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:

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...

council debate

During the lazy period between Christmas and the January return to work, I'm often inclined to wallow in wall-to-wall BBC 6Music. Listening to Gary Crowley's show this evening I came across some live tracks from the Style Council in 1984.

Now it's generally considered by those who pontificate on such things in the music press that the eighties were something of a blight on Paul Weller's career, typified as they were in his case by foppish outfits and haircuts, pretentious record sleevenotes (courtesy of the Cappucino Kid), ill-advised party political campaigning (on the Red Wedge tour bus) and watery blue-eye soul.

Well that's their view and their entitled to it. In support of the case for the defence however, I humbly submit two examples from the beginning and end of the band's career, and modestly enquire if, in the opinion of the court, these are not two great examples of feel-good pop music?

Exhibit A: Headstart for Happiness (released 1983 though this live clip is from later)



Exhibit B: Wanted (released 1987)



Also recommended:

• You're The Best Thing
• The Paris Match (starring Tracey Thorn)
• The Paris Match (Weller version)
• Changing of the Guard

what tracey did next

There was an interesting feature on Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone this evening about Cherry Red Records. They've just released a box set of their singles to celebrate thirty years of the label. One of the songs which got played was "Plain Sailing" from Tracey Thorn's superb 1981 album "A Distant Shore". It went on to become the label's best selling album at the time despite costing only £120 to make!

Thorn met labelmate Ben Watt, they went off to Hull University together, and were inspired by the name of a second-hand furniture shop to form a band.

This was Everything But The Girl's first hit single, from the "jazz-tinged" "Eden" album of 1984...

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...