music diary 2012

Not my idea this. Playing into my hands though...

Friday 4th May 

• Burt Bacharach: This Is Easy (BBC4 TV documentary) - Got about five minutes into this before I realise I'd seen it before. Worth a second go though to hear again stories of Bacharach's obsessive attention to detail: viz. Cilla's story about the gruelling "Alfie" session involving many (possibly identical) takes and Carole Bayer Sager's account of the frustrations of their songwriting partnership, possibly responsible for their marriage break-up.
• Pizzicato Five: Made in USA (vinyl) - Fellow MOR-sters' 1994 LP, not dusted off for some time. 

Saturday 5th May

• Cocteau Twins: Four Calendar Cafe, Stars and Topsoil (iPhone) - Pat Nevin was on 5Live this morning enthusing about Liz Fraser's upcoming Meltdown gig and that, together with some fan reminiscences on the Guardian website and a three-hour train journey, presented a good opportunity to revisit the non-vinyl end of my Cocteaux collection. 

Sunday 6th May

• Miles Davis: A Different Kind of Blue (Sky Arts TV documentary, including live footage of Isle of Wight Festival 1970) - Came across this while channel-hopping on my Dad's SkyBox. Interesting interviews from collaborators in the fusion-based period up to and including Bitches Brew. 

Monday 7th May

• Emma Pollock: Watch the Fireworks; Gorillaz: Demon Days (iPhone) - Accompanying soundtrack to a gentle ramble in the North Wales countryside. Nice.

Tuesday 8th May

• Nick Drake: Bryter Later (iPhone) - Another train journey. A not-very-original choice of accompaniment to the green fields rolling by the train window. And, as an antidote...
• The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Bonus CD (iPhone) - I remember reading an interview with Paul Simon once where he said that he always tries to vary the keys he writes in as it helps him to vary his style and avoid monotony. All the Pains of Being Pure at Heart's songs seem to be in the same key = bit boring.
• Lightships & Snowgoose (Live at the Lexington) - Respective side projects of Teenage Fannies Gerard Love and Raymond McGinley. Preferred the latter although... 

Wednesday 9th May

• Neil Young: "Lotta Love" (YouTube) - ...Lightships did a rather splendid cover of this to bring yesterday evening to a close: it's been playing in my head all morning.
• Richard Hawley: Standing at the Sky's Edge (Spotify) - My favourite album of the year so far, I think. Reckon Alex Petridis's review is a work of art in itself.
• Beach House: "Myth" (Spotify) - Like this lot. New album out. Good. Sound a bit like the Cocteaux (see above)...
• Ebo Taylor: Appia Kwa Bridge (Spotify): By way of contrast, some lively Afrobeat to round things off for today. 

Thursday 10th May

• High Llamas: Snowbug (iPlayer) - I like to stop off in Kennington Park en route to my Thursday job, park my bike and listen to some tunes. Haven't heard this for a while. It's my favourite Llamas album. O'Hagan is a genius, etc etc (see blog ramblings elsewhere on this subject...)
• Kyle Eastwood Band (Live at Ronnie Scott's) - Enjoyable enough, accessible in a jazz kind of way, but maybe I have a problem with celebity offspring making it big? Not that they are by definition void of talent (although sometimes they are). 

Friday 11th May

• Kyle Eastwood: Songs from the Chateau (Spotify); Snowgoose: Sycamore (band website) - another blast for a couple of the week's live music highlights.

Saturday 12th May

• Sounds of the Sixties (Radio 2) - usual mix of classics, obscure gems and, well, tat frankly. Highlights: Skeeter Davies: End of the World, The Settlers: Major to Minor written by the British Bacharach & David, Tony Hatch and Jackie Trent.
• Various programmes (Jazz FM) - there's some good stuff on Jazz FM, I find. On the big band programme at lunch time they played Johnny Dankworth's "Tomorrow's World" theme. Classic.

Sunday 13th May

• Radio clash this evening. On 6Music, Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone, featuring tracks from Portishead's Third album, which I haven't played for a long time. Also: this rather lovely track from, er, Dixie's Death Pool. (You don't get much Abba on the Freak Zone...) Simultaneously, on Radio 2, the first part of Marc Almond's documentary on Jacques Brel. I'll have to fire up the iPlayer for this later in the week...

