in. The voice! Definitely a touch of Marianne Faithful, PJ, Siouxsie and Nick Cave about her but she is distinctively strong enough to deserve attention in her own right. And on many of the songs off her new album Fast Food, recently released, the lilt of her South Shields comes through loud and clear.A real talent. Goth. But in a good way.

Songs Heard on the Radio # 49 Bill Callahan

'There's sap in the trees if you tap 'em.'

More than a touch of Chris Bell's wonderful You & Your Sister on this. But lovely nonetheless.

Album Reviews # 43 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Hits Album # 3 Up Around the Bend

'Fix your mind on a crystal day...'

'I put a little music room in my house in late ’69, and I was up there with a guitar, fiddling around with a lick from [Marty Robbins’] “White Sport Coat (And A Pink Carnation)”. Later, I was out on my motorcycle riding around Berkeley, probably going around a corner. It had this sense of urgency. So when I got home, I went up to that room and married the urgency of going somewhere to that riff. And I made a whole song out of, ‘We don’t know where we’re going, but we’re on our way.’ Y’know, the way all kids feel – just immortal. '

John Fogerty

Two minutes forty four seconds. Labelled 'innocuous' by American music critic Dave Marsh but it's better than that. Living in the moment and heading into a better future. Less precise  as a song than many Creedence numbers which often locate themselves very specifically. This one I guess is about the mythic highway and escape from the horrible, historical time Creedence found themselves in towards something better. Imagining yourself into a different time and place. With one of the best, sharpest, cleanest, riffs John Fogerty ever came up with. Sounds great coming out of a jukebox. It adds fuel to Springsteen's claim, made on his inauguration speech for their entry to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that they were among many other things a dance band.Reached Number 4 in the States, with Run Through the Jungle about which more later, on the flip side.

Song of the Day # 472 Mbogwana Star

Congolese electronic street music.

Album Reviews # 43 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Hits Album # 2 Travelin' Band

'Take me to the hotel. Baggage gone, oh well...'

Clocks in at two minutes twenty four. Three seconds longer than Bad Moon Rising. Creedence songs don't outstay their welcome except when they do. For the most part they were at their very best when they kept it short. This was B-Side to Who'll Stop The Rain which reached Number 2 in the States in 1970. A tale of constant touring for which John Fogerty played many of the instruments including brass and piano.

This is the early blast of Rock and Roll reborn. The sound for the most part of  Fogerty paying full throated tribute to Little Richard and like many things during his career it turned round and bit him when the band was obliged to pay damages out of court to one of his record companies a couple of years later when they threatened a plagiarism lawsuit.

For me this seems somewhat unjust as Little Richard never sounded quite like this. A soundtrack to constant touring and the sheer euphoria that it must have been to experience being pretty much the biggest thing in America which they were at the time. The band sound like a freight train behind Fogerty. Creedence blew away their peers at moments like these.

5th May 1959 Ian McCulloch

Song of the Day # 471 Stella

From 1967. I know no more except that it's great.

Album Reviews # 43 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Hits Album # 1 Bad Moon Rising

'Looks like we're in for nasty weather...'

As I carry on with this blog it becomes a harder exercise but something I need to perservere with.It started off as an album review exercise but in time has turned into the thing I said on my first post that it wouldn't be. Diary entries. Life is a more difficult road to navigate than you ever thought it might be on the offset. However, time to get back to long playing records. I feel now that I should review Creedence. They're a band quite apart, Never really an albums band. Much more entuned to the individual song and the emotion and feeling that gets across. So I'm going to review the first record I bought of theirs in round about 1983. A greatest hits record. I'll do a song at a time, one a day, 'til the album's done.

First up is Bad Moon Rising. Clearly among their finest songs and one I imagine that is closest to leader John Fogerty's heart. Like so many of his songs it's deeply political and scared, talking of deep primeval fears that have always lurked within us, but also understanding of the audience it's reaching out to. It got to Number 1 or else Number 2 in every chart it registered on as far as I know, And quite right too. Celebratory, despite it's darkness and sure to hit a chord every time it's played in a public place. You'll see the reaction of those around you whenever people hear it's opening chords and Fogerty's vocals. I've yet to meet anyone who doesn't react positively to this.

Of course it's also laden with gloom. Written with Nixon and Vietnam in mind and aware that the Hippie Dream all around them is utter nonsense and there's a need to return to basic values and sounds. But this is no act of nostalgia. Not a Rock and Roll song that could have been churned out in the Fifties to an unaware and contented America. Times have changed. Important figures who might have transformed the landscape are dead and the world is now one of impending chaos where a short, sharp but also sweet statement is required. Two minutes and twenty one seconds and it's gone. Fogerty was quite right that things were about to get ugly. They did over the next few years across America and elsewhere.

