SongsWithoutWhich

"Dancing The Night Away"

2012-01-10T21:57:00.003Z

Pub rock.
C'mon, you know. Dr Feelgood. Eddie & the Hot Rods. Brinsley Schwartz. Ducks Deluxe. Kursaal Flyers.
No? You don't? Then you can't be just the wrong side of 50 years of age, then. And from north London.
If ever a musical genre belonged to a particular place and time, it was pub rock. A scruffy rebellion against the (somewhat) cheesy low-rent camp of glam rock, and not quite marginal enough for those who became punks. We're probably talking about a two-year phenomenon from 1973 to 1975, before Malcolm MacLaren found a way to splice the whole New Yorks Dolls/Suicide/Television strand with simplified pub rock, and a lead singer to sell it to the masses.
Punk historians (and there are a few of them) claim that punk was all about tearing down the self-important bloated carcasses of prog rock and disco, but really, that process was begun with bands like Dr Feelgood, who hooked themselves all the way back to the R&B era, and gave it a wax-job of 1970s depression. Lee Brilleaux, Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds probably did more to puncture the egos of the likes of Emerson, Lake and Palmer than John Lydon ever did.
Listen to the track, possibly the finest piece of airbrushed pub rock there was. A gorgeous riff, a positively glam-rock chantalong chorus, and yete, and yet, you can't shake the impression that this was born in the back rooms at the Hope & Anchor one fuggy night in October.
While the Feelgoods and even Ian Dury were busy being forensically authentic (and I use that term with reverence) pub rockers, the Motors were all about being chart-friendly, casting one envious eye at the sort of teen adulation their forebears had enjoyed, rather than the cynical, faux-grudging acceptance that was about to become the hallmark of punk. And they clearly absorbed all the right lessons. This is a power pop classic, with just enough grit to keep it honest.
Such a good song, in fact, that Cheap Trick were driven to cover it. And if that's not a seal of approval I don't know what is.

Listen to the full-length, epic version here. And enjoy!

"Fooled Around And Fell In Love"

2012-01-08T20:16:00.002Z

One of the pitfalls of being a Rock Snob is that you really think you know it all. And when you combine that with a gadfly mind in which every field of your knowledge is an inch deep and a mile wide, there is so much scope for error.
For example, if someone were to bring up the topic of the mid sixties flourish of progressive music, I'd jump right in and start yammering on about obscure releases on the Harvest label, not having done the requisite research to know that Harvest was only launched in 1969, or that prog rock really only took off around the same time. More than once I've wished I could crawl into a hole and die as my utter amateurism was ruthlessly exposed. There may actually be some bands or genres where I know my stuff, but as time and experience have passed, I've learned to be circumspect about claiming any expertise. Still doesn't stop me from making a total fool of myself from time to time.
This song has always been familiar to me: it's a staple on radio in the States, it's got a fantastic white soul vocal, a fantastic guitar solo, and it just swings oerfectly. I love the fact that it starts as if it's going to be something vaguely middle of the road, something easy, until the voice joins in and we're taken to another plane. The harmonies, the Hammond organ, it's all perfect.
So for the last 35 years I've always thought that Elvin Bishop was one of the great lost vocal talents of our times. On this record he sounds like Paul Rodgers' long-lost twin brother; just like Rodgers, he pushes his voice just to the point where it's about to fall apart, but no further, in exactly the way Rod Stewart didn't. Not that I dislike Stewart's voice - but they're different instruments.
Back to the Rock Snobbism. Imagine my surprise when in preparing to blog this song, I discover that Elvin Bishop's the guitarist, and that Mickey Thomas is the singer. You getting some heat from the screen as you're reading this? That's nothing to the heat coming off my cheeks, let me tell you.
Anyway, I put two and two together and went off in search of my copy of Jefferson Starship's "Freedom At Point Zero" album, where Mickey Thomas sings on "Jane" and Lord, his voice is just as good there. Maybe he's been to the requisite hard rock singer school where they teach you to reach those really high notes (think Ian Gillan on "Child in Time" from the "Made in Japan" album - dogs will come running), and maybe he's lost a little of the soul that he has on "Fooled Around", but it is so clearly the same voice. And you can also see how Mickey Thomas made such a good replacement for Grace Slick.
Sorry. I'm meant to be blogging a song, but it seems now that I'm doing a Mickey Thomas appreciation. Take a look at his page on Allmusic.com and look at the artists he's performed with. Perversely, I sort of wish he'd tarted himself around a bit more; there are so many songs I can imagine he'd have sung so well.

"Wichita Lineman"

2011-11-28T21:09:00.002Z

One of the questionable benefits of 24-hour mass media (of all kinds) is that we are never more than a keystroke or away from our heroes. We can watch them, *consume* them if you like, whenever the spirit moves us. Want to know where Rihanna left her clothes last night? Look! Here's a picture of her dressing room floor. Was that one of Dire Straits I walked past on Dulwich High Street last night? Oh here, yes it was, here he is on Facebook (some details have been changed to protect the innocent).

As this new age of connectivity spreads far and wide, it will absorb ever more details, it will log more "appearances" and "sightings", and it will store ever more photographic evidence. Hurried phone camera pictures, fragments of German supermarket tabloid reports, gossip website entries.

Face it, we're going to grow up right next to our heroes, online. We'll be able to check ourselves out in the mirror every morning as we grow up and older, and then check *them* out to compare. We'll be able to pick up anti-ageing tips, fashion ideas, all perfectly appropriate for our age group. We already follow blogs, tweets and Facebook updates: we're living their lives too! At some point we'll have to draw the line. Somewhere around Tommy Lee, I hope.

One of the sadder parts of being so well-connected is that we learn many things that we wish we hadn't. I read a feature about Glen Campbell not long ago, in which he talked about the onset of Alzheimer's Disease and how he has made one more album as his farewell to the business.

It made me think of Brian Wilson and Johnny Cash: the first because he's been a wounded songbird for so very long; the latter because he decided not to "go gently into that good night." These are, were, old men, old in precisely the way Paul McCartney or Mick Jagger aren't, or at least, don't appear to be. Does that make sense? We're not conditioned to think of Paul McCartney as "old". He still *looks* young, dammit. Mick Jagger may have a couple hundred more lines on his face now, but we still think of him as the prancing, preening live-wire.

The difference is, I think, that we haven't been treated to the sort of performances from Jagger and McCartney that suggest their age. We've seen Brian Wilson looking vaguely vacant at the keyboard while performing the "Smile" album, and we've squirmed in our seat, maybe. We've seen the video for Johnny Cash's electric version of "Hurt" and it's as plain as day that he was an old, ill man when he made that last clip.

Cash excepted, who grows old gracefully in musical terms? Bluesmen, maybe. B.B. King may be ancient, but he still looks as merry and full of life at 86 as he did thirty years ago. He may not move much, but he can still wring that guitar's neck. Jazz musicians can grow old gracefully too; look at Herbie Hancock.

But these artists choose to continue performing - they feel they can still hack it and often, they can. But does an artist really ever "retire"? Usually they're "retired" and when I say "retired" I mean Joplin/Hendrix/Morrison "retired". Or Buddy Holly/Stevie Ray Vaughan/Duane Allman "retired".

Maybe retirement from the music business is reserved for those that could walk away, for whom it wasn't enough, for whom it was too much, or who found it wasn't worth it any more. For every artist who's been performing in their 60s and later, there must be several hundred who left in their 30s.

None of this has anything to do with why "Wichita Lineman" is in my list of SongsWithoutWhich. It's here because of the ineffable romance of long straight roads that go nowhere for ever. It's here for the casual, absurdly conversational line "I know I need a small vacation/But it don't look like rain", and for the shattering, pained, utterly gorgeous line "And I need you more than want you/And I want you for all time."

But most of all, it's for the almost unnoticeable vocal trill that can just about be heard when Campbell sings "is still on the line" in the chorus. It's little things like that which make a sing perfect.

"I'm In Love With a German Film Star"

2011-11-28T20:02:00.003Z

I make no apologies for repeating some of the songs that were first featured, oh, a lifetime ago. When I started out doing SongsWithoutWhich, I was more interested in creating lists, in just getting through my collection of songs as fast as possible, adding only the briefest of comments. In the intervening seven years (sevenfuckingyears? holycow) as you might observe, the style has loosened up a little, and the content wanders all over the place, which is, of course, just fine. But many of the first hundred or so songs I blogged are deserving of more... consideration. Or at least a longer ramble.

Since this blog started we've had Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, the Blogger vs Wordpress debate, several wars, a few hundred natural disasters and two (or is it three?) recessions. Since this blog started, we've had some good music created. And some really, really bad music. I suppose it's customary for every generation to discuss the Infinite Monkeys Theory and try to establish whether we have, in fact, experienced all the good tunes. Of course, that's a preposterous suggestion. I mean, there are notes out there that nobody (with the possible exception of Hendrix) has even tried to play yet. So we're good for another fifty-odd years, right?

Most of the songs I've put up here are in my list because they're great tunes, wonderful lyrical confections, or because they just make me Feel Something. They're outside time, if you like. But others are here, in part, because they are intimately connected with a particular place, a particular time. I can't listen to "Electricity" by Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark without being transported back to a dark, chrome-and-plastic emporium near Leicester Square where, with a couple of friends from school, I would spend hours Trying To Be Cool. Failed dismally, of course, but that song seems to chronicle the depths of adolescent insecurity for me.

*This* song is another such. The moment the opening chords gently loom out of the speakers, I'm taken to a damp apartment in Paris, where I spent a year studying and pretending to be a writer. I remember this song being in heavy rotation on a local station (95.2 FM, it was) and I liked it so much I recorded it off the radio onto a flaky mix tape. I seem to remember this track segued into "Rock & Roll Girls" by John Fogerty. Hey, that's just the way it fell.

There are a whole slew of songs that I still enjoy from that year, most of them French: "Dans la Rue" by Polnareff, "Tombe Pour La France" by Etienne Daho, and in particular, "No Sell Out" by Malcolm X and Keith LeBlanc, and the French version which had old clips of Charles de Gaulle speeches over some fairly anonymous techno stuff. Les Patriotes, I think the group was.

But they all fade into relative obscurity next to this song. This is so studied, so rehearsed, so....artificial. And for all that it's perfect. The idea of feckless teenagers, or even disaffected 20-somethings, copping poses and attitudes is not new, but it's never been better expressed in a musical medium than this. The vocal is just this side of bored (check), the lyric admires a suitably exotic and foreign artist (check), the song is spare and laid-back (check), with plenty of moody echo (check). If you ever wanted a song that encompassed the whole concept of the teenage search for identity and peer group acceptance, then this is it.

The best part for me is that this song first came out in 1981, while I heard it repeatedly in Paris four years later. Which suggests that the French were not really all *that* when it comes to catching on to something good. Nor was I, for that matter.

"Quark, Strangeness and Charm"

2011-11-19T16:17:00.003Z

There are more than a few bands who have been fated to occupy the margins for their entire careers. The ones that persevere on the pub and club circuit for years on end, that perhaps accumulate what the music press are pleased to call "a devoted following", but which never quite translate their particular charm and quality into a record contract, widespread acclaim or fame.

Then there are bands who, either by chance, by design or by sheer bloody-mindedness, manage to carve out a successful career without ever troubling the sharp end of the music charts. Maybe they're not mainstream but in fact are very well-regarded in their particular niche, whatever that be. They make records without the aid of a major label, they work their socks off to distribute and promote their work, and they sell enough to make the whole business worthwhile.

i can't work out whether it's easier or more difficult to exist on the fringes of the "mainstream" music business these days. Back in the 1960s and 70s music was a simpler and dare I say it, cheaper business to be in. Bands formed, practiced, recorded a demo and booked themselves gigs in gradually larger and larger venues, until the "business" couldn't ignore them any more.

Nowadays all the work goes on even before a band's sung a note or made an appearance. (Notice I didn't say "played a gig" - nobody in the mainstream seems to "play gigs" any more, just as so few artists seem to be able to play instruments any more. But then I'm old, and I've earned the right to be grumpy.) The stylists are brought in, the publicists and songwriters are hired, the website's set up (or at the very least the URL is reserved), and all before anything like "music" has happened.

And when we *do* get to the music, it's clear 99% of the time that the song and the performer have only the tiniest relationship. It's hard to shake the impression that performers these days (those that don't write their own material, but occasionally even those that do) are merely viewing songs as a means to an end. There's nothing in the song that really needs to be *communicated*: no great idea, no intelligent information, no message.

Look at the top 40 this week. At least 30 songs are about relationships, physical attraction or just overweening egotism. Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, even Billy Bragg might as well have never been born. Even so-called alternative artists are merely oddly-dressed - once they open their mouths you can't tell the difference.

So, in the spirit of grumpiness and with a healthy disregard for music-as-commodity, I offer today a song that comes from a band that for a heroic 42 years, has followed its very own individual path, has had moments of both notoriety and popularity, and has survived because it has always had the resources and the will to do things its way. And continues to this day to have a devoted following.

"Einstein was not a handsome fellow/Nobody ever called him Al/He had a long moustache to pull on, it was yellow/I don't believe he ever had a girl."

As soon as you hear this, you already know we've left the main road and we're out among the tumbleweed.

"Copernicus had those Renaissance ladies/Crazy about his telescope/And Galileo had a name that made his/Reputation higher than his hope/Did none of those astronomers discover/While they were staring out into the dark/That what a lady looks for in her lover/Is charm, strangeness and quark."

It's upbeat, clean-sounding, irrepressible. There's a lack of bass in the sound that suggests that these guys were making a conscious effort to tone it down. Maybe they left the bassist at home. There's no feedback, the drums are positively restrained, it's pop! Who'd have thought it?

And because the subject matter is treated with humour, with intelligence and with .... charm, the whole makes for a very satisfying listen. It's hard to say that about everyone you hear these days.

"Cigarettes and Alcohol"

2011-10-24T20:19:00.004+01:00

Machinery is simple. People can be too.

A machine is, at its most basic, a fairly binary application of force. Like a lever. Pressure on one side is translated into pressure on the other. Complicated machines are arrays of simple ones: take the internal combustion engine. A force (the explosion that results from combustion in the cylinder) is applied to the piston, which in turn applies force to another machine, and so on.

As we humans became more sophisticated, we found ways to link ever-increasing numbers of machines together, miniaturising them to the point where the internal combustion engine can be as small as a fingernail. Even computers are nothing more than an immense accumulation of binary machines. 10101 etc etc.

Nostalgists like steam-train enthusiasts wax lyrical about the simplicity, and at the same time, the complexity of the object of their affections. They take pleasure in the engineering developments that turned Stephenson's "Rocket" into the Eurostar. And yet, at the root of their passion is still, always, that simple machine.

When we are very small children, we're exposed to machines in a gentle, cartoonish fashion, like Thomas the Tank Engine, or Cars. We don't understand what a machine represents in terms of physics or engineering, but we're taught that they're harmless, helpful, occasionally recalcitrant, and we vaguely understand that we're in charge of them.

There are times, particularly when the world is in an unusually violent state of flux, when we individual humans can feel like machines at the heart of a much bigger, much more complicated one. What with Libya, Syria, Eurodebt, wars, Tea Parties and the like, the world feels like an immense whirling cloud of machines that's spiralling out of control.

And so at times like this we revert to the simple, binary things like finding a quiet spot to drink a tall, cold glass of orange juice, or reading a book that takes us back to a simpler, happier time. When Ronald Reagan talked of the America he knew and understood, he was harking back to a time that his entire generation (and the next three or four) could readily identify with - 5-cent Cokes, Burma Shave advertisement hoardings, casual racism.

So, we come to a simple musical machine: Oasis, who always knew that less/simpler was more.

"Is it my imagination, or have I finally found something worth living for/
I was looking for some action, but all I found was cigarettes and alcohol."

Even the intro: a dull hissing, a careless whistle, and the simplest, the very most basic of guitar riffs, tells you that you're dialling the 21st century right back, stripping away the sheen and the unnecessary treatment that songs today are drowned beneath.

Liam Gallagher's vocal comes across as careless, sloppy even, but it's a statement of intent. No airbrushed American intonations here, no concessions to pop's mainstream, just an honest Mancunian slur. It's simple, it's the machine of communication he uses every day, not the more sophisticated, false one that advisors or PR consultants would have wanted him to use.

Cigarettes and alcohol, too, represent the most basic machine of leisure that we often have in the 21st century. No time to sit back and reflect, no time for contemplation. We have to cram our relaxation into the precious few hours we have between quitting time and bed time - a snatched takeaway and the last tube home.

Honesty demands simplicity and you don't get more honest than this.

I might go as far as to suggest this is the sort of song that Thomas the Tank Engine would have listened to in his rebellious teenage years.

"Lithium"

2011-10-04T20:31:00.002+01:00

Marshall MacLuhan was supposed to have said "the medium is the message". Well, I'm not so sure. In this era of spin and presentation, of focus groups and of carefully-crafted diplo-statements that say precisely nothing, or precisely everything depending on the placement of a comma, it's become the norm not to believe what you read, or hear, until someone has helped you work it out.
Back in the day, we took the words of the great and the good at face value. When Churchill said "we shall fight them on the beaches", you knew he had precisely that in mind. When Marie-Antoinette said "Let them eat cake", it was so preposterous that you know she really meant it.
And when the great and the good invoked the name of their, our our, particular deity, our first instinct was to believe that they believed.
These days, the media and an almighty assortment of consultants, spin-doctors, Special Advisors, backroom manipulators and bloggers are on hand to interpret, peel away the chaff and tell us what Churchill *really* meant. Every newscaster finishes his to-camera piece and then turns to the suit at his side with a "So, Bradley, what exactly did Herr Hitler mean?" And Bradley will tell us.
So, on to Nirvana.
All those years ago when I first heard this song, I took it at face value. I thought: "OK, a rather weary, rootless, cynical view of religion and its presentation of itself as a cure-all for the downtrodden." I could imagine a shiftless, bored youth reacting like this after being canvassed by members of his local congregation. They'd say "Come down to church, man. We're not out to sell you anything, just help you get some peace of mind." And he'd mumble an excuse and wander off, thinking "yeah, right".
And that's what this song is. It's a "yeah, right" to religion, a shrug of the shoulders and a dismissive middle finger.
Or at least, that's what I thought it was, in Nirvana's hands.
But to hear the Polyphonic Spree sing it, takes us further, much further into the dark heart, into the Marxian opiate-addled trance.
Where Kurt Cobain mumbles and whines, where his screams of "yeah yeah yeah" in the chorus sound so bored and dismissive, the Spree sound positively diabolical. Where Nirvana's rhythm lumbers from bone-shaking thud to bone-shaking thud, the Spree give the song a lightness that is so such more seductive, and yet so much more menacing.
Maybe it's because they understand that religion, or cults, are at their most dangerous when they're not trying overtly to recruit, but when they're focusing inward on their own membership. It's the take-it-or-leave it nature, the idea that if you're so blind you can't see a good thing by yourself, then we're not interested in you joining our club. *That's* what the Spree does. It has a damn good time performing this song, and if you can't tell what fun it is, then it's clearly not for you.
Both versions of the song say the same things, but whereas Nirvana need an interpreter, a spin-doctor, to convey the full sense of what they're saying, the Polyphonic Spree give you the full Coles Notes with added context for good measure. Maybe there's room for both.

"Etude, Opus 10 No 1"

2011-03-06T22:06:00.003Z

Virtuosity.

— n , pl -sos , -si
1. a consummate master of musical technique and artistry
2. a person who has a masterly or dazzling skill or technique in any field of activity
3. ( modifier ) showing masterly skill or brilliance: a virtuoso performance

It's an important word in music. To be the master or mistress of your instrument to such an extent that you leave your audience dumbfounded, open-mouthed at your skill.

In popular music, for a long time, there's been a subculture within virtuosity (if I can put it that way) which suggests that if you look like you're working hard, then you're not really that great. So for every rock god that screws his eyes shut, pulls faces, adopts the legs-apart stance and wields his axe like it was a broadsword, there's a "proper" muso hunched over his fretboard, poker-faced like Robert Fripp, just getting on with the business of being really, really good.

Ah, some of you might say, but the whole posing, facial expressions and whatnot are just a manifestation of an Artistic Temperament. It's the Artist Getting Into His Work.

And that may be. I mean, Joe Cocker wasn't doing all that... that... *stuff* he did for adulation. I hope.

Case in point (though it is fictional) is the guitar duel at the climax of the otherwise awful film "Crossroads", which starred Ralph Macchio and, in the critical scene, Steve Vai as Jack Butler, the Devil's own lead guitarist:

Jack Butler's all over the place, dancing round the stage, pulling faces, sticking out his tongue, doing the whole cod-Hendrix showmanship schtick. Meanwhile, The Kid (Macchio) just lets it happen, lets his talent do the talking. And when the duel reaches its end-game, The Kid..... pulls out the classical joker. Game over.

And that's where I'm headed here.

For some reason, at some level, the classical repertoire still, to this day, trumps modern music as a test of virtuosity, of the physical mastery of one's instrument. Stretching a point, a guitarist would go as far as flamenco as a true test of ability.

I realise it's not all a matter of how many notes per second one can play, that it's also about tone, colour and the rest, but that's precisely why the classical repertoire is still a standard. Not only does a classical pianist need to be able to play this:

...but they also need to be able to play this:

Nobody gets as excited about a rock guitarist playing a love song as they do about an uptempo number. Compare Eric Clapton playing "Layla" and then "Wonderful Tonight" - which one gets more fanmail?

Having got *all* of that off my chest, the SongWithoutWhich I wanted to blog today is this:

As long as I can remember I have wanted to be able to play this. To me this piece, all two minutes of it, is a glorious, complete whole, a combination of bombast and delicacy. It explores the range of expression you can achieve on the piano, and it represents one hell of a manifesto for anyone who reckons themselves a bit of a keyboardist. Get one note wrong, the whole thing falls apart. You can't hide behind a wall of sound from the rest of the band: it's solo.

It's also properly virtuoso. You can't Autotune your way through this, you can't "hide it in the mix": if you're good enough to play this, then you're good enough.

Shameless fun

2011-02-22T20:09:00.002Z

Starting tonight, we're going to put each and every SongWithoutWhich up on Twitter, linking to a video (original wherever possible, best quality live as a second choice, and whatever we can find as a final option) and to the blog entry as well. Fire up your Twitter clients and look for @SongsWoutWhich, tweet-fiends! Though I suspect "trending"is the last thing this collection will do...

