song of the week 25: crosby stills nash & young - woodstock

I've just been watching a BBC Four documentary about music in Los Angeles in the early seventies. There's something odd about the way I find some of these songs particularly evocative of the period. Odd because, although I did listen to them, a long time ago, this would have been a few years after their release. I would probably have been hitting my own "Me Decade" round about the time the Sex Pistols were making front page news.

There are maybe four albums in particular which bring on this strangeness: Joni Mitchell's Blue, Carole King's Tapestry, James Taylor's Greatest Hits and, most of all, Deja Vu by Crosby Stills Nash and Young.

To be honest these are artists I tend to airbrush out of my history in certain company. I used to own a lot of this music but much was culled from my record collection in the anti-singer-songwriter purge of, I don't know, probably 1986 or thereabouts when I'd decided to adopt some kind of post-punk/indie affectation. In latter years I've come to terms with my past predilections for massively unfashionable music.

For the benefit of younger readers, this song commemorates the landmark Woodstock music festival of 1969 and was recorded by three artists at the time, each version interesting in its own way: Joni Mitchell of course wrote it and included it on her 1970 Ladies of the Canyon album. Matthews Southern Comfort (starring ex-Fairport Convention vocalist Iain Matthews) took it into the UK Top 40, their only hit in a short-lived career. This is the version which appeared on the LA supergroup's aforementioned Deja Vu album of 1970:

frankly my dear...

Tonight I've been catching up with my backlog of videoed Jools Holland Later programmes. First episode up features kd lang with songs from her new album which sound pretty good. There's some Fleet Foxes, some Hugh Laurie (ahem), then kd brings the show to its end with "Constant Craving", her 1992 hit.

Now, judging by her performance all these years later, it seems to me that this is one number which lang has really sung way too many times before. She's really quite fed up of it. She can't be bothered anymore with the rise and fall of the melodic line, the rhythmic flow of the words. She's pretty much phoning it in. Seems to me that craving ceased to be constant a good while ago...



And this is how it's meant to sound:



It's not a hideous musical crime. Just a little disappointing.

we love beyonce!

The other night I was listening to Gnarls Barkley's St Elsewhere. It's one of those albums which I was a bit non-plussed with when first I bought it, but have come to really like the more I've listened to it. These days its accompanying marketing blurb would probably claim it was "genre-crossing". It certainly has some soul and gospel tinges, a touch of hip-hop and maybe even a jungle rhythm here and there.

Of course, "Crazy" was a huge hit and went down in "parp music history" when it became the first single to reach number one in the U.K. due to download sales alone. This great slowed-down version of the song really shows off Cee-Lo Green's fantastic soul voice. I particularly remember it featuring several times on Top of the Pops, although as far as I was able to determine at the time, this particular arrangement seemed to be unavailable in the shops.

Gnarls Barkley - Crazy (totp 2006-04-16)
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This TOTP clip from 2006 proved to be one of the last number ones featured in the weekly chart run-down programme as it was axed a month or so later. We still get a best-of-the-year round-up at Christmas but it's clear that those whose views hold sway at the Beeb no longer see a place for the "Pops" in the TV schedules, bursting as they are with top quality programmes night after night.

The Christmas and New Year TOTPs last week were notable in two respects. Firstly, they presented a selection of almost unremittingly poor songs. Some were better than others of course, but there was certainly nothing which sent me scurrying to Spotify or iTunes. Mind, it's not that Top of the Pops ever played consistently excellent music. I'm old enough to remember the glam rock days of the seventies and even at the age of thirteen I knew that there was better music out there than Mud, the Sweet and, er, Gary Glitter. I'm sure it's true that the programme never existed with the intention of showcasing the critically acclaimed artists of the day, but rather to promote the three-minute pop single in all its disposable, sometimes tacky, glory.

The second reason the TOTP programmes last week were notable is that I'd heard almost none of the songs before. Music is almost totally fragmented these days with, for example, entire radio stations devoted exclusively to one style--black music hived off to Radio 1 Xtra, indie to xfm, and so on. As a result I exist in what I laughingly like to consider a rarefied musical world inhabited by the likes of Radcliffe and Maconie, Guy Garvey and Jazz Record Requests, and so I never come into contact with the chart pop fodder being peddled on Radio 1.

It does mean though that I might miss a great pop song now and then. And we can't have that. Come on, the Beeb. Bring the Pops back!

(Just to prove, I hope, that I'm not just a terrible muso snob, here's a gem from the archive. It was massively popular, has never--to my knowledge--been played on Radcliffe and Maconie. I think even Jazz Record Requests has so far steered clear too. It's a great song though and this is a great performance. Whassup Top of The Pops?!)

bad cover version

This week on "Later with Jools Holland", we learn that Diana Krall, for many years entranced by Brazilian rhythms, has felt sufficiently moved to cram her new album choc full of bossa nova tributes. To illustrate this, she slides into a husky gender-reassigned version of "Girl from Ipanema".

Now I like a bit of jazz as much as the next man but I just can't get on with this. Slurry and out-of-tune, for me it's bordering on Vic Reeves territory. It's a classic tune Diana. Why condemn it to such a painful and unnecessary death?

.

On the up-side, this week's programme also includes the very excellent Unthanks and some great soul from Maxwell.

kinky afros

In the last few days I've been listening again to this compilation of old seventies soul hits. I remember many of these ("You Can Do Magic", "Have You Seen Her?") with a lot of affection since they date back to a time in my early teens when I first started listening to music. (This often involved a transistor radio secreted under the bedclothes late at night and tuned to the Radio Luxembourg top thirty run-down).

