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.

song of the week 37: christine hanson and dave formula - mistaken for a dream

Here's a broody slow-burner from erstwhile Magazine keyboarder Mr Dave Formula (possibly a made-up name) and cellist/composer/singer/sound designer Christine Hanson (no relation).

I reckon it's worth five minutes of your time:



More than a hint of a latter-day Joni Mitchell I would say, vocals-wise. And who doesn't like a good flugelhorn solo?

Reminds me a bit of this from a few years ago, although it's not that jazzy and there are no flugelhorns...

song of the week 36: felt - sunlight bathed the golden glow

Last night I went to the BFI to see Paul Kelly's new documentary "Lawrence of Belgravia".

The eponymous Lawrence (his surname is never used) is difficult to pin down: certainly eccentric, sometimes funny (wittingly or unwittingly), generally not particularly likeable though endearing on occasions, above all optimistically single-minded in a search for pop stardom which, to those looking on, seems doomed to failure.

Erstwhile lead singer of eighties jangly indie darlings Felt and nineties glam rockers Denim, these days Lawrence fronts the novelty synth-pop outfit Go Kart Mozart. In one of a series of interviews shown during the film, he claims that he's now "legally bonkers". Fleeting shots of methadone prescriptions and arrest warrants in his name suggest he might be right.

If he seems a bit at sea these days, that doesn't mean that some of the music he made all those years ago wasn't pretty fine:

song of the week 35: sound of rum - so low

Shake a leg there...

song of the week 34: trombone shorty - the craziest things

Lately I've been listening to Mike Chadwick's Saturday evening "Big Easy" programme on JazzFM. It's pretty good.

The "Tremé" TV series is mentioned in dispatches more than a few times but a fair amount of new music gets an airing too.

Here's some Trombone Shorty to maybe whet your appetite (seems Jools is on the case too):




...and then there's also my fledgling Spotify playlist based on music from the show.

song of the week 33: white label - todd

I've just come across "Stolen Voices", an interesting "bootleg remix album featuring rare or unreleased tracks and long-lost demos" from Norman Records.

It features originals by the likes of the Supremes, Harry Nilsson, Billy MacKenzie, David Bowie, Dennis Wilson, John Lennon... (If you're interested there are more details of the original sources here.)

My favourite track is this Todd Rundgren song recorded from a live performance in 1971. An interestingly angular melody which puts me in mind of another band I mention from time to time. The backing track is a bit X-Files, but I think it works quite well.

And can you spot the part where he forgets the lyric?


 

song of the week 32: focus - la cathédrale de strasbourg

At the weekend I was out drinking with a couple of fellow quinquagenarians.

At some point the conversation must have got round to seventies Dutch prog/jazz/rock bands. It can happen.

We all agreed that Focus were just great...

song of the week 31: cecil sharp project - meadows of dan

Here's a song I heard at the Shrewsbury Folk Festival at the weekend.

I told various friends I was going to the festival and almost all of them asked straight away: "Who's on?" Other than the ubiquitous Bellowhead, who claim to have performed at twenty-two festivals this summer, I couldn't particularly remember any names I was particularly looking forward to. Generally I don't go to festivals just because of the headliners but in the hope that, among the maybe twenty or so artists I'll be seeing in the space of a few days, there'll be the unexpected discovery of new artists who I haven't heard of before.

One such was Caroline Herring whose solo set was one of my highlights of the weekend. There's not a great deal of her own material available on the internet although the Cecil Sharp Project*, to which she contributed and who also performed at Shrewsbury, has received a fair amount of media coverage. Here's a pleasingly tuneful number from the resulting CSP album featuring Caroline Herring on lead voice and guitar:



* The Cecil Sharp Project is a suite of songs and tunes based on the life and work of the famous song collector composed and performed collaboratively by a number of folk musicians. This YouTube clip explains more.

song of the week 30: marvin gaye & tammi terrell - you're all i need to get by

It's one of those sitting-in-the-pub type questions isn't it? What's your favourite ever Motown album?

Stevie Wonder made some great records in the seventies of course but, in terms of a single album, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's Greatest Hits probably does it for me.*

Some bog standard facts:

• Tammi Terrell died tragically of a brain tumour at the age of 24. 
• Gaye was so shaken when it happened that he gave up live performance for three years and, rejecting the love song, turned to political issues for his inspiration. As it happened that worked out quite well.
• Rumour was that during the recording of the Greatest Hits album Terrell was already too ill to complete her vocal parts and that songwriter Valerie Simpson was called in to do so in her absence. Simpson has subsequently denied this though. 
• Simpson and husband Nickolas Ashford wrote most of the tracks on the album, as well as many great songs for other Motown artists. 
• They also scored a number 3 UK hit under their own names in 1984 with "Solid". 