"Don't Believe a Word"

2011-01-24T20:06:00.003Z

One of the institutions that we in the UK are spoiled by is the BBC: a public service broadcaster whose reach and whose repertoire extends beyond the dreams of even the most megalomaniac of media moguls. A true multimedia behemoth. What we in this country tend to forget is just how trusted the BBC is around the world as a paragon of accuracy and of impartiality. Its motto is "Nation shall speak peace unto nation", but it might as well be "Truth is the only safe ground to stand on." Whether you're in Kinshasa or Kentucky, it's reliable, regular as clockwork and impartial.
For so many years it was the only "live" record of the UK's history, in documentaries, in light entertainment, even in vox pops on the evening news. Only now, through the internet and through painstaking efforts by curators, archivists and historians, is the BBC's real importance really becoming evident, through a never-ending stream of archive recordings that shine a light not on the world-changing events of years ago, but on the everyday components of life.
I'm not here to start an argument about the value of taxpayer-funded broadcasting; all I can say is that for my part I think I've got out much, much more than I've put in. Thanks, Auntie. Oh and thanks also for that Thin Lizzy retrospective the other week.
One of the things you tend to do with the BBC is use it, but forget it's there. You switch on the radio, you turn on the television and chances are you're tuning into the Beeb. Chances are the program that draws you in, piques your interest, or entertains you is on the BBC. But you'd be hard pressed the next day to remember what channel you were watching or listening to.
Sadly (or not), the same was the case with Thin Lizzy. Too often, if you're a rock fan you can be seduced by the sheer technical wizardry of a guitar virtuoso like Jimmy Page or Richie Blackmore, or the vocal calisthenics of an Ian Gillan, or the polyrhythmic genius of a Ginger Baker. Too often, bands rely on one individual's skill or talent to push them out of the ordinary. You remember their songs for a solo, for an outstanding vocal.
With Lizzy, that wasn't the case: you remember their songs because they're irresistable, unstoppable. Two great guitarists, a superb drummer and a sublimely talented bassist/singer/songwriter meant that the band was always perfectly balanced. And though Phil Lynott was the undoubted star of the band, he didn't outshine the rest of the band in the same manner that other stars have. They were all just as good as each other.
The reason I was comparing Thin Lizzy to the BBC was because, for many years they were as reliable and solid as the Beeb. Albums got better and better - the five albums from "Fighting" to "Live & Dangerous" are as steep a quality curve as you'll find anywhere in rock - they refined their sound until the twin-guitar harmony attack was absolutely perfect, and they managed to walk the narrow path of hard rock without it becoming heavy metal pastiche. In this they were undoubtedly saved by the Irish heritage and Lynott's mournful voice. He's not your typical hard rock singer, nor are his lyrics archetypal rock - his songs seem to come from Springsteen territory rather than the edges of self-indulgent oblivion. "The Boys Are Back in Town" comes across like a statement of criminal intent, but it's really just about any Saturday night.
*This* particular song is probably the best example of the band's ability to marry the sound and attitude of rock with surprisingly sensitive and thoughtful lyrics. Lynott's voice is at its most mournful, the lyric is as open and honest as anything a wannabe bad boy ever wrote, self-aware and full of the sort of rogue-ish charm that Lynott was known for.
It's short, sweet and as good a way to remember this much-missed man.

Of course it's hard to think of Phil Lynott without a smile and a chuckle for his immortal line: "Is there anyone here with any Irish in them? Are there any girls here who'd like a little more Irish in them?"

"Lido Shuffle"

2011-01-12T12:55:00.004Z

I've been toying around with an entry here for about six months. I started out planning to pick my favourite blue-eyed soul performance (not *singer*, just *performance*), but that spiralled completely out of control; before I knew it I was juggling Lowell George, Todd Rundgren, Boz Scaggs, Tom Johnstone and Michael MacDonald, Robert Palmer, Paul Rodgers, Rod Stewart, Jack Bruce, Dan Zanes of the Del Fuegos and about a hundred others.

See, if this blog teaches me anything, it's that there is no science to this music appreciation business. I can't be one of those pipe-smoking critics who talks about the technical aspects of singing, traditions and the like. I either like a song or I don't. If I like it, watch out! I start reading up, doing my research on Wikipedia, AllMusic etc until I know just about everything there is to know about a song.

Somewhere I remember reading a quotation on trying to analyse humour: "It's like dissecting a frog," the quote goes; "It can be done, but the frog tends to die in the process." And sometimes I feel like that about my occasionally obsessive approach to the simple, harmless act of appreciating a work of music.

Why analyse, why obsess?

Having said all this, what I seem to be describing is an extended teenage phase. I mean, we all lay on our beds with the headphones on and the lyrics sheet in our hand when we were teenagers, right?

So this is normal. It's dragged on a bit, but it's normal.

So, as part of the intense research I described at the start, I have spent a lot of time listening to Messrs Marriott, George, Palmer, Rundgren et al over the past few months, in an effort to try and pick what I think is the best blue-eyed soul performance of all.

Any great soul voice has something unusual about it: Rod Stewart had his sandpaper, Lowell George had the beautiful southern inflection (just listen to the way he sings the word "southern"), Michael MacDonald has his falsetto, Steve Marriott had his passion. They all *work*.

That's the reason they're all SongsWithoutWhich. Because they travel with me all the time, they come around on random shuffle at the strangest moments and they make me smile, sway, tap my feet. I just have to stop being anal about it.

And for that reason I wimped out. I can't pick a favourite: I'd choose a different one every time. But what I *can* do is share a performance that I treasure. I remember loving this when it was first released, enjoying the idiosyncratic vocal (it sounds vaguely gargled, doesn't it?), and the unstoppable rhythm.

Boz Scaggs hasn't been a prominent mainstream name, unless you're into Steve Miller or Donald Fagen, but by God he has a voice.

The first video shows how much fun you can have making music, even if it isn't the best performance of the song.

The second is an older, wiser Boz and a slower, much more menacing version. I cna't imagine how many years separate the two performances - a lifetime, it seems, but they're both fantastic.

"One Day Like This"

2010-09-02T13:44:00.002+01:00

Not that it's relevant to anyone apart from myself (and one or two others), but I got married three months ago. In doing so I drew a line under the last decade - the noughties - put a lot of baggage in the dumpster, and so on and so forth.

As I was dressing on the morning of the wedding, my daughter plugged her iPod in and started playing tunes as we zipped around the house, collecting things, fixing hair and straightening ties. We'd taken a guest cottage not far from the wedding venue, a house overlooking a green Irish field that slopes down the ocean.

At one point I became dimly aware of a gentle melody and of an insistent lyric. I stopped what I was doing and sat down to listen to this song. It was perfect. In every way. The lyrical Mancunian accent, the rolling strings, the stop-start rhythm, the rousing fade-out.

"What made me behave that way?/Using words I never say/I can only think it must be love/
Oh, anyway, it's looking like a beautiful day."

It's a love song, a song about growing old together, but one without illusions; a song that starts, most likely, with a drunken one-night stand and ends with a slow sunburst of awareness. One that makes the quantum leap from here to eternity in one simple verse:

"When my face is chamois-creased/If you think I'll wink, I did/Laugh politely at repeats/Yeah, kiss me when my lips are thin."

As the wedding day unfurled I found myself humming this song from time to time; it summed up the best day of my life, it offered a glimpse into the future, and restored all the childish optimism that years of rough-edged experience scrapes away.

"Throw those curtains wide/One day like this a year'd see me right."

Not surprisingly it's become one of my very favourite SongsWithoutWhich, but for more or less the same reasons as every other one on the list.

The original video is superb - watch it here,

or enjoy these versions; they're both excellent:

Nimrod

2010-04-20T15:34:00.005+01:00

Throughout the entire 500-odd songs that I've written up on this blog I have, with one exception to date, been listening to modern popular music, that is, music created any time since 1950 and probably 1960. I'd have to go through the whole list to check but right now, on this freshly-laundered spring afternoon, I'm too blissed out to care.
I've been listening to one single piece - a fragment, almost - of what you'd call classical music for a few days now. I call it "classical" only to differentiate it from "modern", but that word almost has a pejorative ring to it. As if it automatically means "old", "uncool", and tragically undanceable. And this one piece of music has set me off on one hell of a tangent.
How does music go beyond the personal? How can it reach out to encompass a society, a race, a country? How is it that one piece of music can achieve the same results in the ears, minds and hearts of a million people at the same time?
If you were living in the UK in 1990, you may remember how the British television coverage of the football World Cup that year used the aria "Nessun dorma" from Puccini's opera "Turandot" as its theme.

It was stirring stuff, calculated to tap into patriotism, football fan-dom and the excitement of big competition and fold them into one lung-busting blast of .... what? One-ness? A sudden rush of national awareness? What, exactly?
I mean, Turandot was written by an Italian.The opera is set in China. There's nothing inherently British about it. And yet it's become one of the country's favourite pieces of classical music - if it wasn't already, but pre-1990 classical music preference polling data's a bit thin on the ground.
What sort of music, then, could theoretically act as a personal, emotional, intellectual or even social touchstone for an entire nation? Every country has a national anthem, sure, but they tend to be little more than rather tasteless, blood-thirsty 18th century PR for the most part.
For example, do Frenchmen feel uplifted by an anthem whose opening verse includes the lines "Do you hear, in the countryside/The roar of these savage soldiers?/They come right into our arms/To cut the throats of your sons and your wives"? Do Americans feel their hearts stirred by singing about the war their forefathers had to fight to preserve the infant nation? "And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air/Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there."
When we sing our national anthems, are we thinking of the entire boxful of virtues, events and achievements that brought our country to where it is today?
I doubt it. To sportsmen and women, who are in the business of representing themselves and/or their country, these anthems do mean something, but to most of the rest of us, our national anthems are a reflex action rather than a conscious, positive commitment.
So maybe then it's time to think again about how music represents us as collective peoples. Each of our countries has its own history, its own cocktail of virtues and vices, those stereotypes that we all cling to in jokes and in prejudices. How should we represent those?
Put it another way: imagine your country has just stepped into the street, but suddenly spies a truck bearing down on it at top speed. In those final few milliseconds before impact, what images would flash through your country's mind? *That's* what an anthem should bring to mind.
So, not wishing to spread myself too thinly and come up with 200-odd anthems, since it would quickly fade into parody and bad taste, I'm going to stick to one. At the same time I'd suggest that anthems shouldn't be sung but played, and that we should all sit or stand in reverential contemplation of the history, of the composition, of the country we call home.
Music used to be so good at "summing up", reaching out in every direction at once to grasp and express myriad elements almost at the same time. Composers of old seemed to have such a wide palette of colours to paint with, while today we seem to need a piece of music to zoom in and focus on a particular thing with microscopic precision. And any country, any society has become too big for words to encapsulate. Let music alone do the job.
So sit back and listen to this piece. Close your eyes, let it take you on your journey, wherever that is. There are hundreds of pieces of music out there that could do the same job of transporting you, setting you alongside your fellow-men and highlighting what it is that brings you together as a society. This is just one of those hundreds of pieces. For me, it fits the bill perfectly. It defines what it means to live where I do, and the attachment I have to the country in which I live. Surely that's all you need when it comes to an anthem.

Variations on an Original Theme for Orchestra, Op. 36, No. 9 ("Nimrod")

"Daydream"

2010-04-20T12:48:00.001+01:00

We're getting a taste of summer this week. The sun's bright, the streets are humming and there's a welcome breeze blowing outside. Hemlines are edging their way north, overcoats are being left at home, and lo and behold, people are smiling! Perhaps it may also have something to do with the blissful silence in the skies above.

And as if by karmic instruction, this song pops up on my iPod, as if my inner devil was telling me to take the rest of the day off.

"I'm blowing the day to take a walk in the sun,
And fall on my face on somebody's new-mown lawn."

But before I do skip out of the office, there's time to finish this.

Back here, I was saying that Evan Dando has this effortless ability to write terrific tunes. Well, I stand by that, but I have to add John Sebastian to the roster of "impossibly talented songwriters."

"Summer in the City," "Do You Believe in Magic," "Welcome Back," "You Didn't Have to Be So Nice".... each one so simple, so elegant and irresistable.

I'm sure we each of us know an irrepressible optimist, a friend for whom the glass is always more than half full. Someone whose laughter we've almost come to hear in our sleep. John Sebastian is probably one of those. First guy in the bar, first one to crack a joke...

In an age where rage and discontent seem to own more than their fair share of the landscape, it's a real treat to have a friend like that.

"(I Never Loved) Eva Braun"

2009-09-23T21:33:00.003+01:00

Do we like Geldof?

It seems a million years ago Bob Geldof was a new wave singer, another snotty streak of piss with an attitude, a mouth and a truckload of ambition. All of that seems to have been overrun by his involvement with famine relief, third world development, peace, butter mountains, and for a while by his personal life.
These days, the Geldof brand is being marketed by his daughters, who certainly seem a chip off the old block in some respects.
Back in the day though Geldof the singer (the real one, not the daughter) was the real "enfant terrible" of the new wave. When Johnny Rotten retired to become John Lydon and work at being taken as a serious musician, Geldof was right there, stage left, waiting to take over.
But where Johnny Rotten was all about outrage for outrage's sake, Geldof was always more thoughtful, if sometimes a little clumsy. Like Sinead O'Connor, Geldof had issues with some of the hard-dying traditions in Irish society, the influence of the Church, and he used his position as a pulpit from which to attack.
Even his music reflected more thought. While the Pistols were throwing as much manure at the wall to stink up the place, The Boomtown Rats picked their subjects with a little more care, even if shock was still on the agenda. "I Don't Like Mondays" got itself banned in the US for dealing with a schoolyard shooting (20 years before Columbine), and "Mary of the Fourth Form" and "She's So Modern" skewered the rapidly-unwinding tradition of schoolroom innocence, like The Police would do later.
But one song, to me, stands head and shoulders above the rest of their material.
if you're setting out to shock and undermine you can do it, as the Pistols did, with a blunt instrument. Or you can subvert the process and have a little fun. I have no doubt that, as unpalatable as the subject matter is, Geldof had a lot of fun writing this song.
"I never loved Eva Braun/Though a thousand people say I did/She was just some girl who was on the make/Boy she wanted to be so big."
Okay, so we're already coming at the subject sideways. Listen to song! Not only are the Rats twisting our tail, they're taking the mickey by hauling in ancient references (the "Are you really going out with Adolf?", the "oh no?"/"oh yeah?"/"yes we see" are pulled straight from the Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack?").
I never heard all the screams (oh no?)/I never saw the blood and dirt and gore (oh yeah?)/That wasn't part of the dream, (yes, we see)/Of maps and generals and uniforms."
To be honest, it's a sick, twisted song, but from the safe distance of thirty-plus years, we can see that it's entirely in keeping with the Geldof way: be outrageous, be subversive, take the accepted truth and play with it.
And it's helped by a truly great chant-along chorus that spins faster and faster, right to the final ringing chord, and the whispered, awed, "Gee!".
Maybe it's not songwriting on a par with the Neil Youngs of this world, but it's as in-your-face and provocative as Geldof ever was.

Apologies for the video... minimize the window if you must.

"Ezy Ryder"

2009-06-23T21:25:00.003+01:00

I'm taking a night class in creative writing - sort of scratching an ancient itch of you like. While I write for a living, journalism isn't exactly creative: the plot, the characters, the dialogue, it's all laid out there for you and all you need to do is arrange it so that it makes sense. Creative writing is conjuring something out of thin air, something that didn't necessarily happen to people that don't necessarily exist.
And as any teacher will tell you, a story has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. And as I'm finding out, a good beginning is a real challenge.
Which brings me to songs, and how a great song begins. The only problem here is that there are so many great intros to choose from.
I've already listed more than a few songs that have magnificent intros: the Stones' apocalyptic "Gimme Shelter", Hendrix's unstoppable "Ezy Ryder", the Allman Brothers' spic "Whipping Post", CSN&Y's gentle, perfect "Find the Cost of Freedom", Arlo Guthrie's gorgeous "Gabriel's Mother's Hiway Ballad No. 16 Blues", the list goes on....
But then, it's not necessarily *what* you start a song with, but *how* you start it that matters. So a song with no intro at all can be great - the Buzzcocks' "Orgasm Addict" kicks off with lyrics before the music starts, while Catatonia's "Road Rage" puts Cerys Mathews' voice well to the fore, so you've heard two lines of lyric before you've even worked out what the tune is.
At the other extreme you can spend one and a half minutes listening to Traffic get their so-laid-back-it's-horizontal groove on before Stevie Winwood starts singing in "The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys". And Pink Floyd were never ones to mess up a perfectly good piece of ambient soundscape with nasty, human lyrics until it was absolutely necessary (usually around ten minutes into the piece). Besides, you had to let the sustain on Dave Gilmour's guitar fade away before there was room for a vocal...
So what this is all gathering itself to say is that there probably is no perfect, or even right way to start a song.
Great. Now, how about ending a song?
I mean, do you let it gently fade away into nothingness, like the Beatles' "I Am The Walrus"? The Fabs irritatingly stuck so many bits and clips onto the fade-out, forcing me to spend many long evenings gradually turning the volume higher and higher in an effort to work out what was being said (as I recall the final sentence is "Sit you down, father; rest you").
A side question here - how long do you think Cream extended the thrash-out at the end of "Sunshine of Your Love" *after* the recording fades out? I bet that was fun. And who left the tapes running on "Helter Skelter"?
Alternately, you can run a song into a brick wall to end it, like Blur do on "Song 2", or Roxy Music on "Do the Strand", or Faith No More on "We Care a Lot!".
Most songs, if they don't fade out, just bring everything to a neat and tidy end, so tidy in fact that it's almost unsatisfying. It takes a particular kind of cussed nature to cut a song off in its prime and leave the listener wondering what the hell happened to the neat ending.
So, picking my favourite intro hasn't been easy - it's taken many weeks in fact. But I come back, time and again, to Hendrix's Ezy Ryder. It's not delicate or sensitive: Jimi's hammering hard on the strings to get those choked chords out, but nonetheless they flow, they grow, they swirl until the intro's built up such an immense head of steam that you cannot resist or obstruct the launch of the song proper.
The rest of the song ain't so damn bad, either.

For my favourite ending, I'm reaching way, way back to the 70s to the chaotic implosion at the end of "White Punks on Dope": the chorale fades, drunk/stoned musicians ask "as that alright?" and then cackle with maniacal laughter, a toilet flushes, and finally a voice intones something Spanish. More Dada than Dada.

There's no video of the full versionof the song sadly. The single was chopped and edited to bits, faded out and generally sanitised. But grab a copy of the Tubes' fist album and don't ever let it go. Totally fab.

"The Older We Get"

2009-05-03T10:07:00.003+01:00

Do we get harder as we get older?
I mean, do we grow a tougher skin, do we become more uncompromising, more.... for want of a better word, ruthless?
Think back to teenage years, when everything matters, where every sense, every sensation is magnified by our unfamiliarity with it; where everything we feel, from the unutterable joy of a favourite song to the intense disorientation of the afterglow of a romance, is just so damn big. Does that magnification fade, dwindle, as we grow into adulthood or do we simply develop better ways to deal with it?
I suppose what I mean is how we as humans, both young and old, deal with stresses in our lives. From the shock of realising that we are entering "The World" after the cotton-wool basket of infancy and childhood, to the vast untested horizon of independence and responsibility, these are massive stresses that we face as children and teenagers and even into our twenties.
Later, as fully paid-up adults, we face essentially the same dilemmas but because we have told ourselves there is more at stake, or because in fact there *is* more at stake, we feel that the potential costs are so much greater.
Do we find our strength and resilience in simply growing tougher and more ruthless in handling our errors, our choices, or do we try to absorb them, feel them to their fullest potential and absorb the lessons so that next time we will confront them with the same optimism but just make the right decision first time?
It's an often-repeated piece of conventional wisdom that the three most stressful events we face in our lives are marriage/divorce, moving home and changing work. These are all adult events, but just rearrange those events into a teenage context and the stress is just the same.
So it's how we handle these events that must change. In our youth we dive in head-first, experience everything to its fullest and emerge on the other side bruised but still whole.
It's as adults that we are more prone to breaking rather than bending, I think. We are more set in our ways, less willing to make the adjustments, the compromises that we once believed were the better approach.
"As a child touching age, we think that it's so:/That life, love and everything is easy to know./The old, they can't reach us/Their ways are not ours/Though they furrowed our futures/Our freedom they bore."
I'm not sure how to wrap this up, except to say that when we take the luxurious moment to stop the clock and look backwards in generous spirit, I think it's important that we try to remember how much more *life* we can experience if we open ourselves to the possibility that imperfect is the natural state of things, and that stress and disappointment is normal. To allow ourselves to dry out, to stiffen and to be prone to breaking rather than bending is to remove ourselves from this world.

"Stay With Me"

2009-04-12T19:00:00.004+01:00

Many, many years ago, I got to live a dream. Through my brother, I met a guy that ran a pirate radio station - no, perhaps *the* pirate radio station - and he asked me to work as a DJ for this station.
Understand, this was in the mid to late 1980s, before the wholesale liberalisation of the airwaves, when pirates still contributed something to the agenda (perhaps they still could today).
Naturally, I jumped at the chance, and one Valentine's Day I found myself shivering on the deck of a tiny fishing boat as it ploughed its way offshore. I landed, seasick and disoriented, on a 200 foot ship parked in the middle of the English Channel, and three hours later, I was doing my first show.
At this distance of years, it is a fond, warm memory, a consolation even; and I classify as one of my more "rebellious" acts. As a non-Britisher, I risked being tossed out of the UK for good if the authorities came after me. So I lived those few months extra-hard. I drank in every moment, even when the weather chased me into the darkest bowels of the rusting, tired old ship. I watched St Elmo's Fire dance around the aerial masts, I learned to drink coffee and tea with salt as well as sugar, I even got to taste horseflesh.
And I spent hours, days, listening to music. A kid in his early 20s, a music nut, let loose among 15,000 or so records, with copious facilities to play, record, mix and enjoy.
I got to know real strangers, the motley assortment of characters who were drawn on board simply to play the music they loved for hundreds of thousands of people they'd never meet. Some of us were serial offenders, jumping from pirate station to pirate station, others were kids with the DJ bug who just had to get into "the business" and for all I know, still are in the business.
We'd watch for supply boats when the beer and cigarettes ran out, we'd wave at the ferries passing every day, we'd even flick a finger at the Air Force jets that once in a while would buzz the ship.
But most of all, we sat together and each of us chortled inside at cocking a snook at The Man, at our daring and naughtiness, reveling in the companionship that comes from a shared risk. And when my time was up, I left without a backward glance.
Last week, I went to see "The Boat That Rocked", Richard Curtis' film based on the pirate station that I once worked on. It wasn't the ship, the time, the atmosphere that I remembered - it was long before, in the station's heyday, but the ethos, the feeling was the same.
Yes, there was nostalgia, some sadness that the era has passed, but most of all, a warmth in remembering the oh-so simple act of rebellion that took me out to sea.
I still have about ten cassette mix tapes that I made on the boat, songs that I discovered for the first breathless, delicious time in the warm cabin that served as the record library. Many of them are SongsWithoutWhich and are chronicled here.
But this one isn't. It's actually a song from the film I saw last week, and so I can't claim it was a selection based on my impeccable taste, nor a song that resonates with personal meaning. It's just a wonderful song, whose chorus I recall dimply from some radio show many years ago and which, when it cropped up in the film, gave me one of those "ahhh" moments when a long-forgotten memory comes streaking to the front of your mind.
I won't ever associate this song with my time on the radio station, but I do now associate it with my act of remembrance of that time and so it is, tangentially on one level at least, a SongWithoutWhich.
It doesn't hurt that Lorraine Ellison has a voice that does both the caressing and the paint-stripping in equal measures, and that it is a simply fantastic song. 'nuff said.