Granted, there are some duffers here too. It's a shame, for example, that keyboardist and one-time "fifth Beatle" Billy Preston got mixed up in "With You I'm Born Again", a syrupy ballad with the one-time Mrs Stevie Wonder. The Stylistics were a band who seemed to have hit after hit for a number of years but I'm afraid I never really came to terms with the window-shattering falsetto of lead singer Russell Thompkins, Jr.

Doing a trawl of YouTube for some of the better tracks, I discovered a fantastic selection of videos from the US show "Soul Train" which are a real document of the times. Predictably, there's a preponderance of wide lapels, flared trousers and, yes, afros. And those synchronised on-stage dance routines are often a thing of wonder. As for the audience, on Top Of The Pops at around this time I seem to remember a lot of embarrassed dancefloor shuffling. There's none of that here...

reasons to feel guilty, part 3

Having extolled the virtues of the Carpenters and the Style Council in recent posts, I now stride fearlessly on in the quest for a hat-trick of Guilty Pleasures (TM). This week BBC4 brought to our homes its five-night Prog Britannia season in an appreciation of the 1970s musical behemoth that was progressive rock.

Like the music itself, the season had its ups and downs. The hour-and-a-half historical documentary which opened the season seemed to claim that it was at the very time when punk appeared to drag popular music out of the Court of the Crimson King and into a sweaty, pogo-ing crowd at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall, that the music of the main prog acts (Yes, ELP, King Crimson) had begun to cross an ill-defined line into overblown self-indulgence. In reality, you only have to look at Rick Wakeman's spangly cape and huge bank of keyboards and listen to the cod mysticality in, say, Jon Anderson's largely nonsensical lyrics to know that self-restraint was never the prog way.

It's a fair enough assessment though that prog was a logical development of some of the psychedelic meanderings which had begun to appear, for example, in later Beatles albums, and for musicians involved--Steve Howe (Yes), Carl Palmer (ELP), Bill Bruford (Yes/King Crimson)--to claim that they were attempting to combine the complex structures of classical music, the irregular rhythmic metres of jazz and world musics and their own extreme instrumental dexterity, and so create something genuinely original.

Some of the programmes in the season were quite painful to watch. Nothing to do with the music though. Two words. Phil. Collins. Now, I have to admit a certain affection for the early Collins-era Genesis albums, Trick of the Tail, And Then There Were Three, Duke. Lord knows though, it's difficult to warm to him as a man... We'll leave it at that.

Anyway, that's not to generally denigrate the music. I reckon there are some good tunes buried in there among all those 27/8 time signatures and all that instrumental noodling. How about this YouTube gem for example, from the 1971 Genesis album Nursery Cryme? At least Collins could hack it as a drummer...

the indisputable lure of the idiot lantern

Tuesday was a great night for music TV with the one-and-a-half-hour live final of "Maestro" followed by the unveiling of this year's Mercury Music Prize winner.

I'm quite happy for Elbow to carry off this year's Mercury. Although I've only heard radio plays of tracks from "Seldom Seen Kid", general opinions I've heard this week, notably from Messrs Radcliffe and Maconie, claim that over the course of seven years and four albums Elbow have paid their musical dues and are now a band "whose time has come". I also agree with them that it's been a very open field this year, although I don't think there was a realistic chance that the Portico Quartet, as token jazz nomination, would win. No doubt they will benefit from a massive sales boost though as a result of being shortlisted, so it's all good...

It all does mean (sigh) that my Amazon shopping list grows ever longer with the addition of Elbow, Burial, British Sea Power, Laura Marling and possibly Estelle. I'd already bought the Radiohead, Last Shadow Puppets and Rachel Unthank and the Winterset (particularly pleased for them), so hoorah for me...

As for Maestro, well I don't know, is it more than a kind of "X-Factor" for the (cringe) "chattering classes"? It's been compulsive viewing anyway--who wasn't rooting for Goldie, who didn't find Jane Asher really annoying...

Genial chief judge Sir Roger Norrington hopes that the series will rekindle interest in classical music. It seems to be working on me. Recordings in the paltry "classical" category are consigned to the almost-completely-inaccesible bottom shelf of my CD rack and it's been years since I went to a classical concert. Blow me though if this afternoon I didn't get myself down to Balham Library, borrow Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde" and Vaughan Williams's Sea Symphony, spend half an hour scanning South Bank Centre leaflets for the next two months and pencil in a couple of concerts by the Philharmonia Orchestra.

We'll see if it lasts...

sound and vision

Some interesting stuff on the TV, radio and at the cinema this week for the aspiring ethnomusicologist:

- a Channel 5 programme about folk music in the North East of England featuring Kathryn Tickell, Northumbrian piper and fiddler, and showing some of her work as a teacher in Northumbrian schools. It's great that people like this are doing something to preserve this music and pass it on to future generations. Interesting that you can now do a degree in folk and traditional music at Newcastle University, apparently the first course of its kind in the UK.

- then I put the radio on. "The Organist Entertains" really is a remnant from a bygone age, with a selection of tunes played on huge theatre and cinema organs. Amazing to think there is still such a community of enthusiasts out there and credit to Radio 2 for continuing to put the show on, another example music of the past being preserved.

- then later in the week I saw "Favela Rising" at the cinema. Anderson Sa and his band, Afro-Reggae, have done fantastic work in recent years in the favelas/shanty towns of Rio by getting youngsters involved in music- making and offering them an alternative to a life of crime mixed up with the local drugs trade. Now signed to a record label and touring in Brazil and overseas (recently opening the Barbican's current "Tropicalia" season), the band have ploughed all royalties back into the favelas. It'll be interesting to see if their international success cuts them off from their roots at all as time goes on.
More about the rise of Afro-Reggae.