Here's a tribute to Nickolas Ashford who died yesterday.

R.I.P.

womadness

Songs of the Last Three Weeks (numbers 27-29, not that anyone's counting...):

I Am Kloot - I Still Do
Oi Va Voi - Yesterday's Mistakes
Ana Moura - No Expectations

A couple of weeks ago I went off to the WOMAD festival. Despite its reputation as an exclusively world music affair, I actually found that in terms of the range of music on offer there's quite a lot more to it than that. For example. we also got:

• the genre-defying Penguin Cafe,
• lounge-dubsteppers(?) Submotion Orchestra: meaty bass-pedal effects to make your chest rattle and flugelhorn to send your spirits a-soaring,
• Louisiana's Feufollet, beloved of Elvis Costello, peddling an interesting cocktail of cajun (all fiddles and accordions) and indie (all guitars and winsome vocals), and
• Guy Garvey's Mercury-nominated mates I Am Kloot.

I know some people go to festivals to have a good ole party and consequently maybe judge the quality of the music on the extent to which it allow them to jolly well dance their socks off, but for me the great moments of the weekend were the quieter ones. I have to say that these three songs fair brought a lump to my throat...

Genial lead Klooter Pete Branwell admitted that the band had been sceptical about coming to WOMAD and "weren't sure they would fit in". They got a good reception though from what seemed to be a preponderance of white males of a certain age (er, like me...). This was a great pin-drop moment:



Oi Va Voi gave as energetic a performance as ever and went down a storm with the party people. I'm not sure though they've ever matched the quality of the songwriting on their first album, is it really eight years ago? I doubt that KT Tunstall (for it is she) ever regretted her move away from the band in view of the millions of albums she's shifted since, but for me this is by far the best thing she's written. Also what I'm guessing is Steve Levi's "cantorial" singing--anyone?--gets me every time:




I'm not generally a massive fan of Fado but I really enjoyed Ana Moura's performance. I'm sure world music purists would cringe at my lack of deference to nearly two centuries of Portuguese musical tradition but for me this Rolling Stones cover was the highlight of her set:




Next week something more upbeat, I promise...

song of the week 26: cornershop - biro pen

It's been a while since we heard from Cornershop. Yesterday I picked up their excellent new album for a very reasonable price from one of my favourite CD shops.

As is the way of these things, a while ago Brill Records in Exmouth Market--for it is they of whom I speak--were obliged to diversify into bagels and coffees in order to keep their business going, but they still care about music. They've still got a good selection (rock, indie, soul, folk, jazz, world music), still pick out the best new releases and display them prominently alongside reviews from recent newspapers cut out and pasted up on a noticeboard.

Their genial and usually upbeat proprietor tells me though that sadly sales of CDs are now quite few and far between. Shame.

If you're passing by why not pop in and treat yourself to some new music?



End of commercial break...

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:

song of the week 24: fleet foxes - sim sala bim

Did anyone else notice the preponderance of facial hair on display at Glastonbury this year?

There was this lot:

...who pale in hirsuteness in comparison with these boys:

...who are almost a latter-day...

No, you're right. ZZ Top didn't actually show up at Glastonbury although they're still very much a going concern and if you're interested--and are prepared to go to all that trouble--you can catch them on a mammoth US tour round about now. (You'll remember of course that Frank Beard is the comparatively clean-shaven one.)

It's Fleet Foxes though who are pretty much the pick of the beardy bunch for me at the moment. I've been giving their recent Helplessness Blues album a good few spins and it seems to me every bit as good as their 2008 debut. Here's a track from their Glasto set:



Spotter's badge if you identified Elbow and Eels hiding behind the hair at the top of the page.

cover versions

Had a post-work CD shopping binge this evening at the excellent Flashback Records in Essex Road. You know how it is on a Friday.

Pretty pleased with my haul, which included the following two fine examples of Brazilian cover art:

They'd look even better on those big record sleeves we used to get...

song of the week 23: betty wright - clean up woman

Heard this on 6Music the other day...



Pretty good huh? Really like how the two guitar parts interlock and that...

Annoyingly though, once I've listened to it, it's this song which plays in my head afterwards.

song of the week 22: michel legrand - dingo rock

More jazz this week, featuring legendary veteran French composer Michel Legrand, who I was lucky enough to catch at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club this week.