"Downtown Train"

2009-04-01T13:19:00.003+01:00

What's happened to the love song over the years is a pretty exact mirror of what's happened to society at the same time. Everything becomes more explicit, more obsessive, more dysfunctional. And so have the songs.
Let's review somoe evidence. In 1950, Nat King Cole sang "Mona Lisa" which went a little like this:
"Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you/You're so like the lady with the mystic smile/Is it only 'cause you're lonely they have blamed you/For that Mona Lisa strangeness in your smile?"
Beautiful, isn't it? Elegant, restrained, and with a hint of sadness beneath. Textured and literate too.
So now we fast forward a decade, and here are the Beatles:
"Something in the way she moves/Attracts me like no other lover/Something in the way she woos me/I don't want to leave her now/You know I believe in how."
Equally elegant, equally beautiful and George Harrison's little guitar break is gorgeous.
But then, later in the song comoes this:
"You're asking me will my love grow/I don't know, I don't know/Stick around, and it may show/But I don't know, I don't know."
Suddenly love, commitment and the desire to cleave to one another became conditional, or at least uncertain, as the changes wrought in the 1960s filtered through into our very simple view of ourselves and our emotional relationships. Suddenly the world eas more of a playground and we didn't need to cleave to our partner quite as much as our parents did.
Now we hit the 1970s. For the purposes of demonstration, I'll take Billy Joel:
"Don't go changing, to try and please me/You never let me down before/Don't imagine you're too familiar/And I don't see you anymore."
Lordy! Suddenly the love song has admitted to the possibility of codependency, and that we have to really, really work at being just right for our partner. Why? Because they have an alternative now. Anyone who's read Tim Harford's "The Logic of Life" should understand: relationships have become a bargain struck in the market place. We take someone on because we calculate the costs and the benefits of being with them and for a while at least, the costs outweigh the benefits. For a while.
Still with me? On to the 1980s, then:
"I wanna know what love is/I want you to show me/I wanna feel what love is/I know you can show me."
Geez, talk about projection. So now we've all become emotional illiterates who can't identify our own feelings?
1990s:
"If I should stay/I would only be in your way/So I'll go, but I know/I'll think of you ev'ry step of the way."
What, so now we didn't know we loved someone until we split up? Big oops. (And yeah, I know it was written a lot earlier.)
Anyway, what I'm trying to say here is that the love song has mirrored our own emotional decay, to the point where love songs these days are more about obsessive codependency than soulful paeans to the one we purely, simply, love.
And I will now present to you what is, to me, the ultimate love song.

It's simple, it's real. The characters and the situations may not be pretty, but they're real. Honest. "Downtown Train" is a story rather than a shopping list of one person's lusts and insecurities. The line "Will I see you tonight/On a downtown train" could have come from a black & white film, a bygone era.
There's desire, sure, but it's emotional desire and not physical. The song aspires to something better, greater than so much of what we are forced to listen to these days. And it gives not a fig for codependency, obsession, need. It's generous, open, properly loving. And in a day, a time like this, it's a consolation to know that there are people who still love like that.

"In Every Dream Home a Heartache"

2009-03-17T04:10:00.003Z

I've been dropping references to art-school rock from time to time, usually to point out how punk and new wave really weren't the snotty, street-level phenomenon that we all thought they were at the time, but instead a fairly carefully choreographed effort at testing the collective boundaries of post-permissive society. Ten years after "free love", LSD and all that jazz, it seemed the only way to outrage the bourgeoisie was to swear at them. Even the hippies didn't do that...
Anyhow, I didn't really think much of the references to art schools until I rocked through the Rs on my collection and came slap bang up against these guys.
I suppose if you were looking for an exemplar of the whole idea of art students as rock musicians, you could do a whole lot worse than Roxy Music's first two albums (yes, the ones with Brian Eno).
They made a visual as well as aural statement - Bryan Ferry had his immaculate coiffure and louche elegance, Eno looked like Riff-Raff's mild cousin, Phil Manzanera like a biker who'd just had his annual shower, all very eclectic - just like art school.
And so with the sound. From the frantic joyous romp that is "Virginia Plain", the out-to-lunch weirdness of "Ladytron", on through the lively chaos of "Do the Strand" and then...this.
It's a masterpiece in two halves. The first is all menace, sullen glitter and empty wealth: "Open-plan living/Bungalow ranch-style/All of its comforts/Seem so essential." A dangerously seductive mood, half-despairing, half-drunk at the pleasures of excess, quiet and menacing. The story evolves, spins slowly in from its wide-screen view to the story of a man and his inflatable doll. And by the time anger begins to flare ("Inflatable doll/Lover ungrateful/I blew up your body/But you blew my mind"), the song has seemingly built up unsustainable pressure and all hell breaks loose.
Sheer genius. A decade before Adam Ant was pulling the whip out of his valise and getting so physical, Roxy Music had already mapped out the territory.
But because art students back then didn't swear on TV, the bourgeois didn't make a fuss. And by the time Adam Ant was a memory, Roxy were still in business.

"Smells Like Teen Spirit"

2009-03-08T20:32:00.003Z

Whenever a musical genre is born its leaders proclaim loudly how their sound is like nothing else we've heard, that they've broken the mould, that they're fresh, new and unique. And while that may be true on some level, invariably these pioneers owe their place to someone who came before, who pointed them in the right direction.
The Beatles were fans of rhythm & blues; the Byrds created a delicate fusion of folk and rock; the Yardbirds and the Rolling Stones developed the blues; and Led Zeppelin took the whole damn shooting match and turned the volume up to 11.
Later on, things got a little more confused as communication developed closer to the pan-global instant access that we enjoy today, and New York and London fed off each other. Punk, though many think of it as a British phenomenon, was really a transatlantic joint venture: punk bands would later namecheck key influences such as the New York Dolls or the Small Faces.
So it is sometimes an interesting exercise to look through the last decade or so and wonder what bands the Next New Wave will be claiming as a key influence. Maybe the whole arena of popular music has become so well-connected through MySpace, YouTube and the like that influences will become more immediate, and we won't have to wait almost a generation until the next set of snotty rebellious Bash Street Kids come swaggering out of nowhere and drop names like Happy Mondays or The Good, The Bad and The Queen.
But I'd very much like to know what bands have or will cite this band, and this song as a seminal moment. I suppose it may be too soon to say what Nirvana's long-lasting impact will have been. They certainly managed to cover a lot of territory in their short time, gathering a lot of what was called "indie" and bringing it to the attention of the masses. They made it hard for kids to try to be cool by liking obscure bands, by shining a million-watt bulb on the scene that spawned them. Nirvana almost made the mainstream look indie.
They may also have been the last truly rebellious rock group. For the last fifty years, rock music has tapped into teenage alienation...
"What are you rebelling against, Johnny?" "Whaddaya got?"
...to gather the kids and their admiration and worship. Rock music offered those kids at the margins - the disaffected, the marginalised - a chance to be cool.
But Nirvana did this on a scale that meant that pretty much any uncool kid suddenly became part of something widespread, something almost comfortable. Nirvana didn't express the politicised rage of punk, the ambitions of the art-schooled, but rather the wailing confusion of a generation that had nothing left to rebel against. Increasingly permissive parenthood has meant that there's less for teenagers to rebel against, and this lack of focus, this lack of a target results in the passive rage that we see around us. There's no "Man" to stick it to these days, just gnawing boredom to lament:
"With the lights out its less dangerous/Here we are now/Entertain us/I feel stupid and contagious/Here we are now/Entertain us."
And that may be Nirvana's great dollop of genius: to have managed to tap into that early-21st century rootlessness and give the latest generation an anthem for their own time.

"Sunshine of Your Love"

2009-01-02T13:51:00.004Z

In the film "Wayne's World" (or it may be the sequel, I can't be sure), there's a moment when Wayne sees a particularly beautiful guitar. He turns to camera and says "It will be mine. Oh yes."
Well, you get the same sort of feeling from this song. As love songs go, this isn't so much a hearts-and-flowers "moon-and-June" type of song, more a "You're mine. Get used to it" song. Which is fine with me.
The intro is just about the most recognisable opening 16 bars in rock anywhere, a spare riff on bass, echoed by the guitar with a muffled jungle throb in the background. Dark, brooding, a little mysterious. Hardly what you'd expect to hear, given the song's title.
"It's getting near dawn/When lights close their tired eyes./I'll soon be with you my love,/To give you my dawn surprise./I'll be with you darling soon,/I'll be with you when the stars start falling."
And right from the start, I'm wondering to myself how Jack Bruce can have been overlooked as one of the very greatest singers of his eras. It's not a blues growl, nor is it a rock shout: it's crystal clear, hinting at a deep wellspring of emotion beneath, rising to hit the higher notes with barely a trace of effort. Just fantastic.
Eric Clapton's guitar playing is perfect for the song: understated, happy to sit in the background until his solo, when he steps up and delivers - just right. Bluesy, but not drawn-out, clear, almost an academic solo, as if he's trying to understand what he's playing and why.
Ginger Baker sounds like he's not using his sticks but is just striking the skins with the flat of his hand, so muffled is the sound. It's exact, precise drumming, holding the song together with bonds of steel, hitting the off-beat with such relish that you can almost see him laughing with glee.
"I've been waiting so long/To be where I'm going;/In the sunshine of your love."
As a New Year's bonus, here are two different takes on the song. Firstly, a funereal version:

And secondly a more frantic version from their farewell concert:

"Tower of Strength"

2008-12-08T18:35:00.003Z

I never really got the goth thing. I know that it sort of evolved out of the darker side of punk, a step-child of Siouxsie & the Banshees, and that it spawned all sorts of mini-tornadoes like shoe-gaze and grunge. I liked the fact that it spoke to poeple who were fundamentally out of kilter with the rest of the world, in exactly the way that punk emphatically did not.
One or two songs from that era penetrated my consciousness, but on the whole I was looking for a more sensitive, laid-back groove at the time and I had no time for the sheer ponderous weight that goth laid down.
But I remember *this* song very well. I think it was the not-terribly-discreet rip-off of "Kashmir" that did it for me, the fact that Wayne Hussey adopted a ridiculous gun-totin' Western image for the video (riding a horse through the city, wearing poncho and hat, for goodness sake), and that, really, it was a great song because it wasn't entirely original.
Yes, it's a tad ponderous; yes it looks like a Goth, feels like a Goth and sounds like a Goth; yes, it's derivative and therefore utterly predictable, and yes, the video is ridiculous.
But it's a GREAT song!

"Jesus Says"

2008-11-29T10:22:00.003Z

I'm fooling myself, I know. But I don't care.
I came across this song not long ago and as soon as I heard it I knew it was a SongWithoutWhich. It just ticked so many boxes, lifted me up and got me going, that it's muscled its way into my heart and my list.
As I hinted at with the Jesus and Mary Chain, there actually do exist some bands that I haven't researched to death, and of whose existence I am still not aware. Ash is just one of those: I mean, I knew the name, I knew there was a band named Ash, but beyond that they had not impacted me.
I forget where I actually did hear this for the first time, but I do remember downloading it immediately and bouncing along to it for much of the following day. It's yet another in a long and honoured line of perfect teenage songs. It's simple, it's fast, it just doesn't stop, like a teenager who can't stop his leg from twitching while he's inhaling his supper.
If I were to be facetious I'd say this song was half-way between Motorhead and the Archies. It's got hints of bubblegum, yet the guitars are nice and crunchy. The intro is Sex PIstols-lite, and you can actually *hear* the sneer in the vocals, so it checks out for attitude, too.
Dammit, this song makes *me* feel like a teenager. And that's where I'm sadly deluding myself. But don't you think that any song that takes 20 years off your age in an glorious instant must be worth holding onto?

"I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever)"

2008-11-29T01:23:00.004Z

Have you ever stopped and thought about movie soundtracks, about how difficult it must be to find the slam-dunk, 100% perfect song for a particular scene? I'm not talking about movie scores which are by definition perfect for their moment, since they've been composed specifically.
No, I'm talking about choosing a song that's been written by someone totally unconnected with the film, probably written in a completely different context. Something like the Chuck Berry tune, "You Never Can Tell", that John Travolta and Uma Thurman dance to in "Pulp Fiction", for example, or The Jesus and Mary Chain's "Just Like Honey" from the closing moments of "Lost in Translation".
When it works, it really works, and you can imagine the relief, the triumph that whoever selected that song feels; you can almost picture them laughing with pleasure and saying "Well, who knew?"
Well, imagine a whole damn film where every single song is one of those "who knew" moments. Imagine a movie based on a book which manages to find the perfect song for every kind of emotion, every kind of accident of everyday life. Imagine "High Fidelity."
If you're a rock snob, then this is for you. If you're a thirty-something slacker who's working his way through the music business by running a record store, then this *is* you.
And, like any good rock snob with an extensive collection, you yourself have the perfect soundtrack to your life. There's never a moment that can't be summed up in a ten-second clip from a dusty 45, a slightly mangled cassette or even a coffee-stained CD. "High Fidelity" proves beyond doubt that if you leave a man alone in a room with a pile of records and a stereo he can make his own entertainment for... oh, a month or two.
I pick this song because it's the greatest song of a collection of great songs from the film, because it's the final track, the resolution, the happy ending; and because any song that can gather in and encapsulate a truly happy ending deserves to be recognised.
But most of all it's a SongWithoutWhich because of the genius of Stevie Wonder.

"Time"

2008-11-23T16:52:00.000Z

It's easy to lose track of time. This life that we lead, this world we inhabit, are like centrifuges. If you don't put your hand out and STOP things, everything just speeds up until you're hanging on for dear life. You find your overdraft is so big that you can only live off your credit card, and when you max out your credit card, you pay the monthly instalment by taking out a second credit card and robbing Peter to pay Paul. The noose tightens around you tighter and tighter until you become this black hole of debt, regret, time and confusion.

I recently bought a DVD from the "Classic Albums" series, and settled back to watch Messrs Waters, Gilmour, Mason and Wright explain "The Dark Side of the Moon."
At one point, Roger Waters discusses writing the song "Time." He describes it as "very lower-sixth" (high school) and marvels that he got away with what he clearly thinks is facile, teenage stuff.

"Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain;
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today;
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun.

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but its sinking,
And racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in the relative way, but you're older:
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death."

Later on, he remembers how his mother believed that childhood and adolescence were all about preparing for a life that was going to start later. And, as he says, "I suddenly realised that life wasn't going to start later, it starts at dot, and happens all the time. At any point you can grasp the reins and start guiding your own destiny."

With all the bad news and apocalyptic headlines these days, guiding our own destiny seems a bit of a tall order. The last time there was a recession like this I was in high school, and being a typical teenager it didn't really affect me. My parents probably worried and fretted endlessly about keeping everything together and paying the bills, my father may have stressed out about keeping his job but me, all I worried about was the next weekend.

Well, twenty-something years later the shoes are very definitely on the other foot. And those of us who've spent the last two decades forging careers and climbing corporate ladders are probably thinking back to the last recession and saying, "well, it wasn't so bad, was it?" Well, maybe not, but we didn't have mortgages, careers, kids, bills and an uneasy feeling that perhaps we made some wrong decisions.

But the sort of troubles we face today can't be fixed by "guiding our destinies" or by "running to catch up with the sun". They just take strength and resolve. Neither of these things are time-sensitive, and neither of them require a particular degree of insight in a youthful mind. "Time" really isn't what it's all about. And while I may be stretching a point here trying to link this song with the sort of worries that we are dealing with today, the line "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way" seems to me to send the wrong message - but then I'm a lot older than Roger Waters was when he wrote the song.

"Time" is, though, a miraculous song. A true SongWithoutWhich, even if I'm uncomfortable with its sentiment. Enjoy.

"You're All That I Have"

2008-11-16T22:00:00.000Z

Being a music fan is, in a large part, about hero worship. Or an extreme kind of respect at the very least.
Musicians do what we, for the most part, can't. They gather and wrap up the enormity of our feelings, our excitements, our thoughts and desires and they package them such that we zero in and bounce alongside them in perfect synch.
Musicians' and songwriters' ability to do the seeming impossible, to hold up a mirror to ourselves, generates this visceral reaction, this quasi-adoration that takes us over and drives us straight to the local record store.
If you're overjoyed, excited because it's a hot summer and everyone's outdoors and having fun, what other song could there possibly be but "Dancing In The Streets"? If you're love-lorn, feeling as if your love has just torn apart the entire fabric og your life, you can turn to the hope that rests in anything from the Hothouse Flowers' first album. And if you're a confused and distressed teen who can't seem to find your place in the world, there are any number of songs out there who speak directly to your concerns too.
So our relationship with musicians andd writers starts with this wholesale, blind fan-dom - we paper the walls of our rooms with pictures, drawings, quotations, we dress like them, we cop their attitudes.
And when they do something that hits a wrong note with us, we feel a vague sense of betrayal. All that seeming faultless insight, all those moments when we curled into a tight ball and felt the swell of power, derived from someone else's empathy just evaporate. We reject them.
But what about when we screw up? Who writes the song for the mistakes we make, the regrets we pile up and stare at, stacked up against our bedroom wall? Hardly anyone. See, rock and roll isn't about self-awareness. It's not about maturity. It's more about feeling injustice, feeling hard done by, feeling rebellious: it's all focused outwardly. And it just doesn't include taking time out to look at yourself.
So for anyone out there who's made mistakes, recognised them and wanted to find the sort of song that maybe speaks to the bright light of self-awareness, I don't think there's one out there. Not lyrically, anyway.
But for mood, that's a whole other thing, and I think this song does carry that mood. There's a restless sense of desperation, the kind of feeling that you get when the ground opens up beneath your feet and you realise that the feet of clay you're suddenly sporting will drag you to the bottom of it, sure as eggs are eggs. There's panic, there's passion and sheer sweaty dread too. When we come face to face with our own failures and their consequences, that's what we feel, I think.
Listen to the song, watch the clip here. Tell me if I'm wrong. And if there is another song out there that speaks of human weakness and failing, then let's hear it!

"Man In the Corner Shop"

2008-11-09T21:10:00.004Z

I'm not sure where this is going to go. But what the hell.
I was never a mod. Not in the 60s, you understand, since I'd have been the youngest mod in existence. No, I mean the mod revival in the 70s. Parkas, Vespas, purple hearts, you know the drill.... I didn't get it. And when The Jam surfed to the top of the musical agenda on the wave of this revival, I didn't buy into it, not one bit. Those skinny ties....yuk.
Having said that, I did enjoy their music. I thought "English Rose" was just about the finest love song ever written - and still do - while "That's Entertainment" and "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight" brought living in London during that period so vividly to life. Between them, Paul Weller and Tom Robinson pretty much told you how it could be, living here.
I hadn't heard this song for a long, long time until this weekend, when something prompted me to buy it. And I remember now why I liked it so much. For a start, there's something very 60s about this: the guitar sound and the echoing chorus sound a little like something the Byrds might have toyed with.
But it's really the lyric that you're listening to here: "Puts up the closed sign, does the man in the corner shop/Serves his last then he says goodbye to him/He knows it is a hard life/But its nice to be your own boss really." Like Ray Davies, Paul Weller knows that the universal lies in the particular, and there's no better story to tell than all of our stories. And it's so English, the "does the man in the corner shop." No other English-speaking country does that, and that one phrase places the song and its story so specifically that you feel like you could be watching a film.
The other thing is Weller's voice - he's toned down the harsh, spitting aggression of the first four albums and he's concentrating on carrying the tune - the echo gives his voice a gentler feel and makes the story he's telling feel almost like a dream.
"Go to church, do the people from the area/All shapes and classes sit and pray together/For here they are all one/For God created all men equal." That's a hell of a way to end a lyric of a Jam song, when most of the material Weller wrote was so rooted in the real world and so in-your-face.
And I suppose that's the real reason that this is a SongWithoutWhich - that, and the wondrous events of last Tuesday.

"Just Like Honey"

2008-10-21T22:10:00.003+01:00

Not too many years ago I was given a copy of "The Rock Snob's Dictionary" by someone who knows me far too well. It's a very funny, uncomfortably accurate collection of the sort of esoteric one-upmanship that music nerds can be guilty of.
Or, as the blurb puts it: "At last! An A-to-Z reference guide for readers who want to learn the cryptic language of Rock Snobs, those arcana-obsessed people who speak of "Rickenbacker guitars" and "Gram Parsons."
I'll put my hand up now, if I haven't before at some stage of this blog, and admit that yes, I'm a Rock Snob. I can argue at LENGTH about whether the Stones were better with Brian or without, about the classical references strewn all about the Beatles' work, or about how Jackson Browne is more important than the Eagles.
And if you want to pick up these or any other topics with me, you can do it in the comments section.
But I'm going to go all wobbly and sad and admit that my Rock Snobbery has blinded me to a great number of treasures. Back in the mid-1980s, when I was still struggling to deal with punk in an adult fashion, I was unable -- or unwilling -- to process much in the way of what was going on at that time. I turned my back on gems like Los Lobos, Nick Cave, The Cure and Echo & the Bunnymen. Oh, sure, the odd piece of magic would break through the murk -- Killing Joke's "Love Like Blood" was one that really got to me -- but in general I was too busy still trying to process the 1970s.
Here's one song, and a band, I very definitely did miss out on.
And because I never exercised my Rock Snobbery on the Jesus & Mary Chain, they remain an intriguing mystery: I don't know the minutiae of their early days scratching around the club circuit, nor the details of their struggle to remain relevant in the face of increased popularity and major-label backing, their various drug-induced flame-outs and their triumphant renewal at a now-legendary gig in Budapest back in 1995. (I'm joking: this bit of Spinal-Tappery is meant to illustrate a point, ok?)
See? Because I can't contextualise the JAMC in any sort of stereotypical rock 'n roll storyline, I lose the ability to pontificate at length about just how great they are, and I can't whip out factoids and "in" references to show what a discerning fan I am. In short, "music fan digs great music for what it is shocker"!
Anyway, this is just terrific and needs to be listened to by everyone.

"Cut My Wings"

2008-09-28T20:11:00.003+01:00

I am so steamed.
As a cast-iron, certified 100% "rock snob", I get severely irritated and uppity whenever some no-neck fool displays their ignorance. And reading through the British press over the weekend, I ran into a doozy. Now you shouldn't go looking in the mainstream press for much in the way of informed criticism of anything, much less music, but still, it's the casual flaunting of utter idiocy that got my goat, particularly when it concerns someone as good as this guy.
Like pretty much anyone who believes that great music is not something that comes along every day, I have only a passing interest in what gets broadcast on music TV, but I happened to be watching the estimable Jools Holland's New Year show a couple of years back, and was flat-out knocked out by Seasick Steve.
Basically Steve's a life-long drifter with a guitar, who as far as I can tell is channeling Robert Johnson. On the show, he played amplified Delta blues on a three-stringed guitar, whacking a wooden box (the "Mississippi drum machine") with his shoe for a beat. And he didn't just play. He tore that guitar up, bent those three strings to within an inch of breaking, and generally hollered his way through some great music.
I mean, check this out!