The End

song of the week 38: kate bush - symphony in blue

Here's something from a lady of a certain age who's been in the news lately:



I've been reading such good things about her new 50 Words for Snow record that I've been fair enthused to dig out some of her old stuff--which I'm not that familiar with to be honest--and see what I've been missing.

My brother used to have a copy of the Lionheart album and I reckon I haven't heard it since about 1982. I've just dug it out on Spotify though and it's better than I remember it. I'm afraid I've always found some of her piercing vocal pyrotechnics a bit too much but there are some tracks here which don't offend too much on this score (see above).

She's well known of course for her imaginative subject matter and I do like some of her flights of fancy ("Oh England My Lionheart" and "In the Warm Room" in particular). There doesn't seem to be very much dead wood in terms of lyrical content. Many a perfectly decent pop song can disappoint when you pick through the lyrics but I reckon these words could be read aloud and still tell a pretty good tale.

She tinkles a pleasing ivory or two an' all.

fab four fest

I'm going through one of my periodic Beatles binges at the moment. The Fab Four section of my CD collection runs only from Rubber Soul (1965) onwards so I thought I'd try brushing up on some of the earlier albums of the "Beatlemania" years.

What's brought this on is a British Library event I went to a couple of weeks ago to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the band (It was in 1960 that John, Paul, George, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best made their first forays into Hamburg clubland). Regaling us with Beatles tales, playing choice tracks and fielding questions are Beatles luminaries Paul du Noyer (author of books on John Lennon and the music of his native Liverpool) and Philip Norman (definitive Beatles Lennon biographer and author of a hefty 864-page tome on Lennon).

Both speakers are at pains to play down the usual stereotypes of Lennon as "Angry Young Man" and McCartney as "Sensitive Soul". Two tracks from the "White" album--Julia and Helter Skelter are played as cases in point. Lennon's early family background is well documented elsewhere and this song for his mother, who died in a car accident when he was seventeen, is full of poetic beauty ("When I cannot sing my heart I can only speak my mind") at odds with the cynical, sometimes spiteful, character who would often appear in interviews.

Similarly, McCartney--famous balladeer of Yesterday, Michelle and The Long and Winding Road--wrote Helter Skelter after reading an interview with Pete Townshend describing their recent single, I Can See for Miles, as the "loudest, rawest, dirtiest song" the Who had ever recorded. Not wanting to be pigeon-holed as a writer of slow songs, he set about trying to write something just as "loud, raw and dirty" for the Beatles. The song certainly provoked a reaction: its supposed prophecy of an apocalyptic war infamously led to it being appropriated by Charles Manson. It has even been hailed in some quarters as an important stage in the development of heavy metal music.

One of the tracks Du Noyer chooses to play is a reminder that, even among the uptempo sing-a-long hits of the first few albums, there are quieter, more reflective songs which hint at Lennon and McCartney's developing genius for songwriting. Clocking in at a sublimely understated 1 minute 57 seconds, I'll Follow the Sun--from the 1964 "Beatles For Sale" album--is a fantastically impressive early example of McCartney's nack for a cleverly crafted melody:



There's no disputing that John and Paul were the creative genuises of the band but I'm struck by the extent to which du Noyer and Norman seem willing to play down the roles of George and Ringo: Norman concedes that Harrison wrote some great songs but "only while he was in the Beatles". I wonder about the extent to which this is true: by the time the Beatles split he had written three whole albums' worth of his own compositions which had hitherto failed to see the light of day. Maybe not many of these were as good as the best of the Beatles. Surely his guitar riffs are worth a mention in dispatches though--I Feel Fine? Paperback Writer?

Similarly, when an audience member brings up Lennon's typically acerbic comment that Starr "wasn't even the best drummer in the Beatles", du Noyer and Norman concede only that Ringo's easy-going personality was a calming influence on the more volatile other band members. They don't make any case for his drumming technique. Aren't there some tracks--particularly in the later years--(Come Together, A Day in the Life) which show Lennon's remark up for the cheap jibe it was?

This was the second Beatles event I've been to at the British Library and like the first it was an entertaining and thought-provoking evening. It's just good to be reminded again what superb songwriters and great musicians the Beatles were.