Still. One of the best songs I know. It resonates with me today just the same as when I first heard it. We have an election in the UK in three days time when appalling things could happen if the result is wrong and the sense of impending dread and need to respond is just the same. Creedence always helps!

4th May 1961 The Marcels

I once made the mistake of putting this song on the jukebox at my local shortly after Man. City had stolen the title from United with virtually the last kick of the season while some deeply disgruntled United fans sat at the bar. Still, a great song which was number one in the UK all those years back.

Song of the Day # 470 The Weather Station

On the Canadian road. Opening track from singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman's forthcoming third album Loyalty which is out next week.Echoes of Joni in her voice but also the Fairport Convention strand of British Folk.

Nick Kent Sound of the Seventies 1977

Finally getting towards the end of this series a year after starting it. From Kent's yearly selections in the appendix of his fine memoir Apathy For The Devil.

1. Elvis Costello - Watching the Detectives

2. Iggy Pop - Neighborhood Threat

Kent chose The Idiot and Lust For Life both released in this year.

3. Television  - Prove It

One of Kent's most famous pieces was his review of this lots' debut album Marquee Moon which was his choice here.

4. David Bowie - Joe the Lion

5. The Sex Pistols - Bodies

6. Steely Dan - Deacon Blues

Kent chose the album this hails from Aja

7. Randy Newman - You Can't Fool the Fat Man

From Little Ciminals, again Kent picked the album

8. Al Green - Dream

From Green's last record The Belle Album

9. Talking Heads - The Book I Read

10. Ian Dury & the Blockheads - Clever Trevor

Again Kent opted for the parent album New Boots & Panties

Record Sleeves # 33 Bob Dylan - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

A classic image. Just saw Sara Rotolo's autobiography in an Oxfam Bookstore window round the corner. It has the same image on its front cover. She's the woman picture on Dylan's arm here. A moment of youth and love captured forever. Shot on a one block side street connecting West 4th and Bleeker called Jones Street. Rotolo is sadly no longer with us while Dylan himself of course soldiers on. She has a considerable influence as muse in the contents of the same album. A defining and wonderful record.

2nd May 1980 Dexys Midnight Runners

Thirty Five Years ago this was top of the UK charts. One of the best ever UK Number Ones.

Things I've Found on My Local's Jukebox # 70 Helen Reddy

For anyone, like me who grew up on Radio 2 during the Seventies. When this was on. All the time.

Songs Heard on the Radio # 48 The Unthanks

Sunday morning. Rain pattering on the window pane. I've got toothache. But at least the radio's good. Not least this. Played in tribute to the 150th Anniversary of Alice in Wonderland  being published.

Song of the Day # 469 The Doors

I was about seventeen and my record collection was really starting and mushrooming at one and the same time. Like many at the same age I'd fallen hard for The Doors and bought all six of their studio albums within a period of six months. My mother decided at one point to hoover my room. Well I was seventeen and couldn't be expected to do it myself. For the first and only time she decided to put on something of mine just to hear what I was listening to. It wasn't on for long and she never did so again.

I'm still fond of The Doors. It's something your supposed to grow out of. Morrison is meant to be the defining factor. Sixth form poetry and general oafishness. But I think their music stands up for the most part, certainly better than most of the contemporary San Francisco stuff which I think is irretrievably outdated. They still pack a punch.

2nd May 1980 Joy Division

The last gig they played before the death of Ian Curtis.

Song(s) of the Day # 468 Ron Sexsmith

Ron Sexsmith has a very simple world perspective. Here's a hymn to the dog he'd most like, and another to the person he most loves. But he's a craftsman with a knack of putting over emotions and melodies really effectively. Songs two and three from his latest record.

Things I've Found on My Local Jukebox # 69 Grace Jones

Friday night. Long week at work. Found this. Lake District tomorrow.

Arcade Fire - Month of May

Having come round at least slightly to Arcade Fire (at least to their The Suburbs album), on a train journey recently, we might as well start the month of May with this. Not perhaps a favourite song on the record but hey, it's May!

The Go-Betweens - 16 Lovers Lane

Friday morning. Here you are.

Song of the Day # 467 Arborist

An Arborist is a specialist in the care of trees. A worthwhile pursuit. It's also the name of a Belfast-based outfit and this is their debut single. It features Kim Deal one of the most wonderful and distinctive singers there is. Just wonderful for a Friday morning. My YouTube feed goes from this to a day in the life of an arboristfor those interested in exploring further.

Things I've Found on My Local's Jukebox # 68 The Cars

Life is difficult coming up to Fifty, without dependents trying to make sense of an upcoming General Election. So I put The Cars on the jukebox. Probably because I've been listening to BRONCHO for a day and a half.

Record Sleeves # 32 Richard & Linda Thompson - I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight

From a record I'm just discovering the greatness of on a Thursday afternoon drifting to Thursday evening when perhaps I should be working harder. The record was released 41 years ago today.