In an age where, as I've complained before, rock bands and artists have to be airbrushed and image-consulted to kingdom come before they get loosed onto an unsuspecting public, an artist like Seasick Steve Wold is a breath of fresh air. There's no pretension at hipness, no punky attitude-by-numbers, as you'd expect from a guy who's spent his life on the margins. What you see is (apparently) what you get. If anyone remembers Ted Hawkins (Wikipedia is your friend, folks) then Steve is cut from the same cloth.
Steve's second album is out now, and it's just as good as the first one. An airheaded know-nothing of a columnist referred to him as a "glorified busker" and in so doing revealed his own utter ignorance of the traditions, the heritage of the blues. Seasick Steve is the blues.

"Silver Machine"

2008-08-28T13:16:00.003+01:00

I'm a confirmed and faithful car-driver. I love being behind the wheel, particularly if I'm beetling along some gorgeous rural landscape. I've driven through the lakes and passes of backwater Switzerland, along the dusty, deserted B roads in Italy, along the stark industrial nihi-scapes of eastern Europe and across the vast vacuum of the midwest US. And loved every damn second of each and every trip.
And when I'm driving, I'm listening to music. Over the past hundred or so years I've gone through countless cassette tapes, I've warped CDs in the heat of Arizona and hunted down 500,000-watt Mexican AM stations in the middle of the night. All in search of that moment when you recognise the song, you wriggle in the driver's seat to reach a more comfortable driving position, and let out a long, satisfied sigh of pleasure.
Nowadays, I'm told I don't have to do all this. Instead, I could saunter into my local music emporium and purchase any number of "Driving" compilations which have been lovingly assembled to enhance my motoring pleasure.
I can see what they're trying to do here, and you can but applaud the intention, but my God, the selections! Since when was the Waterboys' "The Whole of the Moon" a driving song? Or Prince's "Purple Rain"? Check out the compilation I've hotlinked above. How many of those songs would you actually like to drive to?
Who makes these compilations? Cyclists? Pedestrians? Certainly not drivers. I mean, who in their right mind is going to enjoy listening to Chris Rea siinging about the "Road to Hell" when they're loafing along the motorway at 80-something mph on their way to the Continent for their summer holiday?
Which brings me to today's song. Many, many moons ago I blogged "Silver Machine" in the tersest of terms, saying only that it was one of two heavy rock songs that everyone needs to own. But having thought it through over the last couple of years and having driven many miles with it, I'm here today to state, categorically, that this is the ONLY driving song with which every car should be equipped as standard.
Firstly, the title alone says "car." Well, purists could argue it says "spaceship", but I'm not here to quibble. The Silver Machine we drive every day is as close as most of us will get to a spaceship.
Secondly, the song drives. And when I say "drives" I mean it's un-bloody-stoppable. It's like being at the controls of some piece of heavy industrial machinery without any idea of how to turn the damn thing off.
Thirdly, it's not a "fast" song. It cruises, arms resting on the open windowsill, shifting up a gear every four bars and to hell with the mileage and when the next rest stop is. It makes a pleasing hissing noise as it zips along, like big trucks on a wet road.
Last of all, if you play it really LOUD, it slowly dulls your senses in the same way that your brain goes fuzzy after 400 miles at the wheel. The guitar, the frantic drums, the effects all blend together into some weird sound-scape that whisks past you like a blurred service station at 3 a.m.
What other song can lift you off your sofa and into the fast lane of Interstate 60 like that?

"The First Cut Is The Deepest"

2008-07-25T13:34:00.003+01:00

One of the things I've always had a problem with as a music lover is the idea that we should be faithful to artists rather than to songs. Now, no matter how blinkered your attitude is to your favourite artist, you've got to admit that he/she/they have on occasion produced a real clunker.
So for every "Gimme Shelter" or "Sympathy for the Devil" in the Stones' catalogue, there's a "Under Cover of the Night" lurking at the back of the pile.
I've got no problem with that. In fact, I can't put my hand on my heart and say that I have the complete works of any of my very favourite artists. There's always something you wish they hadn't committed to record.
Which is why I prefer to concentrate on individual works rather than entire albums. I don't think there's anything like a single, complete album on my MP3 player - there's always one or two songs that you can do without.
I may be lying. I think I have the whole of "Dark Side of the Moon".
In any case, I think this is all just a way of justifying why I have so many single tracks by particular artists in my collection. And here's another example.
I know full well that P.P. Arnold was perhaps the best of Ike & Tina's Ikettes, and that she performed many wonderful songs in the 60s. But, for the most part, they're not SongsWithoutWhich.
This one is, however.
Cat Stevens wrote it and around a hundred different artists have covered it, but nobody has come close to this performance. Arnold's voice is a husky, swooping, pained and wavering miracle, cut open to the bone and revelling in its sheer brutal honesty.
There's a great video here that was shot on Camber Sands with the Small Faces, but the video below show Arnold in all her glory. Enjoy.

"Bodies"

2008-05-12T11:36:00.000+01:00

Punk.

Remember punk?

As I recall, punk arrived in a storm of outrage, a hail of spit and a wave of enthusiasm as we kids rejoiced in the slaughter of sacred cows, the formerly irreproachable titans who held sway throughout the world of music.

Where there had been prog rock's endless noodlings, now there was three-chord bashing. Where we had the airbrushed perfection of disco, we now had the scratchy Mohican "fuck you" of the street-level DIY ethic.

It was supposed to be the great musical democratic revolution, where everyone discovered that you didn't have to have an art school degree or a childhood's misery of music lessons to become a rock star. Anyone could do it.

And for a while, we believed it. Stars like Sid Vicious, Rat Scabies, Hugh Cornwell, Gaye Advert, Poly Styrene all seemed to be telling us that we, too could be up there.

But you know, I'm not so sure punk really was the blast of fresh air it was supposed to have been.

For a start, most of these people were pretty damn good musicians. Listen to Laura Logic's saxophone on "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!" Or pretty much everything by The Stranglers. The Adverts' "Gary Gilmore's Eyes", on of the first supposedly "punk" hits, features some pretty un-punk harmony singing. The Clash.... well, the Clash came in with reggae.

Even the Sex Pistols, that untouchable lodestone of the whole punk and new wave ethos, were a pretty tight unit - at least Cook & Jones were.

What probably set punk apart, more than anything, was the look. I mean, hearing the Damned singing "New Rose" for the first time wouldn't have had anything like the same impact if Dave Vanian hadn't looked like Bela Lugosi's understudy and Rat Scabies hadn't looked like Fozzie Bear on day-release.

So, if the very first flush of punk wasn't even "punk" enough, what hope did those who followed have?

Siouxsie & the Banshees, Blondie, Adam & the Ants and before you know it, punk was left far behind and we were knee-deep in art-school new wave.

Which is a roundabout way of working up to this song.

"Bodies" was probably an experiment in seeing how tasteless one song could be. It was probably one of those dares that guys will come up with in the pub, to see how many utterly foul things they can put together. Either that, or Malcom McLaren had a deal going with the Daily Mail.

"She was a girl from Birmingham;
She just had an abortion.
She was a case of insanity;
Her name was Pauline, she lived in a tree.
She was a no-one who killed her baby.
She sent her letters from the country.
She was an animal, she was a bloody disgrace."

The intro is utterly fantastic, more menacing even than the Stones' "Gimme Shelter", the guitar is a wall of sheer sweaty fuzzbox, and Paul Cook never drummed better in his life.

But even though it's a terrific tune, it's songs like this that make me wonder whether there really was any purpose to, or result of, the whole punk genre.

Was punk meant to be nothing more than a wrecking ball? What was it supposed to actually build?

As the video below shows, the Pistols live were fucking awful. It's obvious that the only musicians in that band were Cook & Jones, and it's equally clear that producer Chris Thomas had to do a lot of work to make the Pistols' only album presentable. The only real saving grace is Johnny Rotten's stage presence.

I suppose all of this is nit-picking. The Pistols were one of a handful (and I mean handful) of bands that changed music. In this case, they ripped up the convention that said "thou shalt not speak of the ugly realities." Johnny Rotten was the perfect personality to drive a stake through the heart of the complacent dinosaur that music had become - in the video below he's utterly magnetic: Fagin the AntiChrist, if you like.

It's more a case of BandWithoutWhich than a SongWithoutWhich....

"If You Won't Leave Me I'll Find Somebody Who Will"

2008-03-14T00:31:00.002Z

TV theme tunes.

It's a tough job, picking or writing a theme tune for a TV show. You've got to make it readily identifiable, for a start. By now, I imagine that anyone who hears the opening bars of The Rembrandts' "I'll Be There For You" is immediately transferred to a sanitised, family-values-friendly simulacrum of New York and the daily goings-on of the Friends. So, mission accomplished on that particular front.

Secondly, it's got to be hummable. John Sebastian's cheery, beery "Welcome Back" ("Welcome Back, Kotter") is a perfect example, though the trend for macho rock-oriented themes, or digital, futuristic themes ("Knight Rider", anyone?) sort of threw us all off track.

And ideally, it's got to give you a hint about the show itself, and here the genius of the TV executives who chose the Rembrandts song for "Friends" shines through. The show itself may be questionable, and the song itself may be a bit bland, but as a TV theme it leaves no room for misinterpretation.

So what do we make of this?:

"Ever look out your window, babe,
And wonder what was going down in the street below?
Out where the four winds blow?
Ever stand in the crossroads, babe,
And know it didn't really matter which road you chose?
Heaven knows...
I'm a refugee from the mansion on the hill
And if you won't leave me, I'll find somebody who will."

Forty-three seconds. Restless rock beat.

There's alienation, confusion, even a hint of desperation in there. Not what we'd call prime-time television. Which is what makes this so great, and makes me wonder what the hell kind of TV show this was meant to be the theme for.

Because it never got made.

"Machine Gun"

2008-02-17T16:41:00.005Z

There's a long and in most cases honourable tradition in popular music of artists exercising their rights as human beings to comment on the world around them and, where appropriate, to protest at what they perceive to be wrong.
Every so often someone writes a learned article on the dearth of protest songs today, and casts back nostalgically to the 1960s for examples of a time when popular music wholeheartedly embraced its role in contemporary society and threw up a legion of committed, intelligent songwriters.
Since that period we've not exactly been over-endowed with protest writers, and Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" andd Peter Gabriel's "Biko" stand out a mile among fairly innocuous tunes like "Sun City" and "Do They Know It's Christmas?"
What's even more interesting is that musicians - real, honest-to-God players of instruments - don't seem to have bestowed protest songs with their very best work. I mean, while we can all agree with the sentiments expressed, most of these tunes are not what you'd call classic.
Take "Do They Know It's Christmas?" We remember it for what, exactly? Mostly the images associated with the song, and the fact that the song itself, and the Live Aid concert, were major events. Midge Ure's melody is fairly pedestrian and the lyrics...well, don't get me started.
As I said, there are songs and artists out there which "did the job" far, far better than anything we've seen in the last 30 years: Country Joe McDonald's "Feel-Like-I'm-Fixing-to-Die Rag", Edwin Starr's "War", Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son", Arlo Guthrie's hysterically funny "Alice's Restaurant Massacree", and Neil Young's savage "Ohio" are just a few.
But this one stands head, shoulders and body above the rest. Not because it's lyrically very clever or says something new, but because this song, more than any one other song, represents the revolution that Jimi Hendrix wrought on the electric guitar as an instrument. If all you ever wanted to hear was how a musical instrument and the sounds it makes can call up the images of something, then this is your song.
Here, Hendrix hoists the guitar out of the rhythm-and-blues trenches and lets rip, almost literally. He drags feedback, white noise and soaring, screeching horror from a simple piece of wood and wire and lets them play about our heads.
The song bleeds as if its life was seeping out through hastily-applied bandages, breaking out into occasional screams of pain. The chaos of hurt, the trembling unstoppable trainwreck of war is brought to life through ten fingers, some wires and transistors and one unholy battle of a song.
I'm sure I've bored on this topic before, but nobody, NOBODY had ever made music like this, or has since. Nobody has been able to lasso the unpredictable whiplash of feedback or white noise and make it do their will like Hendrix did. And to tame it, organise it into such a hard, powerful statement like this.....
Billy Cox and Buddy Miles provide a steady background of bass and wailing harmonies, while Hendrix's vision of hell shape-shifts and crawls around your head like a particularly vivid nightmare. Towards the end, Billy and Buddy harmonize behind Hendrix's singing, uttering a ghostly, other-worldly howl that matches the mood to perfection.
The lyrics aren't anything special, but they don't need to be. The music's doing all the talking here, and it's saying a ton.
Check out the film of this performance below. Hendrix built his early reputation as a showman, a show-off, playing the guitar with his teeth or behind his head but here, it's all about the music, the sounds. He stands still for much of the song, moving only to adjust the effects pedals or crank up the speakers. It's as if he doesn't want to be noticed, but prefers to let the music have its say.
THAT'S a protest song, dammit.

"Sweetheart of the Rodeo"

2008-02-01T22:41:00.001Z

Back in the day, music was simple to understand. Your grandparents simply had "music," which usually referred to Brylcreemed crooners singing the sort of song that brought to mind cardigans, hot chocolate and a crackling fire.
After Bill Haley there was "music" and there was "rock 'n roll."
Bob Dylan popped up and we had to add "folk."
Someone paid attention to what was going on in the US and reluctantly, we opened a new file called "country and western."
From there, it went downhill. Acid rock, folk-rock, glitter rock, prog rock, disco, punk, new wave, ambient, house, trance, garage, you get the picture.
Proper music nerds like nothing more than to spend hours categorising bands. And it's got to the stage now where pretty much every band has its own sub-sub-sub-sub genre. Just to prove that they aren't like anyone else you've ever heard.
And of course you can't have any two genres actually merge - it has to be a 50:50 joint-venture, with an option to withdraw on grounds of music and aesthetic incompatibility.
Where is all this taking us tonight?
To the site of a deep-space impact, to be precise. The kind of impact where a solid, meaty planet busy on its own orbit meets a feisty asteroid that just won't take no for an answer.
Imagine you're in The Byrds, a solid, respected band touted for a while as the US' answer to The Beatles. You're all fantastic musicians, you sing glorious harmonies and you've managed to drag folk influences into the electronic rock age more convincingly than Dylan ever did.
You've had some seriously big hits: "Mr Tambourine Man", "Turn! Turn! Turn!", "Eight Miles High", "My Back Pages."
Unfortunately, your band is falling down around your ears. Either you don't get on with them, or they don't get on with you, or they have better things to do, and eventually you're left as just Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn. What to do?
Well, what they *did* was draft in Gram Parsons.
Gram was a fairly low-profile guy at this time: no track record to speak of, but it didn't stop him from shoving The Byrds off the folk-rock highway and onto a new, dusty, unimproved road - country-rock.
"Sweetheart of the Rodeo" was the only Byrds album with Parsons on board, but it's a million miles away from the trippy "Eight Miles High," or the chiming "Mr Tambourine Man."
Where before there were 12-string Rickenbacker guitars, here were country twangs. Where before was the nervous, jittery rhythm of "Eight Miles High", here was a laid-back cross-country groove.
Today, this sound is so all-pervasive that we take it for granted. Sheryl Crow, the Eagles, Neil Young wouldn't have been able to do half the things they did without the car-crash that created country-rock. Pretty much the entire mid-80s "Americana" movement - Jason & the Scorchers, the Rainmakers, the Jayhawks, Long Ryders - owe their existence to this album and to the new genre it created.
And that's one for the nerds.

"I'm Free"

2008-01-18T22:47:00.000Z

A long time ago, a friend and I were in an art gallery, staring at a work by David Hockney (if I remember rightly). My friend muttered something to the effect that this art business didn't seem like a lot of hard work. Splash a bit of paint here and there and bingo.

But is anything as easy as it looks to others? I've had heated debates with people who've doubted the amount of real work that goes into all sorts of skills. Take motor racing. "It's just going round and round in circles," someone scoffed in the pub a few years back.

Right, I said. It's as easy as that. You just push the "go" pedal all the way down and turn the wheel when you get to a corner.

Ask Martin Brundle, Peter Dumbreck, Yannick Dalmas - all guys who have shown, graphically, that it isn't as easy as all that.

If it were that easy, we'd all be Ayrton Senna or Jackson Pollock, right?

Which is where this song comes in. Now, when I started this post, I was looking for a way to celebrate this fantastic news. And, oddly enough, this song was playing in my ears on the way home and I thought, "Yeah! Let's do it."

On the surface, the title, the lyric and even the film from which it comes (which is, spookily enough, on TV later tonight) all look positive and upbeat enough:

"I'm free, I'm free...
And freedom tastes of reality,
I'm free, I'm free...
And I'm waiting for you to follow me."

But then I started to mistrust Pete Townsend. I listened to the song again, and wondered who is really speaking here. Is the character of Tommy spouting populist cod-psychology because Townsend believes it, or because he wants to poke fun at it because it's ridiculous? I mean, this *is* the sixties we're talking about, folks. Nothing's as simple as it looks (again).

So it looks like I'll have to find a more appropriate song for you, Min. Cheers!

"Elusive"

2008-01-17T22:14:00.000Z

Human memory is a frail, rickety, idiosyncratic affair. We're not always in charge of what, or more importantly, how we remember things. For example, if someone hands me a home-made BLT sandwich, I'm instantly transported to my childhood, to my grandparents' kitchen and the big pile of BLTs that my aunts and uncle would make, in a production line, for lunch on the front porch.

Taste, smell, touch, these are senses that can raise a more powerful reaction than a proper, retained memory.

I've spent the last two days commuting to and from work with this song on repeat, listening to it over and over again, trying to get my head around it, to find a way to explain what this song does.

I think it's like a sensory trip-wire; the scent, taste or sound that drives flat-out to the very core of your being and sets off every alarm bell. It's like (guys, pay attention), sitting in a crowded train and suddenly smelling the perfume that a long-lost, long-missed girlfriend used to wear.

Being a guy, of course, you can't remember the name of the scent, but oh boy, do you ever remember the old girlfriend, the happy times, the longing that you're shocked to realise you still feel, and above all the emptiness that you briefly believe has been your fate ever since you dumped her.

Or rather, you *think* you remember. Only the picture isn't quite clear. Her face is blurred because, at this distance of time, you really can't exactly remember the shape of her nose or the curve of her chin.

You remember what it being with her was like, how she felt to hold. Or rather, you remember what being with her felt like to *you*, how holding her made you *feel*, because you really can't remember how, when you held her, your arms would rest on her narrow waist, and how you used to lock your fingers together behind her back.

That's what this song is like. It's the bare bones of a memory, something that feels so wispy and insubstantial, and yet is crammed chock-full of atmosphere and pin-sharp sensory memory.

It starts with the briefest hint of menace, fingers gently dragged over guitar strings with a hint of echo, before, with a slightly weary sigh, Matthews launches into the mystery.

"She's elusive and I'm awake,
You're finally real, there's nothing fake.
A mystery now to me and you,
Open my eyes and I'm next to you.
She said my destiny lies in the hands that set me free."

Even as he wakes up next to her, it's clear that she's not there to stay. She's always just out of reach, eluding our need to capture, pin down and pigeon-hole. She's like a memory that won't go away, yet won't come into focus.

"If it's true, then I am doomed,
What more is there to hold on to?
A strand of her hair is all I own;
A gift to me, this sorry soul."

You can almost sense the despair that's wrapped up in those words. Matthews' voice is worn, tired, his falsetto a wondrous combination of soaring hope and resignation.

I remember one of Sting's first singles after he left The Police was called "If You Love Someone, Set Them Free."

Well, what he didn't bargain for was that if we do let someone go, we can be imprisoned by a memory that fades and can never be fully recaptured, but that never fully disappears either.

"White Punks on Dope"

2008-01-13T18:34:00.000Z

"Teenage, had a race for the night time;
Spent my cash on every high I could find;
Wasted time in every school in L.A.:
Getting loose, I didn’t care what the kids say."

A long time ago, I blogged Warren Zevon's "Detox Mansion," in which he sang:

"Left my home in Music City in the back of a limousine
Now I'm doing my own laundry, and I'm getting those clothes clean.
Growing fond of Detox Mansion, and this quiet life I lead,
But I'm just dying to tell my story, for all my friends to read."

The whole point about that blog was that, back when rock still had hair and all its own teeth, rock stars didn't want you to know about their drug problems. When Famous Singer A had to have his stomach pumped, or Guitar Hero B needed a shot of adrenaline when his heart stopped in the shower, the record company executives closed ranks to make sure the story didn't find its way to the papers.

These days, when Lily or Amy teeter blindly out of a nightclub and into the arms of the Priory, the record company execs, the publicists, the stylists, voice coaches and hairdressers all parrot exactly the same line. They all talk about "exhaustion."

Now, to you or me, that means we've been sitting up all night with a kid who's been throwing up, or we've just pulled a 48-hour stint at work to get the presentation done in time.

When *they* use that word, *their* concept of exhaustion is about as alien to real life as possible. What *they* mean is that poor Amy has been digging around in her arm looking for a vein for the last 48 hours. How fatiguing. What *they* mean is that Lily has been pouring so much alcohol down her neck that her she could fit an optic to her bladder. How desperately tiring.

What's even more distasteful is the conspiracy that the media and these hangers-on engage in. The papers want to sell more stories, while the hangers-on have careers to think about. So the hangers-on can put their hands on their hearts and parrot the officially-sanctioned "exhaustion" line, while the papers just wink and look for new ways to say "dope-addled twat."

I don't want to pick out any particular performers -- though I have taken two names in vain -- because frankly they're all just as bad as each other.

"I go crazy ’cause my folks are so fucking rich;
Have to score when I get that rich white punk itch.
Sounds real classy, living in a chateau:
So lonely, all the other kids will never know."

Fee Waybill (I think) once explained that White Punks on Dope was about all those teenage kids living in California, waiting around in a drugged stupor until they were 18 to get their hands on their trust fund.

It kind of fits today's rant. We've hot-housed a generation of under-cooked little pop tartlets who've been handed the keys to the world after one appearance on MySpace, and most of them have taken the inch they've been given, and run a mile.

Ask twenty kids what they want to be when they grow up, and they'll say "famous." Ask them "famous for what?" and they'll probably shrug and say "whatever."

Let's look back at some other famous drug users

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Lewis Carroll
Thomas Edison
Charles Dickens
Salvador Dali
Marcus Aurelius
Benjamin Franklin
Sigmund Freud
Cardinal Richelieu
William Wilberforce
Paracelcus
Thomas Jefferson

Not exactly a bunch of "whatever," are they?

But until our current crop of drug-users starts producing the goods on a par with the folks above, they're really just a bunch of white punks on dope.

"Born on the Bayou"

2008-01-13T17:08:00.000Z

I have an affinity for what Americans call "Southern rock" - a friend of mine calls it "rock with more than a pinch of soul added," and that's a fair a description as I've heard. All the way from Creedence Clearwater Revival right through the the Black Crowes, there's a great fat seam of soul-tinged rock that moves you just a little more persuasively than, say, Boston or Aerosmith does - though to be honest Aerosmith have picked up more than a little southern influence along their way.
I don't know how it's done, and frankly I don't spend a lot of time worrying about it, but there are times when rock needs to be a little more...re-fried. And if there was ever a piece of music that conjured up a place, a day, a feeling, this must be one such tune.

"I can remember the fourth of July,
Runnin' through the backwood, bare.
And I can still hear my old hound dog barkin',
Chasin' down a hoodoo there."