In a futile attempt to reduce their career to a handful of highlights, may I in conclusion offer the following "top five" Beatles moments:

1. The opening line of Girl, proof that you don't need an intro. Just get on and say what you've got to say.

2. The fugue-like harpsichord solo in In My Life played by George Martin (Is there really anyone else worthy of the official "Fifth Beatle" title?)

3. The final five chords of Please Please Me, the only possible way to end the song.

4. The whole of She's Leaving Home. I once foisted this song on a class of unsuspecting French sixth-formers to get me through an English conversation class. They seemed to enjoy it.

5. The trumpet restatement of the "You Never Give Me Your Money" theme (at 1:52) in the Abbey Road Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End medley, the final track (almost) on the final Beatles album.

Of course, ask me on another day and five different songs would get the vote...

P.S. This interview with Philip Norman gives a flavour of my British Library evening.

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...

the last of the great romantics

If you, like me, are a longstanding admirer of the recorded work of Prefab Sprout, you'll probably think that Paddy MacAloon is a songwriting genius. You'll certainly have been interested to read the many interviews in the press recently and maybe heard the man himself, gracious and self-deprecating as ever, talk to Stuart Maconie and Mark Radcliffe a couple of weeks ago.

You'll be familiar with the story of a compulsive songwriter whose addiction to his craft has meant that, in addition to the albums which have sporadically appeared over the last twenty-five years or so, he's also amassed a huge collection of songs which have, tragically, never seen the light of day. You'll also have heard the sad story of how severe health problems mean that the recording process is now a massively laborious one for him and live performances an impossibility. You'll have seen photos of a man in dark glasses, bushy beard and purple suit hugely at odds with his appearance as a handsome, clean-shaven twenty-something.

Thankfully a recording of at least some of the songs from the McAloon archive has now finally hit the shops. "Let's Change the World With Music" is the pared-down version of a possibly very overblown concept album first put together in 1993 and which consequently met with record company rejection.

These are songs of another time in many respects--they're imbued with the naive optimistism of a younger man and often saddled with rather out-dated arrangements. But they're great songs and, as is typical of Prefab Sprout albums, repeated listenings reap rich rewards. There are some great tunes: the chorus of "Music is a Princess" (below) is particulary majestic I think. "Falling In Love" is all the more heartfelt for its simplicity. The lyrics are clever and relentlessly upbeat. In "Last of the Great Romantics":

Here comes the last of the Great Romantics
Not tortured, not racked, illusions intact,
Undiscouraged by the facts.

He's a master songwriter. In "I Love Music", he claims his hero is "the unnerving unswerving Irving Berlin." You can see why.

Here's hoping for more from the vaults soon...



Links:

• Album reviews: holymoly.com, the Independent
• Interviews: recent Independent (excellent), Unoffical Sprout web site

Recommended Spotify listening:

• Steve McQueen (1984)
  
• Jordan: the Comeback (No, not that one) (1990)
• The Gunman and Other Stories (2001)
  

head honcho

David Byrne @ The Barbican, 3rd August, featuring the Songs of Eno and Byrne

Some things we learned tonight and some things we knew already:

• Talking Heads have a lot of songs which are great for dancing to. The 1980 Byrne/Eno collaboration Remain in Light is particularly good in this respect and we get a fair helping of it tonight. It was quite heavily influenced by Fela Kuti: I think the respective rhythm tracks in "Houses in Motion" and Kuti's "U Be Thief" illustrate the comparison quite well.
  
• This ain't no disco. The Barbican is rubbish for dancing (see also Tricky below).
• While we're on the subject, I found DB's three "interpretative dancers" a bit off-putting and generally surplus to requirements.
• There is no-one younger than forty present. In comparison, Neil Young's Hyde Park gig which I went to last month was full of twenty-five-year-olds who knew the words to all his songs. Maybe it's because of the choice of venue and the price of the tickets. (Seats at the back of the hall cost £35.)
  
• DB is good value though, performs for a good two hours, including five (count them) encores. The "hits" go down well--"Once in a Lifetime", "Burning Down the House", "Road to Nowhere"--but I think "Strange Overtones" is a great song.
• You can't accuse Byrne of having a narrow range of interests. He's recently written a book on cycling and his installation at the Roundhouse opens later in the week.
  

DavidByrne.com has some live tracks from this tour which will give you the gist of proceedings this evening...

pick of the pops

Top platters on the Hooley Towers dansette this week (in no particular order)...