Legrand is mainly known for the lush orchestrations and sweeping melodies of his film scores but, as we saw and heard, he's also an remarkably virtuosic jazz pianist and despite his seventy-nine years his dexterity at the keyboard remains undiminished.

He recorded his Legrand Jazz album with Miles Davis in 1958 and they collaborated again in 1990, a year before Davis died, on a film called Dingo. This funky big-band version of a piece from the soundtrack (which for reasons unknown never made it onto the resulting album) was a highlight of the evening:

Free music - Dingo Rock

More about Legrand's film work in my earlier post.

song of the week 21: gil scott-heron - winter in america

In the twenty-four hours since my last post this song has followed me around.

Thanks for this mainly go to two commendable GSH radio tributes on Jazz FM. One was a compelling interview with Paul Jones yesterday morning which I caught completely by chance in a cafe in New Cross. As the owner and I sat listening he told me about the time he saw GSH perform in the very pub across the road from us. That must have been a good few years ago.



There are no finer testaments to GSH's poetic genius than the lyrics to this song.

gil scott-heron 1949-2011

There have already been many tributes to Gil Scott-Heron who passed away last weekend. He was 62. Since the usual allocation is three score years and ten, he was comparatively young. But it's maybe not really too surprising that he sold himself short. There's no doubt that he had his demons, sadly, particularly in latter years when extended periods of drug use and consequent imprisonment must have taken their toll.

His best known pieces*--"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", "B-Movie", "Johannesburg"--were erudite, acerbic and witty comments on the political landscape but they were all very much of their time. Their references to Watergate, Reaganomics, Spiro Agnew, Caspar Weinberger et al are really no longer meaningful for anyone who's under forty years old. The world is poorer, not just for his loss, but also because we never really got to hear his thoughts on the Dubya era, Abu Ghraib, the Tea Party Movement, and so many more of the issues of more recent times. For me this is a large part of the tragedy of his latter years, of his death.

A huge amount of credit goes to Richard Russell, owner of XL Records, for coaxing Scott-Heron back into the studio and for watching over his work on I'm New Here, last year's "comeback" album, a poetic masterpiece. Russell's trip-hop/dubstep electronica is a far remove from the jazz/soul medium of GSH's earlier career but it's the perfect counterpoint to Scott-Heron's more personal, less politicised, take on the twenty-first century.

One of the consequences of the release of I'm New Here was the round of promotional TV and newspaper interviews which meant that GSH and his work were exposed to a whole new generation of music fans. He even got pride of place on Newsnight in a clip which, in the way of these things, has since been added to YouTube. Cringe with me as Jeremy Paxman hails "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" as possibly the greatest rap song of all time. (I'm sure he would know.)

This interview was filmed at round about the same time. I think it's a fitting tribute.

(The newspaper obit which most struck a chord with me was Suzanne Moore's piece in the Guardian.)

* Some of them songs yes, but others really poetic monologues set to music. I'd prefer to play down the rap/hip hop connection. Unlike most commentators, it seems.

song of the week 20: kane gang - the closest thing to heaven

In its time the Newcastle-based Kitchenware record label has been responsible for some great music. I've waxed lyrical elsewhere about the songwriting genius of Paddy McAloon and his tragically now defunct Prefab Sprout. Round about the time when the Sprouts were being conscripted, fellow North-Easterner Martin Stephenson (these days on a seemingly unending tour of undersized UK venues) signed to the label with his band the Daintees, soon afterwards releasing the classic 1986 Boat to Bolivia album. Equally the post-Microdisney work of Cathal Coughlan--first in the guise of Fatima Mansions with their "Keep Music Evil" manifesto, then latterly under his own moniker--was also foisted on an unsuspecting public by the Newcastle label. All good stuff.

This week's musical gem is a laid-back blue-eyed soul offering from the Kane Gang, another band from the Kitchenware stable. They had a sizeable UK hit with this single from their 1985 album The Bad and Lowdown World of the Kane Gang. All these years later there's little trace of them on the new-fangled internet--their website kanegang.com remains sadly unconstructed--so it seems unlikely that they're planning a reunion Greatest Hits tour soon. As ever, though, Wikipedia lunges in where other chroniclers of obscure pop fear to tread. Can you believe their startling claim that it was the Kane Gang who performed the music for the "Ooh Gary Davies" jingle for the perma-tanned erstwhile Radio One DJ?

How did we even get through the day before Wikipedia * existed?



* Davies also gets a ridiculously long Wikipedia entry to himself, but this discussion on the Word Magazine website seems more worthy of a link.

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.