John Fogerty's voice has got to be one of the most recognisable larynxes around. Nobody else quite has that ability to sound like he's gargling with crude oil while trying to scream.
At the same time, the band's sound shimmers as though you were viewing it through an oppressive heat haze, brushing aside fat, dripping leaves hanging over the water as you try to get closer.
There's a lazy, insistent rhythm too, like organic machinery at the point of collapse, that just wills you to move. I don't know if Fogerty invented the word "choogling," but that just about sums up the rhythm of this song.

"Birdhouse In Your Soul"

2008-01-04T13:09:00.000Z

Oh, it's been a long time. And if anyone thought I'd run out of songs, well...

When I first tried to put this baby to bed 18 months ago, I wrote that "anyone who can find more than 500 songs that they can't live without is probably spreading their jam a little too thinly on the toast."

Well, maybe.

On the other hand, I've tracked down and downloaded some 2,600 songs that accompany me pretty much everywhere I go, and while a few of them were downloaded for fun, or mischief, the vast majority are with me for a damn good reason.

Case in point:

Allegedly, this is a novelty song. Allegedly, They Might Be Giants is a novelty band. But anyone who can write, and sing a lyric like:

"There's a picture opposite me
Of my primitive ancestry,
Which stood on rocky shores and kept the beaches shipwreck-free.
Though I respect that a lot
I'd be fired if that were my job,
After killing Jason off and countless screaming Argonauts."

..has got to have a little tiger in his tank.

This is a jaunty song. I can think of no other word that accurately describes it. It's got an annoying, catchy chorus -- yes, that's annoying AND catchy -- and lopes along with all the grace of a tweenie playing hopscotch on a cracked and uneven pavement.

What I like are the casual hints that beneath the surface of this song, there's a really intelligent mind at work. Someone who can dredge up old-world sayings like "bee in your bonnet" (I mean, who says that any more?), or who can imagine someone filibustering "vigilantly."

Hell, just putting "filibustering" in a song makes it something special. The video shows the band to be just what I always thought they were - college nerds, but what's the point of a college education if you can't use it?

Lastly, maybe someone could reassure me. This song is all about a night-light, right?

"I'm Alive"

2007-07-12T20:56:00.000+01:00

I've just read the always-excellent Barney Hoskyns' "Hotel California", which is no more and no less than a complete history of west coast American music in the early and mid-1970s: think of The Eagles, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and you get the picture.

The early part of the period -- the first flush of creative serendipity -- is wonderful to behold. The gradual ebb and flow of musicians living up in Laurel Canyon, sharing songs, trying new combinations until they hit upon the right creative blend, be it Glenn Frey and Don Henley or David Crosby and Stephen Stills, is smooth, seductive, so happy. Inadvertently idealistic, you might call it.

And then cocaine happened.

And while it didn't always hurt the quality of musicianship, while, for the most part, the hits kept on coming, something really did go sour. Partnerships made in Heaven broke apart, truly talented individuals like Gram Parsons or David Crosby fell apart, the well simply ran dry.

A host of "coulda been huge" bands were formed, made one album, broke up and their members moved on. Lesser-known names like Bernie Leadon, Richey Furay, John David Souther, Doug Dillard, David Blue were all noticed, applauded, recruited, hyped and then made, were persuaded to make, the wrong decisions or were just cast aside. Nowadays they're remembered, if at all, as a co-writer's credit on an album sleeve.

Does anyone remember that Bernie Leadon wrote the song, performed by the Eagles while he was a member, that became the theme from "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"?

Today we have the unedifying sight of a generation of talented musicians, the survivors, touring on their past glories. In many cases the original partnerships were ruined by drugs to the extent that there are two or even three versions of the same band playing the nostalgia circuit.

Neil Young -- one of the few straighter individuals of the period -- wrote "It's better to burn out, than to fade away", but even he can't take his own advice, and maybe it's his monumental exception that proves the rule.

Read the book. Marvel at the names that flit past, find yourself thinking "I never knew he/she/they were involved in this album." Marvel at Linda Ronstadt and Joni Mitchell's steely resolve to survive in a business that still treated women like chattels.

Throughout Hoskyns' book, a few key figures stride through the period, surviving everything that wealth, taste and indulgence could throw at them. Neil Young, for his ornery, cussed stubbornness that kept pulling him to the left of centre; David Geffen, for his sheer ambition to create an environment for artists to thrive and for him to make vast sums of money; and Jackson Browne, for his reckless honesty.

Yeah now I'm rolling down this canyon drive
With your laughter in my head
I'm gonna have to block it out somehow to survive
'cause those dreams are dead
And I'm alive

I want to go where I will never hear your name
I want to lose my sorrow and be free again
And I know I've been insane
When I think of places I could have been

"Soul Sacrifice"

2007-06-25T21:41:00.000+01:00

If you've been watching the news or reading a paper this last week, you'll know that this is festival season. Glastonbury, Download, Wireless, Isle of Wight, V, Reading, the list goes on and on.
I haven't attended a festival for many years, and watching The Who show the kids a thing or two late Sunday night made me keen to strap on the backpack and get out there again.
Wait a minute. The Who? At Glasto 2007?
Let's put some perspective on that. The Who played Woodstock, thirty eight years ago. THIRTY-EIGHT years ago! And while Sunday's show wasn't the same four guys who tore up the stage in 1969, while time has laid its hand on the grizzled heads of Roger and Pete, they still had "it".
It's an education to look back at the Woodstock line-up from 38 years ago and see who's still carrying the flag: Richie Havens, Country Joe MacDonald, John Sebastian, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Santana, The Who, Joe Cocker, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young...
History shall recall that The Who played a 24-song set to close the second day of the festival. And while there were four songs they played at Woodstock that they ALSO played at Glastonbury there was one that, to me, stood out head and shoulders, both times:

There may have been better performances, but they're not on film. This is charisma, this is skill, this is passion, this is excitement, this is everything that was ever good about live performance.

So why is this entry named "Soul Sacrifice"? Because wanting to pay tribute to The Who after their performance Sunday sort of sidetracked this blog, but mainly because, hidden away among the great performances that weekend in upstate New York was one that, when I first saw the film of the event, knocked me sideways and still does.
Santana only played seven songs at Woodstock but the one that made it on film was "Soul Sacrifice," in which drummer Michael Shrieve, who was 19 at the time, played what I imagine most drummers would call "a blinder."
For over nine minutes he's at the center of this song, driving it on, trading the lead with Carlos Santana's guitar, filling, rolling, and delivering a solo that I have yet to hear the equal of. And he's loving it. Who wouldn't love, at nineteen years of age, to be playing alongside one of the legends of music?
At around 2:26 into the clip, Shrieve looks skywards with a smile of sheer delight on his face, and ten seconds later the camera pan over the percussionists, hunkered down tight over their congas, and you see the same smile on their faces. This is music played for the sheer pleasure of it, and extended workout that's been so well-learned that the musicians can relax and enjoy it.
And while the entire band's performance is irresistible, it's obvious that the one who enjoyed it most was Michael Shrieve.

"Darling Nikki"

2007-06-20T20:47:00.000+01:00

George Bernard Shaw once said “Dancing: The vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music." He might as well have gone the whole hog and added "...by Prince."

What is it with Prince and sex, anyway? His music has explored pretty much every single kink or proclivity known to man; Mary Whitehouse would definitely not have approved. Though I wonder if she could have resisted dancing.

Here's a song that takes you into the bedroom, ties you down and has its wicked way with you for, oh, a weekend or so. The guitars make a sound like cotton panties being ripped, the chorus is the musical equivalent of the vinegar strokes, and the whole thing winds itself up in an orgiastic cataclysm.

And Prince? After the girl kicks him out, he gulps, he sighs, he pants, he mewls like an underfed kitten, and when it's clear Nikki isn't coming back, he lets loose with a shattering, piercing scream that strips the paint off walls, while his trusty Revolution...well, they might as well not have even been there.

This is Prince's (bedroom) show and he's not taking any prisoners.

"Tipitina"

2007-05-13T22:18:00.000+01:00

I don't think I need to say anything about this song. Enjoy

"Dixie Chicken"

2007-04-23T13:10:00.000+01:00

This is just great. A slow-burning groove, honky-tonk, soul and blues all wrapped up into one seriously hip-shaking piece of lazy good-time music. Lowell George's voice is just fantastic, a hint of Boz Scaggs' half-swallowed gargle and plenty of raw southern emotion.
It's one of those stories of misadventure that manages to inject humour as well as a little pathos. Instead of pain, we get hungover regret and a sense that he got what he deserved: "Many years since she ran away/Yes that guitar player sure could play/She always liked to sing along/She always handy with a song/But then one night at the lobby of the Commodore Hotel/I chanced to meet a bartender who said he knew her well/And as he handed me a drink he began to hum a song/And all the boys there, at the bar, began to sing along."
Listen to this: these guys are seriously talented. The whole song, the feeling, the rhythm, all are utterly, utterly effortless. I can't shake the image of a bunch of bearded, heavyset guys, sitting round someone's front room and laying down this blistering groove.
"We made all the hotspots, my money flowed like wine/Then the low-down southern whiskey, yea, began to fog my mind/And i dont remember church bells, or the money i put down/On the white picket fence and boardwalk/On the house at the end of town."

Sadly, Lowell George died a long time ago and there's not much in the way of good footage. This first clip is Little Feat doing "Fat Man in the Bathtub," which gives you an idea of the sort of slightly surreal southern thing they were doing.

And this is just priceless. Keisuke Kuwata's a Japanese singer-songwriter, and his cover of "Dixie Chicken" is perfect in almost every way....

"You Belong to Me"

2007-04-16T14:25:00.000+01:00

One of the things about growing up that I don't think I'll ever forget was how goddam important everything was.
From being selected for the first team in sports, to being invited to the coolest party on the weekend, to having my girlfriend tell me how much she loved me, to telling her how much I loved her.
If anything didn't work out, it was as if the earth had turned itself inside out and all the madness and badness had been let loose.
Remember all that?
A while ago I blogged "Here Comes My Girl" by Tom Petty, and it reminded me of how I looked at the world and felt about things when I was a spotty teen with too much of some things and not enough of others.
Now that a lot of water's gone under the bridge, I've come to think of this song as an older companion to the Petty song. Both songs are about how important a particular woman is, how she makes them feel, how they feel about her and what they plan to do about it.
So far, so vanilla.
But where Petty's song is all youthful agression and determination -- "When I got that little girl standing right by my side/I can tell the whole wide world to shove it" -- Steve Earle is older, wiser, sadder and a lot more bruised.
"Now your mama said you could do better than me/Baby I know that's true/But you believed me instead, and every word I said, and I did too/Now every day's a little bit harder out there no matter what I do/I could carry the world on my shoulders girl, 'long as I got you."
And while Petty's protagonist comes across as wild, unfocused, determined and a bit like Marlon Brando in "The Wild One", Earle's got too much experience for blind optimism. He's got the bumps and scrapes to prove it, though there's still a spark deep inside: "Well my shining armour is rusted and worn/There's a heart inside here entrusted and sworn to you/Just tell me baby what I need to do/I can win you over again if you want me to."

I can't find a video of this particular song, so you're going to have to do with this piece of wonder instead. Enjoy.

"Into Dust"

2007-04-09T17:37:00.001+01:00

This is a blog about a feeling. About learning how the feeling is caused, about how much it hurts and about the song that brings it back, every damn time I hit "repeat" on the stereo.

How do we hurt people? In a hundred million ways, small and large, very day of our lives. Anyone who's managed to get through a life without hurting or being hurt by other people is either lying or living in a sealed bubble somewhere out beyond Betelgeuse. To get through even one day without doing so is a stretch.

From the father who cuffs his child because the child knocked over a bottle in a restaurant, to the child who betrays his or her parents' trust for the hundredth time, to the commuter who stalks guiltily past the old man huddled over a steam grating for warmth, to the lover who dredges up any unpleasant, insulting, hurtful remark he can to make a clean break from his devoted partner; we've all hurt and we've all been hurt.

We all know how it feels to be hurt. And, with luck and some awareness, we know what it feels like to hurt someone in just the same way: the churning, acid tumbling empty space in the pit of our stomach.

It doesn't, however, stop the cycle from turning, slowly, inevitably, around to the next dose.

There's something just as inevitable about the vibe on this song; the ethereal, helpless voice, the interminable, constant guitar picking, and the caress of the cello as it lays you down on the floor in preparation for your next experience, your next let-down.

This song is the sound the soul makes as it looks up from the pit of despair.

"Crimson and Clover"

2007-03-28T22:03:00.000+01:00

One of the things I struggle with on SWW is those favourite songs that I can't explain away. For the most part, I can bore at Olympic standard about the lyric, the riff, the chorus, or something that you might recognise and agree with.
Then there are those songs that you play just to listen to the particular dry "pow" sound that the drum makes, or the wonderful harmonies half-way through, or the animalistic beat that takes over executive control of your hips for about twenty seconds during the intro... otherwise, you can take them or leave them.
And here's one such song. I enjoy the Tommy James original, drenched as it is in phased guitars and just a hint of flower power. But for some unaccountable reason, I prefer Joan Jett's version.
Well, I say "unaccountable," but I've worked out that the reason I like the meathead cover version is firstly, that Joan does this breathy vocal that completely strips out any of the brash punk that you get listening to "I Love Rock & Roll" or whatever else Joan Jett you might indulge in.
But mostly, I seriously like the thirty seconds from 1:20 through 1:50 when her band -- Wayne's World extras to a man -- provide the falsetto harmony background to the verse. It's a trip to picture what must be hirsute, leather-clad "proper" rock musicians all raising their voices together in an approximation of schoolboy innocence and purity.
Enjoy the somewhat cliched video, but as I said, keep your ears on for those harmonies. I reckon the video director missed a trick there.

"They Called It Rock"

2007-03-27T21:04:00.000+01:00

"Well, they went and cut the record/The record hit the charts/And someone in the newspaper said that it was hot." Ain't that always the way?

Form is temporary, they say; class is permanent. In that case, this is the case for Nick Lowe.

For a start, he was a member of one of the greatest missed opportunities of the 70s -- Brinsley Schwarz -- and wrote the wonderful "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?" which I hope you've heard by now.

When the Schwarz broke up, Lowe moved on to join one of the greatest live bands from the "pub rock" era -- Rockpile. Dave Edmunds may have been the leader, but Lowe was the soul and when Edmunds couldn't move on from rock 'n roll, Lowe strapped on his boots and went to work as the house producer for one of the top punk record labels - Stiff Records.

His list of producing credits is a veritable who's who of punk and new wave: Wreckless Eric, Dr Feelgood, the Damned, the Pretenders, Graham Parker, even Elvis Costello passed beneath his studio benevolence.

And he found the time to record what may be the first punk 45 -- "So It Goes" -- and to put together one of the truly great new wave albums, "Jesus of Cool," also known as "Pure Pop for Now People," a record so perfect that even today it sounds fresh, clear and relevant.

It's stubbornly anti-punk. Instead of fuzzbox powerchords, you get twang, shuffle and proper tunes. How punk was that? "Tonight" is one of the truly great love songs, "Marie Provost" is just epic, and epicly strange as well, while "They Called It Rock" is the music business in a nutshell.

Imagine a straight-ahead country-billy workout and you're half-way to this song. It's tight, driving and complete in a way that so few songs are.

"Well, they cut another record/It never was a hit/And someone in the newspaper said it was shit."

Not Nick Lowe, then.

"Whipping Post"

2007-03-01T00:34:00.000Z

Edgar Varese said "Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes."

Musicians, more than most, have to make the fullest use of those minutes, to grab the tiger by the tail and refuse utterly to let go until they absolutely can't hold on any more. Look at the collective genius of Lennon and McCartney: together they rewrote the book on songwriting, but there won't be many who will argue that their post-Beatles output was the equal of their work together.

Similarly, what exactly happened to Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook? One moment they were lauded to the skies as brilliant, funny, clever writers of sharply-observed vignettes of everyday life; the next, forgotten.

There must be some kind of struggle, some kind of desperate fight, to hold onto whatever ethereal spell exists that makes songwriting such a simple affair for those lucky few. it must be hard to acknowledge the sense of helplessness in the face of an uncaring fate that exists just to give, and then to take away.

Now where did that come from? One minute I was all ready, prepped for a blog on the barbecue of greatness that is Southern rock, and then it's gone. Head empty.

I think maybe what started this off was the devil's brew that is "Whipping Post." There's the five-minute version from the Allman Brothers' first album, a frothy stew of blues rock from 1969 that sounds so far out of time and out of place that it could have been current a decade later.

And then there's the mighty, mighty 22-minute live version. It's not just a song; it's a jam, a spiritual revival, a heart-pumping chase scene from the movies and most of all, it's the very beginning of Edgar Varese's few minutes of genius. Here's a band just getting under way, confident, full of stamina and ready to stretch boundaries.

What sets this song apart from its time is the fierce grip that it keeps on its roots; the lyric is traditional blues, my-woman-done-me-wrong, combined with a hint of the cotton fields and a dash of old-time religion. There's a touch of jazz virtuosity too.

And all this at the height of the hippy era. While Country Joe MacDonald was fixin' to die, while Alvin Lee was tearing up his fretboard at 150 mph and while Jimi Hendrix was inventing feedback from outer space (and I mean that reverentially), Duane and Gregg Allman and Dickie Betts were going back to basics and doing more with less.

And one more thing.

Songs like this are why the Hammond organ was invented.

Part One:

Part Two:

"Saturday in the Park"

2007-01-16T20:47:00.000Z

Last time I wrote how sometimes it's difficult to just let music wash over you and just act as aural wallpaper. Today, I'm going to suggest that a particular song can be like stepping into a hot shower on a cold morning. No matter what the particular song is - it can be post-punk industrial for some, and the most saccharine gloop for others.
The point is to underline, to emphasise how the right music taps into our individual psyches and just....does something. Not that I'm suggesting a particular song may necessarily confer superpowers or X-ray vision, but there are moments.....
This song does all of that for me, and normally I wouldn't even have the time of day for Chicago (the unhinged "25 or 6 to 4" excepted).
Maybe it's the slightly funky piano intro, with that chocolate layer of horns on top, drifting slowly downwards, maybe it's the backbeat chorus with the blasts of brass, but whenever I hear this, I can open the convertible top in my head and just sit back and drink in the sunshine. I may be wearing a suit in the middle of winter in London, but in my head I'm in shorts, cruising south on Route 1 with the windows wide open.
I won't answer for the video - it's from 1973 - but it does set a mood. The song lasts only 3 minutes, but you get a bonus of "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is," which only serves to demonstrate how talented this band really was.

"The Man With a Harmonica"

2007-01-14T17:05:00.000Z

I find it difficult to not listen to music, if you see what I mean. Too often, what is meant to be nothing more than aural wallpaper, a pleasant backdrop to something else, forces its way to the front of my consciousness and I start thinking about the music rather than just letting it wash over me.
Even when I'm on a gratuitious holiday of a lifetime, drinking in sights and sounds that I'd never expect to see in a year of Sundays, music manages to elbow its way to the front of the experience. Hence this track.
I guess when you're putting together a fancy getaway resort for cynical meeja folk and the like, you have to be pretty damn sharp when it comes to music. You want to create an ambience, sure, but it mustn't be an ambience these well-heeled jetsetters have experienced before.
And so Apollo 440 taking the iconic Ennio Morricone harmonica soundtrack from "Once Upon a Time in the West" and slipping it into a dub mood must be something even the most hardened music business lawyer would not expect when it came to mood music for his after-dinner drinks by the infinity pool.
All the cavernous space of the western frontier is still there in the tune, the lonely harmonica still beckons damned men to their doom, but the dub beat adds a note of urgency and a touch of urban thriller. It also brings The Clash to mind, which is frankly weird.
And it does create a mood, an ambience. Just not one that washes over me too easily.

"Hoppipolla"

2006-12-14T13:22:00.000Z

There are a fair few songs out there that defy any effort to describe. I've written before about Pink Floyd's "The Great Gig in the Sky" for example, which has the power to reduce me to a quivering wreck and robs me of the ability to make sense. I also get the same way about Jean Michel Jarre's "Rendezvous".
And now this.
A friend sent me this song not too long ago. I forget exactly why it was sent to me, but I listened to it, thought it was OK, and moved on. For a start, Sigur Ros are an Icelandic band, so I haven't zeroed in on the lyric as I often do. It's also what you might call "emo-ambient," which is not something I readily dive into.
But the damn thing keeps popping up on my iPod and it's been worming its way into my head to the extent that when it comes around now, I stop everything and just drink it in.
Everyone of us carries in our brain the memory of smells that take us back to our childhood, or to a particular time or place, something that brings a lump to our throat or that makes us smile: the particular smell of the sofa in your grandparents' front room, or a baby's freshly-washed hair. Instead of smells, I have songs.
And the damnedest thing is that this song doesn't bring a particular memory to mind, but it just raises ghosts, like the godfather I really missed getting to know or the feeling of security and comfort I remember having at the age of 6, but I'm damned if I remember what house I lived in at the time.
And maybe that's the joy of songs like this: perhaps they're blank canvases that allow us to make of them what we will. They provide the key to some internal door that accesses nameless, orphaned emotions and thoughts.

"It's a Shame About Ray"

2006-12-12T12:39:00.000Z

As an impressionable teenager, I revered John McEnroe; I admired his fiery determination, his unwillingness to be anything but himself and the way that he made a virtue out of what I thought was an ungainly, awkward approach to the game.
As I grew older, I began to appreciate something different: his innate, untutored, helpless talent. I don't think he really had a great deal of choice in the matter - he was born to play tennis. All the tantrums, the anger were just so much static - no matter how crappy a day he was having, his tennis was still solid gold.
I know this might be a stretch, but I reckon that Evan Dando may well be the John McEnroe of music. A sublimely talented writer, gifted with such a fantastic voice, he seemed to just sweat great tunes while he was busy doing something else.
Evan Dando had the luck to be able to knock out such fantastic tunes while struggling with addiction and distraction. A song as simple as this, you'd think, must mean it's not all that hard, this songwriting business.
We think to ourselves, "I'm sure I could do it," but the problem is, we probably couldn't. We either don't have the talent or the application, or else we'd be doing it already, wouldn't we?
And the supreme irony is that, to John McEnroe or Evan Dando playing championship tennis or writing this song was probably reasonably easy. They were used to it - they grew up with the talent, they harnessed it.
There's nothing fancy here, but then listen to any truly great pop song - "There She Goes," "Teenage Kicks," "I Saw the Light" - and the genius is in the simplicity: "If I make it through today/I'll know tomorrow not to leave my feelings out on display/I'll put the cobwebs back in place/I've never been too good with names/but I remember faces."