• Rose Elinor Dougall - Start/Stop/Synchro
• Phenomenal Handclap Band - 15 to 20
• Leisure Society - Short Weekend (more top bandstand action)
• Rose Elinor Dougall - Another Version of Pop Song
• Third Degree - Mercy
• Marvin Gaye - Let's Get It On (Step Remix)
• Big Star - Turn My Back on the Sun
• Gemma Ray - 100 m.p.h. (in 2nd Gear)
• Howling Bells - Let's Be Kids Again
  

Thanks to Radcliffe and Maconie for most (though not all) of these. Probably need to branch out a bit with my radio listening...

noisette on a string

How great is this?



Front runner as UK entry in the next Eurovision Song Contest?

The album's good too. You can get it on Spotify.

why we love modern stuff (continued)

Part 3: Cut down that Amazon shopping list by streaming a load of music. Save £££'s!!!

I'm not normally one to get worked up about the so-called wonders of the digital age but you can get so much music for free these days on internet streaming services that it sort of seems impolite not to explore some of the possibilities.

Spotify seems to be generally flavour of the month at the moment. If you can bear the thought of listening to one advert every fifteen or twenty minutes, you can stream full albums or create your own playlists free of charge. My current favourites include some old but very excellent jazz/blues by Etta James, and some top-notch songs from Congolese outfit Staff Benda Bilili.

Grooveshark even allows me to embed one of those widget thingummies for the convenience of my readers, thus allowing them to check out this top tune, "Counterpoint" by 2009 New-Order-a-likes Delphic:



Remember those "various artists" cassettes you used to foist on your unsuspecting friends and family in the eighties? Just me then. Well you can do a modern-day fancy-dan digital equivalent courtesy of the fantastic 8tracks site. Here's a playlist I put together a couple of weeks ago to mark the welcome appearance of a big round yellow object in the April sky...

and the award...

...for best use of guitars in a single in 2009 (so far), goes to the Britpop-tastic Pull In Emergency...



Bit of a ropey band name though...

single of the week

Finally, some new music: "I Love My Baby (But If Anyone Touches Her I'll Kill Them)" by Napoleon. Heard it on Radcliffe and Maconie tonight. Reminds me a bit of the Blow Monkeys. Probably not breaking any new ground then, but a good song nonetheless?



They're Swedish apparently...

jazz binge (continued)

Neil Cowley Trio and Alec Dankworth's Spanish Accents @ Royal Festival Hall, 22nd November

My November London-Jazz-Festival-induced jazz binge continues unabated with this freebee live recording of Radio 3's Jazz Line Up programme introduced by Claire Martin, the Gabby Logan of Jazz.

Neil Cowley and the boys perform the fourth of their five gigs in 24 hours. Their selection is in turn funky, rhapsodic, virtuosic and (maybe?) Svensson-esque. Alec Dankworth reveals that the family's Spanish connections--hence these compositions--stem from the times he and sister Jacqui were left by their touring jazz-royal-family parents in the care of Spanish childminders who took them on holidays to their homeland and tutored them in the language. More recently it seems his wife has been completing a PhD in flamenco music. I like these tunes.

Going all out for critcal mass, I also picked out these jazz CDs from the public library at lunch time.

• E.S.T. - Seven Days of Falling
• Keith Jarrett - Tokyo '96
• Pat Metheny Group - The First Circle
• Kenny Wheeler - What Now?

Next week: return of the indie guitar

single of the week

Something a bit more recent...



Soha - Tourbillon (Serre-Moi Fort Si Tu M'aimes). More on myspace.

Thanks to Songlines and World on 3 for plugging this.

no nonsense pop (contd)

Another dead easy ten-second blog entry. This is great:



"Paris Is Burning" by Ladyhawke, in case you're wondering. She's from New-Zealand apparently...

(Bit of a dull video though, eh?)

no nonsense pop music

Been listening to some great bubblegum pop this week. Since they took "Top Of The Pops" off the telly
(yes, I know that was ages ago) this kind of stuff has gone off my radar. Should I start listening to daytime Radio 1 again?

Check out Alphabeat...



