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:

fly me to the moon

In honour of mighty spacemen Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, I present the following clip. "Everyone's Gone To The Moon" was the title of the first of a couple of TV documentaries which I watched the other night at the BFI as part of their One Giant Leap season. In the second one, an episode of "Horizon" from 1984, James Burke looked back at the Apollo 11 mission and then forward to plans being formulated at the time to establish a permanent space station positioned in the earth's orbit. Even fifteen years after Armstrong and Aldrin there was still sufficient enthusiasm for space travel that it seemed possible that everyone would indeed eventually go to the moon.

If this TOTP clip is anything to go by, it looks as though even as early as 1965 Jonathan King had already cultivated the facial ticks of a shifty second-hand car salesman. And look out at the beginning for equally sinister blond bombshell DJ Jimmy "Guys'n'gals" Saville moving in an extremely mysterious way.

Good song though...

always something there to remind me

What's come to be known as "lounge" music was quite important in my formative years. Growing up in an early 1970s household really only previously used to classical music and hymns, "easy listening"--as it was called then--meant that it was possible to play pop music on the living room dansette record player in a less raucous, more family-friendly form than most of the chart hits of the day. As a result the first few Carpenters albums were played to death for a good few years.

Listening more recently to the music of Burt Bacharach brings this all back to me. You never know, but at eighty years old (that's him not me), it's likely I'll never get to see him live now but his recent concert in the BBC's Electric Proms season--which I've just finished listening to on the (now indispensible) BBC iPlayer for the third time--was a reminder of those great songs with their sweeping melodies, great arrangements and unusual harmonies.

Shame that he never really got to admit that, great composer and arranger as he is, he never really cut it as someone who can sing in tune. This is a great performance from Dusty but you really need him NOT to join in at the end...



Must dig out that old Dionne Warwick cassette...

whatever you do, don't leave before the last song

Thunderclap Newman @ the Windmill, 17th October

Considering the number of little-known acts who have reformed after thirty or more years of obscurity, maybe it's not that surprising that a band whose name survives thanks to a solitary number one hit in 1969 are touring again in 2008. "Something In The Air" by Thunderclap Newman still gets its share of radio airplay and rightly so, it's a great song. In fact, in the days when chart success was actually a real indicator of quality, it kept songs by both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones ("Ballad of John and Yoko" and "Honky Tonk Woman" respectively) off the top spot.

Andy "Thunderclap" Newman definitely has something of the Brian Wilson about him, sitting behind his keyboard and staring uneasily into the audience from time to time. But it seems it was ever thus. Turning up their entry in the Virgin Encyclopedia of Popular Music, I see that even in 1969 the "[the group's] impact derived mainly from the quirky, old-fashioned image of the pianist".

In fact it was lead singer John "Speedy" Keen, now deceased, who wrote most of the material on the "Hollywood Dreams" album which is performed in full tonight. Andy Newman is the only survivor from the original line-up but he's got an impressive bunch of musicians together.

Check out his groovy piano solo a couple of minutes in...

sweet catatonia

I've been listening again recently to some of my albums from the nineties: the first two Garbage albums and Way Beyond Blue and International Velvet by Catatonia. ("Not," according to Wikipedia "to be confused with Katatonia, a Swedish metal band". Er yes. Thanks for that.) There's some good stuff on these records. Garbage fizzled out after their first album really, although I really like "You look so fine" on Version 2. Such a great arrangement. Catatonia had some excellent songs too, were much more than another Britpop band. On the look-out for Welsh music up in the hen wlad fy nhadau last weekend, I spotted the new Cerys Matthews album and decided to take a punt on it, having heard the single a couple of times. Really good. Again, some great songs, more acoustic than the old Catatonia stuff but thankfully supposedly not as "countrified" as her first solo album, Cockahoop. Best tracks: "Seed song" and "The Endless Rain".

Some more Cerys stuff from a cursory google:
- an interview from the BBC Wales site
- her myspace page
- official cm site
- the Guardian low-down

live stuff: scritti politti at the scala, 11/7/06

Green Gartside's Scritti Politti have got a fair amount of press coverage recently describing how they're back from the 80s wilderness. In fact, they had an album out as recently as 1999. Some tracks from Anomie and Bonhomie get an outing tonight but songs from the recently Mercury Music Prize-nominated White Bread Black Beer take up most of the set. The only exceptions that I can spot are "The Sweetest Girl" from 1982's Songs to Remember--I'd forgotten until I just looked it up on Google that this was covered by Madness--and their big "hit" "Wood Beez", last song of the night. In contrast to material from their 80s heyday, some songs on the new album seem quite spartan, three chord jobs (well, maybe four) with acoustic guitar accompaniment. They don't get the most tumultuous reception I've ever heard, but they're pretty slick and have still got some good tunes...