"Home"

2006-12-11T20:53:00.000Z

I really, really wish I hadn't seen the video for this song.
I happened to see it late at night and was sucked in to the simple, earthy rhythm of the song, and the images of simple enjoyment, the celebration of community and togetherness that it portrayed.
Then I went hunting for the lyrics:
"I woke up this morning/Now I understand/What it means to give your life/To just one man/Afraid of feeling nothing/No bees or butterflies/My head is full of voices/And my house is full of lies."
And I realised just how many promo videos are made that bear utterly no relationship - and in some cases a completely inappropriate one - to the song and its subject. Mind you, with a song as gorgeous as this you really would not expect a lyric like:
"I'm going crazy/A little every day/'cause everything I wanted/Is now driving me away/I woke this morning/To the sound of breaking hearts/Mine is full of questions/And it's tearing yours apart."
Watch the video and see what you think:

"Love Hurts"

2006-12-11T20:26:00.000Z

If you search for this song on Google, you'll get any number of results that cite Roy Orbison, or Nazareth, or some other band as having written this song. Go to YouTube and you'll get any number of second-rate versions of this song.
I'm here to tell you that this version - a duet with Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris - is the definitive take on this song.
It was written by Boudleaux Bryant, who's just about the greatest country songwriter that lived -- his songs sold over 300 million million copies for artists like Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. He never made records himself, but is the only songwriter in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Listen to this song and find out why.
I don't think this song was meant to be a duet, but when you hear their voices entwined, mingling, it's as if the song was written with Gram and Emmylou in mind. The joy of this sad, sad song, the beauty of it, is all in the voices. They could be reciting the phonebook for all I care, and you know it would sound truly magnificent, other-worldly.

"Don't Nobody Move (This Is a Heist)"

2006-11-08T21:32:00.000Z

Now, here's an odd one. I remember first hearing this song over 20 years ago. The local TV station in Maine used to play a couple of hours of wall-to-wall videos most Friday and Saturday nights, and one summer this particular song was on heavy rotation. I liked it but I never did find the record itself.

I got hooked on the song: Tony Powers sings it like Tom Waits' slightly disreputable older brother. The lyrics are a complete hoot: lines like "I was in the police station being booked for garlic breath" delivered in the broadest Noo Yawk accent.

Rumor has it that Powers may have had something to do with the 60s one-hit-wonders ? and the Mysterians, and he was the film Goodfellas. But where this song came from, I've no idea.

Move on twenty years and the age of the internet and particularly YouTube, and a casual search reveals the original video in all its glory. Enjoy, and see how many well-known actor faces you can spot.

"Way of the World"

2006-10-25T13:12:00.000+01:00

And here's the song that broke the log-jam, that fused the lights and reminded me that there is nothing, nothing, like a tightly-wound song to reach deep down your throat and put the squeeze on your gut.

Listen to Bun E. Carlos' drumming - it's spare, economical yet it's a force of nature that just will not stop. The portly, doleful-looking guy behind the kit, with the ever-present cigarete drooping out of his mouth, turns out to be the best kind of drummer a band could ever have - a solid, dependable base from which the song can fly.

Listen to Rick Neilsen's guitar - it's an amalgam of Tom Petty's chiming Rickenbacker, Tom Scholz's precise squall and Jeff Lynne's airbrushed fuzz. It's like every major guitarist of the last 30 years was in a car crash, and out of the tangled wreckage stepped this goofy-looking nerd with an unholy genius for hooks.

And because two ugly dudes like Carlos and Neilsen wouldn't exactly pull the punters in, they roped in ahem...better-looking guys in singer Robin Zander and bassist Tom Pederssen. And surprisingly, it's Zander's voice that really tops the cake to perfection here.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Cheap Trick may not have invented power pop, but by God they perfected it.

Couldn't Resist....

2006-10-25T12:59:00.000+01:00

Normal service (well, what passes for normal) is resumed. After drying up over the course of a long and somewhat distracting summer, the executives at SongsWithoutWhich Towers have decided that enough outrageously good music has been created in the last 50 years that it would be churlish, nay miserly of us not to continue to bring it to your attention.

The select few of you who follow links will know that I've occasionally contributed to the very eclectic Music to Grow Old To as well. And if I can (ka-tish) do it there, I can do it (ka-tish) anywhere.

It also reflects the belated discovery of YouTube around these here parts, and the realization that it is the work of a moment to embed a video of a particularly fine song so that you, dear reader, can listen, watch AND read at the same time! Assuming, of course, that you're all women, because we all know that men can't multi-task.

On with the music.....

Coda: "Claire de Lune"

2006-08-18T00:02:00.000+01:00

The thunderstorm is passing behind the ridge overlooking the house, the hills lit brilliantly for long seconds at a time as the force of nature tears itself apart. To the other side I see the moon, brilliant and sharp in focus over the Mediterranean.

It's not quite humid enough or menacing an atmosphere for the blues, though it is a sore temptation to lay on some Ry Cooder and go for a stroll among the prickly pear and palm. But this place is older, much older than the blues. Black, jagged rocks on the shore that can strip the flesh from the feet of the unwary, while the midday sun can squeeze the breath from the lungs with crushing weight.

Here, there's no place for the rusted, cast-off sounds of blues, of slide guitar and bottleneck. This is pre-mechanical.

Instead, to show the gods of this blasted earth the proper respect, I play something from the salons of Paris, a piece to calm the brutest heart and revive the sorriest spirit. And as the lights go out along the ridge, as the astronomers close the door on their telescopes and as the last moped blares past on the road from the bar, I prepare to close the day, to kiss my sleeping children and lay down to sleep, all to the sound of the whole of one man's eternal yearning.

"Go Now"

2006-07-31T12:17:00.000+01:00

I think it's time to put this baby to bed.
SongsWithoutWhich has been a lot of fun, a lot of frustration and a lot of inadvertent discoveries for me, but it's run its course. I think that anyone who can find more than 500 songs -- and I haven't; we're into the mid-300s here -- that they can't live without is probably spreading their jam a little too thinly on the toast.
And when I have to spend time actively looking through my archived tapes and lists for songs that I might have overlooked, rather than have songs just arrive in my head, then it's time to call it quits.
I hope you've enjoyed the ride.

****************

"Love, Reign o'er Me"

2006-07-24T21:48:00.000+01:00

I couldn't decide whether to blog this song or Everything But the Girl's "Missing".
Most of us are gasping under the hammering basilisk stare of the sun, commending our souls to the sauna-like sardine tins of public transport each morning and evening, and a breath of fresh, cool air or a fine mist of rain would come in really handy.
So when I happened to be sitting on a train outside London tonight, waiting for the sweet relief of a green light and some progress, what should pop into my head but this song...
"Only love/Can make it rain/The way the beach/Is kissed by the sea/Only love/Can make it rain/Like the sweat of lovers/Laying in the fields." Of course the bit about sweating was a modest turn-off at that precise moment, given that I was getting very intimate with someone's armpit at the time, but you get the idea.
And as I was singing this song to myself, suddenly I found myself making the leap from Roger Daltrey's howl to Tracey Thorn's sweet sweet voice murmuring: "And I miss you/Like the deserts miss the rain." I don't want to come across all nerdy or anything, but rain's much on the general mind these days. Rain, lack of; water, shortages of in coming years; heat and humidity, excessive; warming, global.
Ahem. Back to the subject.
If ever a song were to define the words "magnum opus", I think this would be the one. The sheer scale of the ambition, the immense scope of the song put it right up there with "Stairway to Heaven", a journey taken in a few short minutes from the calm reflection of nostalgia and wistfulness to joyful declamation and decision.
We begin the trip huddling for shelter from the rain, listening to it chill our very souls and as the song progresses we move out into the open, we stand tall beneath its cleansing flow, growing in confidence until at the end we are out there holding hands with nature, accepting and revelling.
Even Daltrey's voice seems to have a freshness about it, a hoarseness that comes not from the dryness of an oppressively hot and dusty day, but from screaming out in joy at nothing and everything. It's the vocal equivalent of an ice-cold drink at the end of a long, hot day.

The Full SongsWithoutWhich List

2006-07-18T21:22:00.003+01:00

I Saw the Light - Todd Rundgren
The Great Gig In The Sky - Pink Floyd
I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight - Richard & Linda Thompson
Sweet Jane - The Cowboy Junkies
Say It Ain't So Joe - Murray Head
Movin' On Up - Primal Scream
One of Those Days in England Pts 1-10 - Roy Harper
Desperadoes Under the Eaves - Warren Zevon
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds - The Hooters
All Is Forgiven - Jellyfish
Come Back! (The Story of the Reds) - The Mighty Wah!
Me In Honey - REM
A Love Like Blood - Killing Joke
All or Nothing - The Small Faces
Don't Come Around Here No More - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
Beasley Street - John Cooper-Clarke
Downtown Train - Tom Waits
Little Does She Know - The Kursaal Flyers
Surrender - Cheap Trick
White Punks On Dope - The Tubes
I Ain't Ever Satisfied - Steve Earle & The Dukes
Deeper Underground - Jamiroquai
The Sound of Musik - Falco
Peach - Prince
Kiss Me Hardy - Serge Gainsbourg
Tipitina - Professor Longhair
Stay With Me - The Faces
Ace of Spades - Motorhead
Silver Machine - Hawkwind
Homburg - Procul Harum
Effloresce and Deliquesce - The Chills
Whole Wide World - Wreckless Eric
Biko - Peter Gabriel
Tonight - Nick Lowe
The Needle & the Damage Done - Pete Wylie & The Icicle Works
Women in Chains - Tears for Fears
Teenage Kicks - The Undertones
Smile - The Supernaturals
Wasted Time/The Last Resort - The Eagles
Eleanor - The Turtles
You're So Good to Me - The Beach Boys
Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes - Kevin Ayers
(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding - Elvis Costello
Finishing Touches - Warren Zevon
Nancy Boy - Placebo
Darling It Hurts - Paul Kelly & the Messengers
Political Science - Randy Newman
Hello - The Beloved
The Disappointed - XTC
First/Second/Third Rendezvous - Jean-Michel Jarre
Somewhere Only We Know - Keane
How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live? - Ry Cooder
She's a Star - James
Power in the Darkness - Tom Robinson Band
Everything Must Go - Manic Street Preachers
Rex Bob Lowenstein - Mark Germino & the Sluggers
Every Night - Phoebe Snow
I'm On My Way - The Proclaimers
Welcome to the Boomtown - David & David
"Heroes" - David Bowie
In the Bath - Lemonjelly
Exit - U2
Stay on These Roads - A-Ha
Theme From Boat Weirdoes - Joe Walsh
Rumbleseat - John Cougar Mellencamp
Waterloo Sunset - The Kinks
Superstition - Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble
No Matter What - Badfinger
Ezy Ryder - Jimi Hendrix
Wrecking Ball - Emmylou Harris
Deutscher Girls - Adam & the Ants
Pick Up the Pieces - Average White Band
Song 2 - Blur
State Trooper - Bruce Springsteen
Being Boiled - The Human League
Sneaking Sally Through the Alley - Robert Palmer
Istanbul Not Constantinople - They Might Be Giants
Renegade - Warren Zevon
La Grange - ZZ Top
Find You - Jason & the Scorchers
The Pretender - Jackson Browne
Space Truckin' - Deep Purple
There She Goes - The Las
No More 'I Love Yous' - The Lover Speaks
Bittersuite - Marillion
Life Is Hard - Timbuk 3
I'm In Love With a German Film Star - The Passions
(Get a) Grip (On Yourself) - The Stranglers
Powderfinger - Neil Young
Crazy - Icehouse
American Girl - Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
He's My Best Friend - Jellyfish
Ocean Spray - Manic Street Preachers
Go - Steriogram
Vigilante Man - Ry Cooder & David Lindley
I Want to Take You Higher - Sly & the Family Stone
Finishing Touches - Warren Zevon
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down - The Band
Caroline, No - The Beach Boys
Information - The Rainmakers
Captain Jack - Billy Joel
Let Me Entertain You - Robbie Williams
Alright - Supergrass
Virginia Plain - Roxy Music
Uneasy Rider - Charlie Daniels
Slap and Tickle - Squeeze
A New England - Kirsty MacColl
International Velvet - Catatonia
What a Waste! - Ian Dury & the Blockheads
The Wreck of the 'Edmund Fitzgerald' - Gordon Lightfoot
Anarchy in the U.K. - The Sex Pistols
Lullaby - Shawn Mullins
Well, Did You Evah! - Debbie Harry & Iggy Pop
Rollin' Over - The Small Faces
Video Killed the Radio Star - The Buggles
Journey of the Sorcerer - The Eagles
Total Control - The Motels
Bad - U2
Foreplay/Long Time - Boston
White Rabbit - Jefferson Airplane
Asleep in the Desert - ZZ Top
Neon Lights - Kraftwerk
Hold On I'm Coming - Eric Clapton & BB King
The Load-Out/Stay - Jackson Browne
Will We Be Lovers? - Deacon Blue
American Idiot - Green Day
Voices Carry - Til Tuesday
Every Picture Tells a Story - Rod Stewart
5:15 - The Who
Authority Song - John Cougar Mellencamp
Teenage Dirtbag - Wheatus
FM - Steely Dan
Blinded By the Light - Bruce Springsteen
Overnight Sensation - The Raspberries
One of the Boys - Mott the Hoople
She Still Loves Him - Jellyfish
I Wish - Stevie Wonder
The Fletcher Memorial Home - Pink Floyd
Love the One You're With - Stephen Stills
Welcome to the Pleasure Dome - Frankie Goes to Hollywood
Classical Gas - Mason Williams
Let's Work Together - Canned Heat
Pink - Aerosmith
Boy Crazy - The Tubes
Saturn 5 - The Inspiral Carpets
Misty Mountain Hop - Led Zeppelin
Stop Dragging My Heart Around - Stevie Nicks
Shipbuilding - Robert Wyatt
Keep on Rocking in the Free World - Neil Young
Fall At Your Feet - Crowded House
Life's Been Good - Joe Walsh
Rise - Public Image Ltd
Driving With Your Eyes Closed - Don Henley
The Indifference of Heaven - Warren Zevon
Hoo Dee Hoo - The Rainmakers
English Rose - The Jam
They Shoot Horses Don't They - Racing Cars
Are You Ready to be Heartbroken? - Lloyd Cole & the Commotions
Sebrina, Paste & Plato - Jellyfish
In Your Eyes - Peter Gabriel
Dignity - Deacon Blue
Temptation - Heaven 17
Girls & Boys - Blur
Bad Company - Bad Company
Angel Dressed in Black - Warren Zevon
Gimme Some Loving - Spencer Davis Group
Riders on the Storm - The Doors
Life in the Fast Lane - The Eagles
25 or 6 to 4 - Chicago
Pretend We're Dead - L7
Tiny Dancer - Elton John
Isn't it Time - The Babys
Night Moves - Bob Seger
Every Day is a Winding Road - Sheryl Crow
Three Lions '98 - The Lightning Seeds
Rough Boy - ZZ Top
Disorder in the House - Warren Zevon
Lemon Incest - Serge Gainsbourg
Albedo 0.39 - Vangelis
Here Comes My Girl - Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
We Care a Lot! - Faith No More
A Design For Life - Manic Street Preachers
S-s-s-Single Bed - Fox
I Touch Myself - The Divinyls
Snuff Rock EP - Alberto y Los Trios Paranoias
Buddy Holly - Weezer
Revolutions - Jean-Michel Jarre
Hot Pants Explosion - B52s
Living In the USA - Steve Miller Band
You and Me Song - The Wannadies
Devoted Friends - Wang Chung
Sign o' the Times - Prince
Sunset Grill - Don Henley
Once in a Lifetime - Talking Heads
That's Entertainment! - The Jam
The Distance from Her to There - Lambchop
Detox Mansion - Warren Zevon
Stainsby Girls - Chris Rea
Bela Lugosi's Dead - Bauhaus
Nick of Time - Bonnie Raitt
Fire - The Pointer Sisters
Hole Hearted - Extreme
Easy on My Soul - Free
Follow You Follow Me - Genesis
Casey Jones - Warren Zevon & David Lindley
The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys - Traffic
Love Me Two Times - The Doors
Down at the Doctor's - Dr. Feelgood
Go Your Own Way - Fleetwood Mac
Snake Oil - Steve Earle
Sit Down - James
Calypso - Jean-Michel Jarre
Theme from 'Das Boot' - Klaus Doldinger
The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face - Roberta Flack
Kamikaze - The Thompson Twins
Hello It's Me - Todd Rundgren
Here Comes the Flood - Peter Gabriel
Heart as Big as Liverpool - The Mighty Wah!
No Sell Out - Malcolm X
Synchronicity II - The Police
Parklife - Blur
Funny How - Airhead
It's About Time - The Lemonheads
This is The Sea - The Waterboys
The Rain Song - Led Zeppelin
Police on my Back - The Clash
I Love L.A. - Randy Newman
Who Are You - The Who
Rock & Roll Music - Manic Street Preachers
You've Got My Number - The Undertones
Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't Have)? - The Buzzcocks
I Try - Macy Gray
Dream Police - Cheap Trick
Jerusalem - Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Sorry Mr. Harris - Tom Robinson Band
Don't Touch Me There - The Tubes
Fooled Again (I Don't Like It) - Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
Wherever God Shines His Light - Van Morrison & Cliff Richard
Top Jimmy - Van Halen
She Knows - Balaam & the Angel
Perfect 10 - Beautiful South
Step On - The Happy Mondays
Couple Days Off - Huey Lewis & the News
The Dean & I - 10 c.c.
Prelude/Angry Young Man - Billy Joel
Perfect Day - Various
How Soon Is Now? - The Smiths
Lazy Sunday - The Small Faces
Turn! Turn! Turn! - The Byrds
Everybody Hurts - REM
Gimme Shelter - The Rolling Stones
Stay (So Faraway, So Close!) - U2
Love Rears its Ugly Head - Living Colour
Dream a Little Dream of Me - The Mamas & the Papas
Lust for Life - Iggy Pop
Man of the World - Fleetwood Mac
Motorcycle Emptiness - Manic Street Preachers
Nothing Ever Happens - Del Amitri
Italian Plastic - Crowded House
Ray of Light - Madonna
Whole Wide World - Wreckless Eric
No Matter What - Badfinger
Waterloo Sunset - The Kinks
Biko - Peter Gabriel
Laid - James
The Needle & the Damage Done - Pete Wylie & the Icicle Works
Beat Surrender - The Jam
Drive - The Cars
Rhythm Nation - Janet Jackson
Werewolves of London - Warren Zevon
Movin' On Up - Primal Scream
Pump It Up - Elvis Costello
Luna - Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
When Will You Make My Phone Ring - Deacon Blue
Stay With Me - The Faces
Madame Helga - Stereophonics
Love and Affection - Joan Armatrading
Every Breath You Take - The Police
Blackbird - The Beatles
Regrets - The Eurythmics
New York Minute - Don Henley
Always the Last to Know - Del Amitri
Hollywood Nights - Bob Seger
With a Little Help from My Friends - Joe Cocker
Roadrunner - Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers
Good Times, Bad Times - Led Zeppelin
Suite: Judy Blue Eyes - Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Walking in Memphis - Marc Cohn
Fine Line - Paul McCartney
More Than Words - Extreme
Going Down to Liverpool - The Bangles
I Will Not Go Quietly - Don Henley
Ain't No Sunshine - Bill Withers
Bohemian Like You - The Dandy Warhols
Fearless Boogie - Hank Williams III
Try A Little Tenderness - Otis Redding
Ain't So Easy - David & David
Fergus Sings the Blues - Deacon Blue
Don't Let Us Get Sick - Warren Zevon
Lose Yourself - Eminem
Looking for the Next Best Thing - Warren Zevon
Our House - Madness
Sympathy for the Devil - The Rolling Stones
Open Your Heart - The Human League
Tunnel of Love - Bruce Springsteen
Lawyers, Guns & Money - Warren Zevon
Shake Some Action - The Flamin Groovies
Harvest for the World - The Isley Brothers
Running On Empty - Jackson Browne
Government Cheese - The Rainmakers
Mohammed's Radio - Warren Zevon
They Don't Know - Kirsty MacColl
Rednecks - Randy Newman
Cuyahoga - REM
City of New Orleans - Arlo Guthrie
Shout! - Tears for Fears
Creep - Radiohead
Ca Plane Pour Moi - Plastic Bertrand
Hanging Around - The Stranglers
Ebben, andro lontano - Wilhelmina Wiggins Fernandez
Held Up Without a Gun - Bruce Springsteen
Wonderwall - Oasis
Find the Cost of Freedom - Crosby, Stills & Nash
Sparks - The Who
Walk the Dinosaur - Was (Not Was)
Born in the U.S.A. - Bruce Springsteen
A Fairytale of New York - The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl
I Believe in Father Christmas - Greg Lake
Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End - The Beatles
The Green Manalishi - Fleetwood Mac
Pretty in Pink - The Psychedelic Furs
Two Princes - Spin Doctors
Spooky - Atlanta Rhythm Section
The Promised Land - Chuck Berry
Slave to the Rhythm - Grace Jones
Time - Pink Floyd
Heartattack and Vine - Tom Waits
Paris, Texas - Ry Cooder
Tenderness on the Block - Shawn Colvin
Life's What You Make It - Talk Talk
Wear It Like a Cape - Del Fuegos
I Wanna be a Boss - Stan Ridgway
I'm Sorry - Hothouse Flowers
Sylvia - Focus
Wild Side of Life - Status Quo
Days - The Kinks
Beautiful Love - Julian Cope
Run Baby Run - Sheryl Crow
Tubular Bells Part 1 - Mike Oldfield
New Sensation - INXS
Are Friends Electric? - Tubeway Army
A Hazy Shade of Winter - The Bangles
Hurt - Johnny Cash
No Surprises - Radiohead
Pretty Vacant - The Sex Pistols
When I'm Dead and Gone - McGuinness Flint
I Feel Love - Donna Summer
Joining a Fan Club - Jellyfish
Teardrop - Massive Attack
Physical (You're So) - Adam & the Ants
My Iron Lung - Radiohead
Do You Wanna Touch Me - Joan Jett & the Blackearts
Must Get Out - Maroon 7
Whispers and Moans - Crowded House
The Best of Everything - Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
Mr. Blue Sky - Electric Light Orchestra
Exodus - Bob Marley & the Wailers
Roberta - Billy Joel
Centerfield - John Fogerty
The Great Gig In The Sky - Pink Floyd
10538 Overture - Electric Light Orchestra
Father and Daughter - Paul Simon
These Foolish Things - Bryan Ferry
Boom Boom - John Lee Hooker
The Best of You - Foo Fighters
The Envoy - Warren Zevon
What A Piece of Work Is Man - "Hair"
Love Reign O'er Me - The Who
Go Now - The Moody Blues
Claire de Lune - Claude Debussy
Way of The World - Cheap Trick
Don't Nobody Move (This is a Heist) - Tony Powers
Love Hurts - Gram Parsons & Emmylou Harris
Home - Sheryl Crow
It's a Shame About Ray - The Lemonheads
Hoppipolla - Sigur Ros
The Man With a Harmonica - Apollo 440
Saturday In The Park - Chicago
Whipping Post - Allman Brothers Band
They Called It Rock - Nick Lowe
Crimson & Clover - Joan Jett & the Blackhearts
Into Dust - Mazzy Star
You Belong to Me - Steve Earle
Dixie Chicken - Little Feat
Tipitina - Professor Longhair
Darling Nikki - Prince
Soul Sacrifice - Santana
I'm Alive - Jackson Browne
Birdhouse in Your Soul - They Might Be Giants
Born on the Bayou - Creedence Clearwater Revival
White Punks on Dope - The Tubes
Elusive - Scott Matthews
I'm Free - The Who
Sweetheart of the Rodeo - The Byrds
Machine Gun - Jimi Hendrix
If You Won't Leave Me I'll Find Somebody Who Will - Warren Zevon
Bodies - The Sex Pistols
The First Cut is the Deepest - P.P. Arnold
Silver Machine - Hawkwind
Cut My Wings - Seasick Steve
Just Like Honey - The Jesus and Mary Chain
Man In the Corner Shop - The Jam
You're All That I Have - Snow Patrol
Time - Pink Floyd
I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever - Stevie Wonder
Jesus Says - Ash
Tower of Strength - The Mission
Sunshine of Your Love - Cream
Smells like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
In Every Dream Home a Heartache - Roxy Music
Downtown Train - Tom Waits
Stay With Me - Lorraine Ellison
The Older We Get - Hothouse Flowers
Ezy Ryder - Jimi Hendrix
(I Never Loved) Eva Braun - The Boomtown Rats
Daydream - The Lovin' Spoonful
Nimrod - Edward Elgar
One Day Like This - Elbow

"What A Piece of Work Is Man"

2006-07-18T20:25:00.000+01:00

I was raised in a classical music household. My earliest musical memories are Chopin etudes, Strauss waltzes and hours and hours of Schubert and Beethoven. From the age of 8 I took lessons on a variety of instruments, though only the piano and woodwind instruments really engaged my interest. I still have a huge love for the classical repertoire today.
My introduction to - for want of a better description - rock 'n roll came from the only record in my parents' collection that wasn't classical music, and somewhere in my attic is that same record: a much-scratched, much-loved copy of the original Broadway recording of the musical "Hair", so original that "Hair's" writers - Gerome Ragni and James Rado if I remember correctly - sing the two lead roles.
I still find it hard to put into words the impact that record had on me at the time, and it's one of my great pleasures and indulgences to listen to it from time to time and reconnect with that thrill. So when Cameron Crowe wrote the scene in the film "Almost Famous" where the young boy inherits his sister's record collection, I knew just what he was experiencing.
It's not easy to pick a particular song from "Hair" that stands out - each one lifts me up out of my seat. But there's one that's a bit special because, as the liner notes put it, "it was written by William Shakespeare." Now I'm not going to reproduce the lyric here, because I think you all should go look it up and read it for yourselves, but the title of the song is the clue.
It's not exactly rock 'n roll the way you might describe it today, but it and the rest of the album was like opening the magic door into a parallel universe. This is where it started for me.