...and The Ting Tings.

blue bleezing blind drunk

Rachel Unthank and the Winterset @ The Shaw Theatre, 12th May

..."Blue Bleezing Blind Drunk" and, indeed, other Northumbrian ditties, beer-related and otherwise. I always find it interesting that as well as performing, folk singers like Rachel Unthank also spend a lot of their time seeking out new songs, not just to widen their repertoires but also to preserve small but important parts of regional musical history. Many of the songs on her award-winning "The Bairns" album, of which all the tracks get an airing tonight, were ones she actually learned from her mother and father who are also folk singers.

The most obvious family connection tonight is with sister Becky with whom Rachel shares the lion's part of the singing duties. Interestingly, the voices of the two siblings are quite different in character: Rachel's is strong and pure and her Geordie accent is as pronounced in her singing as in her speech, Becky's is more fragile but at its best haunting and bell-like, nowhere more so than in her glorious rendition of Robert Wyatt's "Sea Song". I think this is a great song: the words are fantastic, it's got a wonderful soaring melody and the piano and accordion arrangement in the Unthanks' version really does it justice. And that voice...

Hear for yourself:
- "Sea Song" Becky vox

Also...
- "Sea Song" Robert Wyatt's original version
- What wikipedia has to say about Northumbrian music
- Guardian interview with R.U.

numbers up (part 2)

Danny & The Champions Of The World, Magic Numbers, Indigo Moss @ The Windmill, 14th Dec.

Once more the Windmill comes up with the goods. Not bad for a fiver, it's those Magic Numbers people again...

After sitting two rows from the back of the Festival Hall a couple of weeks ago, it makes a change to be little more than an arm's length from the band this time. In fact, drummer Sean Gannon is a no-show but we still get a lively run through some of their well-known tracks (if I remember right: "Long Legs", "Love's A Game", "Take A Chance" and "Love Me Like You") as well as the more obscure "Tonight" (which they sang with the Smoke Fairies at the RFH). Quite a big deal to see a major act in such an intimate venue.

Two other (good) bands for my money:

- Indigo Moss, who I heard a few months ago performing on the Queen Elizabeth Hall roof. Lively country/rockabilly tunes, all fiddle, banjo and harmonica, is their stock in trade but one song in particular took my ear, the much more downbeat "Swimming". Shades of Natalie Merchant, I think. Definitely gets the nod as this week's "best song ever".

- Bringing up the rear, Danny & The Champions Of The World were worth hearing too: quite impressive visually, with their face-painted eight-strong line-up, and with some interesting instrumentation (trumpet, violin, sitar). "Time Out" puts them in the "psychedelic pop folkies" pigeon hole and that's probably fair enough. I thought the singing of the main man--"Danny" presumably--had a bit of early Neil Young to it.

No doubt about the real stars of the evening though...

top of the pops

Current single of the week: The Bees - Listening Man

computer love

For me, the advent of the music download has finally made buying singles much more worthwhile. On vinyl you always got a B-side which was usually as weak as the A-side was brilliant, and on CD you got even more unwanted tracks and sometimes three or four different mixes of the same song. I don't think anything can make you fed up with a song as quickly as listening to it in four successively more bizarre versions.

Hooray then for the download: a single song, no remixes, no feeble B-side filler. And you can play a stack of your fave songs one after the other without getting out of your seat...

No surprise that I feel the need to share my top 5 download singles of 2007 so far:
1. Klaxons: Golden Skans
2. Laura Veirs: Don't Lose Yourself
3. Soulsavers (feat. Mark Lanegan): Revival
4. Charlotte Hatherley: Behave
5. Cherry Ghost: Mathematics.
(NB: must be played in this order. I say NO to the random play i-Pod.)

Yes, they're all available on myspace or youtube, but at only 79p a shot at 7digital.com, why not shell out and hang the expense...

daft punk is playing at my house

In fact Daft Punk are taking a break this month. Standing in are...

- Cerys Matthews: Seed Song
- The Young Knives: The Decision ("I am the Prince of Wales!")
- Phoenix: Consolation Prizes
- Toumani Diabate and the Symmetric Orchestra: Single
- The Feeling: Sewn (File under "Guilty Pleasures" *)
- Cathal Coughlan: Black River Falls (see also below)
- Candie Payne: I Wish I Could Have Loved You More
- Arctic Monkeys: A Certain Romance

* Their myspace page lists their influences as ELO, Supertramp, 10 C.C. and the Carpenters!