"The Envoy"

2006-07-18T13:16:00.000+01:00

I want to make it quite clear at the outset that this post is not intended to be facetious or even satiric. Just an observation and a musical link.
It just so happens that one part of the world is loudly chewing itself up in an orgy of blood-letting, something that's been going on for so long now that many of the rest of us have forgotten (or misremembered at the very least) the cause.
In this global family of ours there has to be a rebellious contingent, a maladjusted teenager busy finding a new way to break the family china. And as ever, there has to be a trusted senior family member dispatched to knock some heads together and re-establish some peace and respect.
And so we have the Middle East. In another decade long, long ago when the other world leaders actually possessed a will to see a fair and equitable solution, they'd send some big-shot to do the metaphorical head-knocking. Anyone remember Philip Habib?
Well, this song is by way of a tribute to him, I suppose. The last time there was a spike in the violence in the Middle East, Ronald Reagan sent Habib into the area to try and thrash out a lasting peace. Didn't get it, sadly, but his efforts inspired Warren Zevon to write this song.
"Nuclear arms in the Middle East/Israel's attacking the Iraqis/The Syrians are mad at the Lebanese/And Baghdad does whatever she please/Looks like another threat to world peace/Send the envoy."
I've looked long and hard, but it doesn't seem that international diplomacy is fertile ground for songwriters, and so whenever I come away from watching the TV news, it's this song that I've found myself humming.

"The Best of You"

2006-07-18T13:13:00.000+01:00

There's a moment in each of our lives when we just have to blow up. Be it rage, despair, exhilaration or just the force of life within us that needs to be vented, we need to lift to lid on the dormant volcano and let the pyrochastic flow just ... go. The bubbling fury of emotion can be a wild, vivifying ride or it can be a frightening, disheartening plunge.
You get the impression from this song that it can be both at the same time. The fantastically dialectic nature of the chorus -- "Is someone getting the best of you?" -- shows just how sharp that knife's edge can be. Are you getting the very best of someone's support, friendship, love; or are they delicately undermining you and gaining the upper hand?
One the one hand, Grohl sings: "I needed somewhere to hang my head/Without your noose/You gave me something that I didn’t have/But had no use," but on the other, he follows it with: "My heart is under arrest again/But I break loose/My head is giving me life or death/But I can’t choose/I swear I’ll never give in/I refuse." Which kind of leads me to suspect that someone's putting one over on him in this song.
What commends this song to me most, though, is the sheer force, the emotion expressed in such a wild, unfocussed way. This is the sound of the lid coming off.

"Boom Boom"

2006-07-18T12:57:00.000+01:00

Wow, it's hot. The kind of weather that suggests quietly but firmly that you should either stay indoors and try to move as little as possible, or pop the roof on your convertible and head for the open road.
And if you choose the latter, may I suggest some John Lee Hooker to accompany your cruising? This is serious driving music, the sort of thing you'd play if you were in a rush to get out of California before midnight and had a posse on your tail.
One thing I am eternally grateful for is the electrification of the blues. Now, I yield to nobody in my appreciation of Robert Johnson and his peers who brought the blues out of the cotton fields and into the radio stations, but listening to the old recordings of one man and a bottleneck kinda pales in comparison to what can be achieved with electric amplification.
Case in point here: you get the old, hoary, dirty growl that comes as a standard part of the Hooker package, standing solidly on a bedrock of blues that just begs to be played loud. The intro is as close to perfect as you'll ever get, the half-spoken words over an insistent, hurried riff but when the entire band joins in... well, it's as good as it gets. Small wonder that "Boom Boom" is officially one of the songs that shaped rock and roll.

"These Foolish Things"

2006-07-04T19:55:00.000+01:00

A favourite film sequence of mine occurs in the film "Diva", when the protagonist (the young postman) and the diva walk around Paris through the night and into the early hours of the morning - a silent, aimless stroll that takes in all the beauty and atmosphere of one of the world's truly great cities.
The sequence is set to an absolutely gorgeous, if derivative, piece of music -- go find "Sentimental Walk" by Vladimir Cosma and play it back-to-back with "Trois Gymnopaedies" by Erik Satie -- which draws out all the romance, all the elegance of a place and a moment in time.
But I bet, I just bet, that if the postman were to look back on this moment in his life from a distance of about twenty years, if he were to watch a grainy, jumpy silent black-and-white film of that night, he'd reach for this song to play as an accompaniment.
It's difficult to imagine how a song as wistful, as rose-tinted and gently bruised as this one, can exist among the clash and clamour of those chest-beating, wailing self-indulgent songs of loss. Many of which I love to bits, of course...
Just as Paul McCartney has an obsession with the old music-hall tradition, Bryan Ferry has a fixation with the era of Noel Coward, Irving Berlin and slightly louche smoothies in impeccable dinner jackets, men who wooed a girl rather than took her up to their penthouse apartment. Ferry's lounge-lizard image steps on stage intact here, before it slowly crumples beneath the perfect, crystalline memories of an old affair: "And still those little things remain/That bring me happiness or pain."
It's the casual brilliance and sharpness of the observations that takes this song beyond the mundane: "A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces/An airline ticket to romantic places/A tinkling piano in the next apartment/Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant/A fairgound's painted swings/These foolish things/Remind me of you."
There ain't nothing foolish about them things.

"Father and Daughter"

2006-07-04T10:05:00.000+01:00

I heard this song recently for the first time. It's not often that a song makes me sit down and bawl like a baby, but this one did, and still does whenever I play it. This morning I was on the train to work, and this song suddenly popped up on my iPod. I had to find a dark corner of the train to go and plug the waterworks. By the time I got to work, things had calmed a little but I still needed to wheel out the old excuse about hay-fever....
I suppose there are few things more powerful than the conversion from a lifelong obsession with one's self to an obsession with one's children and the utterly irresistible imperative to see that they grow up strong and happy. The transfer of priorities just happens, bang, like that and your life, which has been running full speed in one direction, suddenly shoots off in another and you hang on for grim death until you get a handle on what it is that's suddenly hijacked your life.
Having said that, what also arises is something that sustains us for the rest of our lives: the huge, all-conquering love for our progeny that will not be derailed or mellowed by any mistake, event, mishap or distance.
"I'm going to watch you shine/Gonna watch you grow/Gonna paint a sign, so you'll always know/As long as one and one is two/There could never be a father that loves his daughter more than I love you." That pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

"10538 Overture"

2006-06-23T11:16:00.000+01:00

In brief: This song is the bastard child of the Beatles' White Album and Sergeant Pepper, with a guitar riff so good that Paul Weller stole it.
Less brief: It's no secret that Jeff Lynne was the mystery musical heir to the Beatles, and there can't have been many songs that were more obviously hommages to John Lennon than this one. The closing coda, with its French horns and deep scrapes from the cello, is straight out of "I Am the Walrus", while the vocals have been thinned out to resemble Lennon's voice.
The guitar riff is almost like something Radiohead might have cooked up, but this song is 35 years old and just adds to the theory that all the best songs have already been written - though we know that isn't true, don't we? But Paul Weller must have thought so, because he lifted the riff straight off this record and made it the core of his terrific single "The Changingman." This song is like a borrowers' daisy-chain.
10538 was the first, and probably the best, example of the ELO experiment to marry strings and the more traditional rock ensemble. Before Lynne became a devotee of the producer-as-musician school, he laid down this plain, unvarnished gem, where the strings are front and centre rather than buried in the mix as they were to become.
Truly revolutionary.

"The Great Gig in the Sky"

2006-06-22T10:26:00.000+01:00

When I first blogged this song, I said it shows how sex and death are opposite sides of same coin - I might have been wrong.
This song is The Passion, like something the classical composers of old would write, where they'd detail their passion as a kind of ecstatic liturgical trance - I remember seeing once a painting of Johann Sebastian Bach, sitting back at his desk and laying down his pen, eyes closed as if savouring the last vestiges of the Passion as it ebbs away.
And like those Passions from centuries ago, this music emerges from the ether into some cavernous cathedral filled with all the longing humanity can muster, channeled through Clare Torry's other-worldly voice, from the whispering, faltering huskiness at its weakest moment through to its raw, bleeding climax when her instrument touches the very limit of expression as if it were being stretched and crucified.
At times she seems to be searching, feeling in the darkness, as if terrified of the animal she's unleashed. Her sobbing, faltering howl seems to repeat itself momentarily as she waits for the next jolt of celestial electricity to transport her.
What scares me about this song is what it creates, what it generates within me; a visceral reaction that not only raises the hairs on my neck, but that almost convinces me that I could transcend this earthly plane. Almost. You can hear the song take over Clare Torry like some swirling witch-doctor's spell, hear as it pulls her away from earth, and imagine it doing the same to you.
The best part? This song doesn't have to be about anything in particular. It's about everything and nothing at the same time - the all-consuming love of a parent for his or her child, a feeling of superhuman power that comes from fulfilment, a celebration of life after death, or merely an acknowledgement that Life, the Universe and Everything is just so massively huge and wonderful that sometimes our efforts to understand it crash all our circuits and turn us into drooling, raging nerve-endings. And when we can't form the words, we have to resort to forming the sounds, just as Clare Torry does so beautifully here.
There aren't many songs that take us outside ourselves, somewhere pure and powerful. Treasure them when you find them.

"Centerfield"

2006-06-08T12:59:00.000+01:00

Here we go, sports fans. A month of football heaven, replete with "the joy of victory and the agony of defeat", to quote a famous American sportscaster. We're going nuts for the next four weeks. There'll be statistics, debate, complaints about referees and in-depth medical discussions about metatarsals, hamstrings and adductors.
The shame of it is, I've already blogged what I believe is the best football song yet written. I realize that worthy musicians from New Order to Rod Stewart have made their own contributions to this genre, but when it comes to a song that will lift the hairs on the back of your neck when it's sung by 50,000 fans I'm sorry, but Ian Broudie has already been there with "Three Lions."
So instead, I'm casting the net a bit wider today. Boxing, for example. Here we have two contenders: Bob Dylan's epic "The Hurricane" (which admittedly isn't totally about boxing) and Warren Zevon's "Boom Boom Mancini", where the chorus urges us to "Hurry home early/Hurry on home/Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon." It's also the only song I know of to deal with the risks that some sports entail: "When they asked him who was responsible/For the death of Du Koo Kim/He said, "Someone should have stopped the fight/And told me it was him."/They made hypocrite judgments after the fact/But the name of the game is be hit and hit back." No apologies, then.
There are no end of what our American cousins call "fight" songs: team- or college-oriented songs of encouragement, but these aren't necessarily about sports. Equally, there are no end of songs that have been appropriated by sports fans: Queen's "We Are the Champions" or "We Will Rock You" are just two.
But when it comes to songs about the love of sport, the fan's true dedication, there are only two that stand out: the aforementioned "Three Lions" and John Fogerty's "Centerfield".
"Well, beat the drum and hold the phone - the sun came out today!/We’re born again, there’s new grass on the field/A-roundin’ third, and headed for home, it’s a brown-eyed handsome man/Anyone can understand the way I feel."
See? I bet you're already feeling that itch of anticipation, that first quickening of the heart as you settle down to live and breathe your team's agony and ecstasy. I'll just bet Wayne Rooney is humming the chorus: "Oh, put me in, coach - I’m ready to play today/Put me in, coach - I’m ready to play today/Look at me, I can be centerfield." Sshhhhh! Don't tell him it's a baseball song!
It needs a special song to be adopted by all fans of a sport, one that transcends the tribal associations or even national ones. You can bet you're bottom dollar that we'll hear more than one chorus from "Three Lions" in Germany this summer, just as right now, across the US, fans are raising their voices to sing Fogerty's song: "Got a beat-up glove, a homemade bat, and brand-new pair of shoes/You know I think it’s time to give this game a ride/Just to hit the ball and touch ’em all - a moment in the sun/It’s gone and you can tell that one goodbye!"

"Roberta"

2006-06-07T13:23:00.000+01:00

Prostitution isn't an easy subject to discuss at the best of times, much less write a song about. Let's stand as far away from the subject as possible, and sidestep for a moment the argument that it exploits and objectifies woman. Wearing our most rose-tinted glasses and with our romantic hearts pinned firmly to our sleeves, there is something about the lonely, shamefaced man and the beautiful, remote woman that stirs the soul. Yes, the man can be an object of pity, disgust or censure. Yes, the woman can be an object of pity, disgust or censure as well. But for every encounter there's a back-story, and I ask you to suspend your cynicism for just four minutes and thirty-three seconds.
Why can't a man fall for a prostitute? Why can't he see in her something akin to fulfilment, happiness or even pride? And anyway, how many men do in the real world? Ask yourself: how did they meet? How did they manage to transcend the dark shadows of the netherworld in which prostitution is forced to exist?
Maybe they listened to this song. "Roberta, you say you know me/But I see only what you're paid to show me," sings Billy Joel. "Roberta, how I've adored you/I'd ask you over but I can't afford you/It's tough for me/It's tough for you."
Maybe Joel believes in something that's so powerful, so ultimately redeeming, that the circumstances in which it flourishes aren't relevant. But maybe he also believes in the Real World, the one that comes crashing through the door at the end of the night. How else could he have written a love song so tender, so confused but still so doomed? "Roberta, I really need you/But I suppose that my small change won't see you through."
The wretchedness of a man trapped by his own heart to follow a path that leads only to disappointment was never captured so sweetly as here. In between the verses, Joel conjures a requiem, a lament for something damned to fail, and as his desperation and disappointment grow the song gently sheds some of the sweetness so that by the end, you're almost tasting the bitterness of loss. Sheer magic in the real world.

"Exodus"

2006-06-06T13:23:00.000+01:00

It's hard to think of reggae as being a form of music that either rouses passionate emotions, or one that can serve up apocalyptic visions in the same way that, say, the Stones did on "Sympathy for the Devil". Think of reggae and you can't help but be seduced by that sexual, insistent beat that suggests a humid midday spent in the shade with something to drink and of course something to smoke too. And there's plenty of reggae that fills that stereotype. Just not this one.
"Exodus" winds itself up into a tight ball before it sets off for the promised land. From its delicate, dangerous opening as the various components take their place, to its steady, marching fade, this is a campaigning song, a determined vision set to music that brooks no opposition, that insists and demands, just like the urgent shouts of "Move!" that recur throughout.
Of course it helps that you can dance just about any way you like to this song. It's tailor-made for anything from waving your arms like a spastic scarecrow to the tightest dance-floor choreography. You don't even notice that the song never breaks step - not once. The rhythm is set in stone, the beat never lets up for a second.
What this song has that so few other songs do is inclusiveness. You can't resist it and hell, you don't even want to.

"Mr. Blue Sky"

2006-06-06T13:11:00.000+01:00

Hey, check out that weather today! While I was away getting rained on in foreign parts, it looks like someone had a word with the people in charge of these things, and now that I'm back, all is brightness and warmth. So, time for something upbeat and meteorological, methinks.
I can think of a hundred people I know who'd scoff and snicker, saying how immensely naff and wrong this song is, but when you get up and pull those curtains back to reveal a clear blue sky and the first inklings of that warmth that will go right through to your bones, then there is No Finer Song to play while you're scrubbing and exfoliating in the shower.
Yes, this is pop. It doesn't have any pretensions to street credibility, to hipness or even to pushing the boundaries of popular music. It's also ab-so-bloody-lutely perfect. I challenge anyone to find any note out of place, any piece of production that isn't utterly essential to the whole song.
I love the luxurious layers of voices soaring and dipping all around the lead vocal, the slightly preposterous operatic harmonies towards the end, and the fact that this song never, ever ends.... each time you think it's winding towards a big finish, it just sits back, lays the ball off to the winger who's storming up the sideline on the overlap (gratuitous World Cup reference there, folks) and then watches as the song lopes along another fifty yards or so.
It doesn't even matter that the words are pretty lame: this is a song about mood and feeling. It's the first ray of sun peeking out from behind the clouds, the shaft of light that touches you on the shoulder as you're walking your own particular line. In fact, it's like a dog shaking itself free of the accumulated drizzle and scampering off to set about the neighbourhood cats.

"The Best of Everything"

2006-06-05T21:17:00.000+01:00

Growing up, even for old crusties like me, isn't always fun or even desirable. There's a degree of "tempus fugit", the nasty whizzing sound that time makes as it rushes past, and it's not always in the faces of other people that we see it. Bonnie Raitt describes the sensation beautifully here, but today I'm talking about the feeling that comes from within, the realisation that today is a day that you won't ever recapture, the people you met one shining will never be the same as they were for those few moments that you were together. "Yeah it's over before you know it/It all goes by so fast/The bad times take forever and the good times/Don't ever seem to last."
And it's hard to say goodbye to places, to people or even to the old self as we knew it. This weekend I've said goodbye to one close, loved relative, I've celebrated my daughter's birthday and I've started coming to terms that people I've known and been close to - dare I say, even loved in my effervescent youth - have moved on. That hissing sound, that kiss of rubber on tarmac, it can be a little unsettling at times.
This is a handy song for moments like the last weekend. Tom Petty has written and performed so many songs that speak to the passionate, youthful nature that to come across a song of gentle acceptance, of grateful valediction comes as a real, warm treat.
"So listen honey, Wherever you are tonight/I wish you the best of everything, in the world/And honey I hope you found/Whatever you were looking for."

"Whispers and Moans"

2006-05-30T18:07:00.000+01:00

And while this title may sound like a song that could just possibly be about sex, it isn't. This is a song about escape, about running away and getting off the production line: "Dull, dull grey/The colour of our times/Cool, cool space/That I still hope to find." Or even "Slow, time bomb/The clamour of the street/I hear this town/It never goes to sleep." The sort of life, the sort of time and space where "I will catch the taxi driver/Weeping like a wounded beast." Doesn't that give you chills? The idea that our world can be so hurtful, even in its inert, deadening weight, that it reduces us to our innermost instinctual response?
What a song, what a simple, elegant expression of the storm within. It's an ackowledgement of the hammering sameness of most of our days, very similar to the one that Del Amitri sing about here.
This is simply a gentle call for release, a plea for freedom. And if that freedom comes from within, from the exalted state that we clamber into when we meet our match, our soul's mate, then we don't have to really *go* anywhere: "Then I wake up in your room/To share one piece of your life/When tomorrow comes we may not be here at all/Without your whispers and moans."
I like the idea that we can fashion our own little piece of space out of time, out of place, where we can just be, where the rest of the world falls away like a melting piece of film. Or, as Crowded House put it so much better: "We are the mirrors/Are the mirrors of each other in a lifetime of suspicion/Cleansed in a moment of recognition/You gave your life for it/Worth it's weight in gold/And growing empires and art collectors/And Alan's sound investments/Will one day be forgotten/One day be forgotten, yeah."

"Must Get Out"

2006-05-14T17:05:00.000+01:00

Where has the time gone? The last week has passed like a needle skipping over a record (gratuitous vinyl reference for the over 35s, there), with snatches of reality blaring out in between bursts of static and ear-numbing scrapes. And all the time, the sensation of time ticking away, a gentle but insistent ticking to remind me of the things I promised myself I'd do, of the plans I'd made for this afternoon, or that weekend.
And on the subject of ticking, I've been listening to a gentle, insistent song that has spent the last year slowly winding its way around my gut, like an indestructible garden weed. It starts with a ticking clock, a single piano note, a thrumming bass drum, slowly gathering strength, until "I’ve been the needle and the thread/Weaving figure eights and circles round your head/I try to laugh but cry instead/Patiently wait to hear the words you’ve never said."
In contrast to the many, many songs that bleed passion, conviction or desire that I've written about before, this is a song of shoulder-shrugged, almost bland acceptance. Yes, the singer knows, as he says, "I’m letting you down," but then again, "There’s only so much I can do for you/After all of the things you put me through." You get the sense this is a transactional relationship that's finally broken down due to a lack of credit.
I like, I mean LIKE, this song. Maroon 7 are as tight as any band Stevie Wonder put together and Adam Levine sings like a god. Anyone who saw them perform at the Live 8 concert can attest to the fact that they can do it live, too.
It's a slow, gently-charged song that forsakes the medieval passion and grandiloquent gestures of another time for, effectively, a shrug and a mutter of "whatever." And sometimes that's about as much as we can muster.

"Do You Wanna Touch Me"

2006-05-03T13:42:00.000+01:00

Music has always had a pretty adversarial relationship with the straight and narrow. I'm talking about things like censorship, political correctness and from time to time, even plain old good taste. Anyone that remembers the Judas Priest court case in 1985, or the sight of Frank Zappa, Dee Snyder from Twisted Sister and, get this, John Denver all speaking out in front of a Senate Committee against the labelling of records in the US, will know the sort of thing I'm talking about. Or the sad spectacle of James Brown being led away by the police on suspicion of transporting a minor across state lines. Or Whitney Houston's crack-fuelled meltdown.
A lot of folks argue that musicians and artists in general are special cases, that we might want to make allowances for their oddness, for their weakness, for the fact that they don't live by the same code that we, the general public, do.
Music doesn't like to be harnessed and wrangled, told what to say and what it can't say. And nor should it. But what's often more problematic is the sort of musician that comes along with that freedom of speech. Often it's simple human frailty that leaves a once-great musician washed up, broken on the wheel of addiction. Other times it's a lack of judgement that leads them astray. Other times it's just greed. The music business has the power to confer great influence and great wealth on individuals. And while it doesn't necessarily take that wealth away, it can just turn off the tap when it chooses to.
I'm not sure where this post is going except to say that today's SongWithoutWhich is, sadly, an example of a fantastic tune that's almost unplayable these days because of who its writer was, and has become. I can see all the various ironies here, believe me!
I've chosen Joan Jett's version for that reason, but also for the fact that Joan knows what this song needs: a proper, full-throated kick in the guts. This is music written from the pit of the stomach rather than the heart, or the head or even the groin. Yes, the lyric is about sex and yes, it's one of those panting-teenage-horniness songs, but listen to Joan's version and marvel at the sheer energy and power here.
This isn't so much a song about "lurve" as a chant from the football terraces, a romping, stomping declaration of intent. And no matter what's happened in the years since this was first written, you can't erase the sheer excitement, the adrenalin rush, that this song produces.

42 songs - Intermission

2006-05-03T13:15:00.000+01:00

Over on Music to Grow Old To, they're listing favourite songs to match ages.... seemed like a decent challenge when I started to make my list, but it's turned into a bit of a brain-twister. In any case, here are 42 songs that do things to me.

I Saw the Light - Todd Rundgren
The Great Gig In The Sky - Pink Floyd
I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight - Richard & Linda Thompson
Sweet Jane - The Cowboy Junkies
Say It Ain't So Joe - Murray Head
One of Those Days in England Pts 1-10 - Roy Harper
Desperadoes Under the Eaves - Warren Zevon
All Is Forgiven - Jellyfish
Come Back! (The Story of the Reds) - The Mighty Wah!
Me In Honey - REM
All or Nothing - The Small Faces
Don't Come Around Here No More - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
White Punks On Dope - The Tubes
I Ain't Ever Satisfied - Steve Earle & The Dukes
The Needle & the Damage Done - Pete Wylie & The Icicle Works
Smile - The Supernaturals
Sylvia - Focus
Wear It Like a Cape - Del Fuegos
Hurt - Johnny Cash
No Surprises - Radiohead
Movin' On Up - Primal Scream
A Design For Life - Manic Street Preachers
Rough Boy - ZZ Top
Pink - Aerosmith
Darling It Hurts - Paul Kelly & the Messengers
Political Science - Randy Newman
Sheep - Pink Floyd
Second Rendezvous - Jean-Michel Jarre
"Heroes" - David Bowie
No Matter What - Badfinger
Ezy Ryder - Jimi Hendrix
Will We Be Lovers? - Deacon Blue
Wrecking Ball - Emmylou Harris
Renegade - Warren Zevon
La Grange - ZZ Top
I'm In Love With a German Film Star - The Passions
Go - Steriogram
Caroline, No - The Beach Boys
Rollin' Over - The Small Faces
Keep on Rocking in the Free World - Neil Young
Teardrop - Massive Attack
State Trooper - Bruce Springsteen

"My Iron lung"

2006-04-26T23:07:00.000+01:00

I'm obsessed with this song. From the very moment the eastern-influenced guitar leads you into a swirling George Harrison moment, to the whiny, moaning voice of Thom Yorke, to the cataclysmic (and I do use that word in the fullest sense) guitar wig-out that draws the song towards its close, this is an addictive, seductive song about frailty. Be it mental, physical or spiritual, we are all frail in some way, and we all need an iron lung sometimes, a device to help us out, to take over for a little while. And sometimes this need to release our hold on responsibility angers us, makes us frustrated and bitter, and that's exactly where I think this song is coming from.
Towards the end Thom Yorke sings "And if you're frightened/You can be frightened/You can be, it's OK." And it comes like a release, an exhalation, the realisation that we are all just dumb animals sometimes and we can give in to our instinct.

"Physical (You're So)"

2006-04-26T22:50:00.000+01:00

A Big Day here a SongsWithoutWhich, folks. Break out the milk, let joy be unconfined. According to the technologists at Sitemeter, this blog has racked up 5,000 visitors and 10,000 page views. Sadly, the lucky persons who took us over the line didn't stop to say hi or anything, so I don't know where to send the money, but in any case I've a hot tune to share with y'all in celebration.
Adam Ant always seemed to me to be some sort of confection for the girls, a sort of tasty morsel they could consume and sigh over while waiting for a regular boy to prance up to their door wearing warpaint and tight trousers. As history recalls, that fashion came and went in a hurry, so a lot of us boys never quite got round to the make-up. Shame.
But if you care to delve a little deeper than the patented Adam & the Ants tribal drums and the ooh-matron videos, you come across some real gems. I've already been through the "Deutscher Girls" earlier, but recently I came across this track again and it really knocked me out.
For a start, any song title with the word "physical" makes me think of Olivia Newton-John, for some vague reason which we shouldn't go into here. But then I wonder what it would sound like if Olivia were to sing this song: "I want the touch of your charms/The heat of your breath/I want to say all those things (those dirty things)/That would be better unsaid." Songs about sex is a recurring theme through SongsWithoutWhich, I know, but then music is often just the tonal expression of a horizontal desire; something like this: "I want you hard in my arms/So soft in my bed", as Adam sings.
This is just a terrific piece of raw, throbbing desire, and when you listen to the song you'll agree, I hope, that the word "throbbing" is pretty accurate. Marco Pirroni makes his guitar grind like a good old fashioned eight-cylinder engine, the feedback fades in and out like your senses when you're in the grip of something animal, and the steady, pounding rhythm suggests more than dirty dancing. It's half-way between Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" and something Black Sabbath might have knocked together when they were taking downers. A real treat.

"Teardrop"

2006-04-16T15:00:00.000+01:00

We don't always have enough time in our lives to sit back, empty our heads and just drink in the moment - whether it's a sunlit field a million miles from anywhere, a dark rainy evening at home, or standing still in the midst of a sea of hurrying, hassled people. We all seem to have too much to do, too many tasks to complete before the day ends. Or, as the saying goes, "I'll sleep when I'm dead."
Here's a song that can stop you dead in your tracks, bring your senses down from their constantly-heightened state of alert, a song that just says "repose". Listening to this is like pressing the "pause" button. From the moment the lazy beat gently gives way to Liz Fraser's gorgeous folksy voice, and the gentle chord progression wraps you up in a blanket of calm, you're in another place.
This isn't the sort of peace you find when you're lying in the arms of a loved one, or the sort of peace that comes from comfort and safety. This is the peace that comes from the lifting of a heavy burden, the loss of the hundred little stresses that make up each day, when you leave this world behind for just a few moments. The music is simple and minimal enough to let you wander off; it doesn't demand your full attention - instead, it's a gentle spell, cast upon a furrowed brow. And that's just about the most precious thing we can ask for sometimes.

2006-04-07T23:56:00.000+01:00

How perfect is this. Stately, elegant and achingly gorgeous all at once yet there's hurt, I mean real wide-eyed pain, beneath everything. If you listen to this and Johnny Cash's "Hurt" together you're going to need therapy, but I recommend the experience. A big shout-out to Neil Young for his songwriting genius and his backing vocal. Just shows how the old folks can still teach the young dogs a thing or two.

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"Joining a Fan Club"

2006-04-03T21:06:00.000+01:00

"She turned the nightlight on and blew him a kiss/He stared back through his green Crayola eyes/She traced his likeness from off the back of a disc/Next to the boxtop promise of the biggest prize."
Hero worship...we've all been there. At that certain age, music becomes an all-consuming religion. We've paid for the records, posters, magazines, so we pray, we wait for the song to come on the radio, we literally consume our heroes like little pieces of popcorn... "Shake that woody/Shake it for me Saint Pinocchio/We've paid our money, now watch that money grow."
Eventually, we move on. It's a wrench, turning our back on that piece of innocent heaven, but we're older, wiser, more sophisticated, and we don't "do" posters and hot longing glances any more. Now we're more cynical, hard-bitten, and we expect our heroes to really put out for us, not just promise it.
"Joining a fan club, big mistake/I still get heartburn when I think about all of the stamps I ate/I wished I'd loved him before fate crashed his car/Say a prayer for the fallen star."
But it's still a piece of innocent pleasure to pull out that old record, see that faded, much-thumbed cover and remember how our entire life revolved around it for such a long time, such a long time ago.

"I Feel Love"

2006-04-01T09:39:00.000+01:00

I've got two things to say about this song.
From time to time I listen to drum 'n bass music, that frantic thudding stuff you can often hear emanating from low-rider cars with blacked-out windows. The car slowly cruises by andd you stare at it, wondering how the occupants can hear themselves think, talk, shout with that killing beat shaking their innards and those of anyone nearby. To quote Garry Trudeau, this is music that "could sterilise tree frogs at a hundred paces." What I get out of it is the utter relentlessness, the constant wash of air over you as the speakers judder in and out at something like four hundred beats per minute. Once in a while it's fun to get yourself pressed up against the wall by sheer volume and physics.
Think back, oh, thirty odd years to the late 70s and the summer of disco, when this piece of heaven came bursting out of the ground like a Jules Verne mining machine. It's drum 'n bass! It's Donna Summer! Immediately you're whisked into an alternate universe with this song, somewhere where spaceships, silk capes, platform heels, glitter balls, strobes and ecstasy all seem to come together for a moment when you're lifted out of your body. It's breathless, heady stuff.
And then, on another level, this song is pure unadulterated erotic science-fantasy. It's speaking to your hands, lips, fingers, throwing your body onto an enormous bed where the rest of the world disappears and you're left, two of you, together in some sort of timeless moment of discovery. It's laughter, silence, roaring noises in your head as you are taken from one world to another. And all the time, Donna Summer, the high priestess of music-as-sex, stands over you with an arm raised in benediction, urging you on to higher planes of knowledge. Or, as you might say as the song winds down after its interminable journey, "fuck".

2006-03-29T17:48:00.000+01:00

One of the earliest SongsWithoutWhich, Nick Lowe's "Tonight" is a simple, gorgeous love song that says everything a guy has ever needed to say to a girl. You wouldn't catch any of today's pre-fab music stars trying to sing a song this simple, without adding a busload of trills, false vibrato and other such aural gymnastics. A song this simple sorts out who can sing and who can't. Now I'll admit Nick Lowe isn't what you'd call a great singer, but when you're singing your own song, putting your own life up there for general consumption, it's something special.

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"When I'm Dead and Gone"

2006-03-27T13:57:00.000+01:00

I'm a fan of pick-up bands, street-corner improvisation, jamming. A song doesn't have to be perfect to be great. It doesn't have to be polished and produced to within an inch of its life, and to be honest, it doesn't even have to be rehearsed to be great.
Tom McGuinness played with the likes Eric Clapton, Brian Jones and Manfred Mann before he got together with Hugh Flint. The pair of them then hooked up with Benny Gallagher and Graham Lyle, and they cut this terrific piece of jug-band folk gumbo. I can't think what kind of style exactly to call this - it's a little like the Band's "Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" in that it's slightly loose, relaxed and more concerned with musicianship than with presentation.
There's a great trick in the production of this song, and I can't work out how they did it, but you feel like you're in the kitchen while these guys are working out in the front room. Maybe it's the really flat drum sound, but it sounds properly "live".
Simple pleasures...

2006-03-26T21:08:00.000+01:00

"Effloresce and Deliquesce" by The Chills.
This is downright spooky. As I said at the time, you've got fantastic echoed guitars, a hurry-up beat, coupled to sharp, observant lyrics....a winning combination. I came across this record when another of the tracks on the album was catching some college airplay in the US. I bet you didn't think they could do stuff this good in New Zealand.

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"Pretty Vacant"

2006-03-24T12:54:00.000Z

History plays funny tricks on us all. From the safe distance of a decade or two, our perspective seems to slip sideways, so that we view major events a little from the side, rather than seeing them as they were at the time - up front, wide and tall and long, in full relief.
This is why I think the era of punk rock has slipped from being, as it was seen at the time, a threat to civilization as we know it and a disgusting boil on the face of the entertainment industry, to a charming little sideshow when young people played at being snotty-nosed dropouts.
But anyone who remembers the newspaper headlines at the time will have no problem remembering the shock, the confidence, the blast of fresh air, the extravagance, the clearing away of the old debris, that punk represented.
This song for me encapsulates the moment when punk first arrived on our doorstep. Oh yes, it had been breeding for a while in places like CBGB's in New York or the 101 Club in London, but "Pretty Vacant" brought punk to the masses.
The song begins like a crackling Tannoy announcement, a clearing of the throat - the distorted guitar intro, the tribal drums (later used to such good effect by Adam & the Ants) kick in, before we're held up against a wall by John Lydon's bored, sneering voice. His voice was the real aural image of the Pistols: despite their best efforts, Cook and Jones were not much more than your average pub rock band, but Lydon's voice was another thing altogether.
And the lyrics! When had we ever heard a song using lines like: "There’s no point in asking us you’ll get no reply", "Oh don’t pretend cos I don’t care", "I got no reason it's too all much"... and the immortal shout of "And we don't care!"
It was a manifesto for the bored, the disenchanted and the pissed-off. A lot of punk bands -- the Sex Pistols included -- tried deliberately to shock, but very few of them (The Clash, the Stranglers) had the wit to write songs that shocked but that also actually described things as they were at the arse-end of the 1970s.
Seen from the safe distance of 27 years, punk may not seem like a lot compared to the thugocracy of rap or the pubescent porn of Cristina Aguilera et al, but at the time it was an earthquake, and nothing since then has moved the goalposts with quite the same deliberate, violent determintation.

2006-03-24T09:37:00.000Z

Today's TasterWithoutWhich is Albedo 0.39 by Vangelis. Another SongWithoutWhich from way back, this is a mellow yet spooky piece of ambient-before-ambient-was-invented. The voice is terrific, the atmosphere is suitably space age and you're left feeling a little weightless at the end

"No Surprises"

2006-03-09T21:51:00.000Z

I've spent the last two weeks on jury duty, spending long hours in a crowded room waiting for a case, and then sitting in airless rooms listening to barristers loving the sound of their own voices. I spent a good deal of time getting to know my iPod again and hanging out with some of my very favourite songs; hence Johnny Cash last week.
This week I sat in on a case that involved a young black girl. She'd been accused of nothing really bad -- she'd made some mistakes in the heat of the moment and got herself into a position she really shouldn't have. She was only 21 years old, had managed to pull herself up and out of a tough childhood and was -- it seemed -- making her way in the world. So being dragged into court must have been both a shock and a depressing backward slip towards some distant childhood memories she thought she'd left behind.
For three days she sat in the dock listening to her character being blackened by one smug middle-class white guy, while the other tried to blacken the character of her accuser. Nobody really rode to her rescue, nobody thought for a moment that she might feel like a great trapdoor was opening beneath her. No family sat nearby to boost her.
This song quite precisely describes the look on her face for those three days. A mixture of helplessness, resignation, sadness, fleeting fear but most of all, utter despair.
The quiet, childhood-singalong guitar notes at the intro let you know you're in for something special here: what's so good about this song is that it once again proves the maxim that less is more. Everything about it is restrained, tasteful and muted. This is a song that's almost completely bereft of hope. And yet it's a song that you'll listen to again and again, marveling at Thom Yorke's ability to create such a completely hopeless picture but marveling even more at how seductive it is.
"A heart that's full up like a landfill/A job that slowly kills you/Bruises that won't heal/You look so tired and unhappy/Bring down the government/They don't, they don't speak for us/I'll take a quiet life/A handshake of carbon monoxide/No alarms and no surprises." Yorke's voice doesn't soar, doesn't reach almost beyond the stars here as it so often has but instead just caresses us, consoles us and persuades us to accept our fate with whatever shreds of dignity and resignation we can muster -- just like the girl did, sitting desolate in court.

"Hurt"

2006-03-04T23:38:00.000Z

I'm in awe of this song.
"I hurt myself today/To see if I still feel/I focus on the pain/The only thing that's real/The needle tears a hole/The old familiar sting/Try to kill it all away/But I remember everything."
Everything about this song speaks of the end. It's like King Lear: a man abandoned, persecuted, resigned; a man that fought all the wars that he had to and came out the other side old and tired, raising his head one more time, remembering the force of his youth and channeling it one last time. "What have I become?/My sweetest friend/Everyone I know/Goes away in the end/And you could have it all/My empire of dirt/I will let you down/I will make you hurt."
This is utterly hypnotic. At times, the song itself takes over from Johnny Cash's voice and builds up into a raging, clanging crescendo of noise, as if he's engaged nature itself as an ally for his last battle.
A few songs don't need much of an entry here, just a listing: they do their own talking.

"A Hazy Shade of Winter"

2006-03-04T23:08:00.000Z

This could be a crime. As if it weren't bad enough to prefer a cover version of a song to the original, but to prefer a version by The Bangles over an original performed by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel will, in certain parts of Massachussetts, mark me down for instant death.
Well, whatever, folks. I'm here to say this song, along with "Head Over Heels" by Alanis Morissette, has just about the greatest drum sound ever, the best guitar riff and a terrific mood. With a Simon & Garfunkel song, you know what you're getting in terms of lyrics: coats buttoned up against the autumn chill, monochrome shadows somewhere near Harvard Yard, pessimism and bags of portentious ambience.
As I said, well, whatever. The Bangles take this song around the back of the bike shed, kick a few whiny lumps out of it, mess up the overcoat and then drag it back to the front for a top-fuel burnout. Why they ditched a sound like this for dreck like "Eternal Flame" I'll never understand, but then the same thing happened to the Go-Gos so it must be some unwritten rule in the music biz that great girl bands must sell out no later than the third album.
Anyway, play this back-to-back with the original and I hope you'll agree there's no comparison.

"Are Friends Electric?"

2006-03-04T22:48:00.000Z

Remember this? Back in 1979, when we were just wiping the dust of the punk revolution off our clothes, wondering what the hell was goin to come along and top THAT, along came this. Imagine, right after punk - the second era of the three-minute single - comes a slow, leaden-paced piece of electronica that clocked in at five minutes 22 seconds. A song about students, bedsits, shoegazing loners and pretentious arty references. And it made number one.
It was like punk had never bloody happened!
What this song did do, though, was usher in possibly the most sartorially-challenged decade of the last two hundred years. After Gary Numan came Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Ultravox and a whole cosmetics counter's worth of floppy-haired, tight-trousered, transistor-plucking art-school dropouts. Hey-ho.
It's hard to describe exactly what makes this a SongWithoutWhich: there's the industrial instrumentation, which comes over like a cross between a steam train and an air-raid siren, the narcoleptic beat - I believe only Black Sabbath have ever performed songs with fewer beats per minute - but most of all, it's the utterly impenetrable lyric, which you'll have to fathom for yourself. twenty-seven years on, I'm still working on this one.

"New Sensation"

2006-02-21T21:53:00.000Z

We're all watching the Winter Olympics at ChateauWithoutWhich, marveling at the tiny fractions of seconds that separate the greats from the also-rans, the feats of derring-do by those certified lunatics on the luge/skeleton/bob run and the unfeasible aerodynamic properties of Finnish ski jumpers.
What is also evident from these and all other Olympic games is how important it is to peak at just the right time, to ensure that you're working at your maximum output at exactly the right time. And this is equally true of music.
For example, how else would music writers talk about "the difficult second album" syndrome, and how do some musicians escape it? My theory is that inevitably, a band's first album will include songs that have grown over time, matured, been honed, while a second album will be rushed out in time to cash in on the exposure.
But over time, bands do learn how to manage the process, and here's an utterly fantastic tune to demonstrate. INXS spent years slogging around Australia, building a solid fanbase at home and refining their unique brand of danceable rock. By the time they got to "Listen Like Thieves", you can hear the sound is almost perfected. But then came "Kick" and the roof blew off.
This is probably INXS' finest moment - the performances are tight, the blasts of synth as good as any Memphis brass section, and the drums drive the song along as surely as a V8. Michael Hutchence tones down the fey heterosexuality of some earlier performances and instead concentrates on giving the lyric a proper, red-blooded kick in the pants. Everything just clicks into place, as if years of training and practicing have suddenly paid off in the Olympic final. This is the sound of a band that are at the very top of their game, and they know it.

"Tubular Bells Part 1"

2006-02-19T01:14:00.000Z

Occasionally, in my moments of weakness and nostalgia, I revisit my teenage ambitions and dredge up what little musical talent I have. A tinkle of piano, a strum or two on the guitar, even - hey! rock and roll! - a toot on the flute. I play a pretty convincing air-piano and I've been known to knock out a mean drum solo on my desk.
But despite teenage dreams of stardom, chicks and gold discs, I ran up against my lack of talent, of ambition in that particular direction, and the of confidence to put it all on show. But I also blame people like Mike Oldfield.
I mean, listen to this record! No content with having talent for one particular instrument, Mike had to go and be a whiz at something like 30 different ones. And what's worse, he had to write an intriguing, beguiling mix of folk and rock, in a classical format; and in doing so, created two of the more memorable tunes of the last 30 years. You could quite reasonably give Mike credit for writing the first ambient album.
Another thought: this is the record that launched (Sir) Richard Branson's career.
Pah.
Seriously, though, this is amazing stuff. It ebbs, it flows, it grows and develops, pulls you in different directions and makes you actually think about what you're hearing. From the menacing opening -- maybe it's menacing only because it was picked up and used as the theme for "The Exorcist" -- through the pastoral middle section, all mandolins and flowing keyboards, and onto the majestic, titanic finale, listening to this is like being put through a wringer. Again I say that just because a piece of music has no lyrics, doesn't mean that it can't be involving.
Having said that, the punk generation had no time for this kind of music. Intellectual, they called it, which I think was some sort of code for "boring". But listen to the last eight minutes of this and there's no way on earth you can call it boring. A simple theme, played first on one guitar; then, one by one, more instruments are piled on top, each one introduced by the late, great Vivian Stanshall, until the whole juddering, top-heavy construction casts loose and floats away into the ether.
It's not often that you have to consciously separate a piece of music from the effort involved in making it: music should be easy, we think. But when the music is as inspiring as this, then the effort, however much it was, was clearly worthwhile.

"Run Baby Run"

2006-02-18T00:58:00.000Z

There's something so ineffably romantic, so attractive, seductive and yet so utterly heartbreaking about the image of a child of the 60s left to its own devices in the harsh, neon unforgiving reality of the 90s and 00s. That naive idealism that came to the fore on the road to Birmingham, Alabama, at the Reflecting Pool in Washington DC where Martin Luther King had his dream and at Woodstock just seems so expensive, so indulgent and so misplaced in this age of go-faster, market-driven entrepreneurship. Sometimes it's almost as if the 60s were a confession and an apology for what went before and what was to come.
Here's a song with a back-story, a timeline born in 1963, "the day Aldous Huxley died." It's a memorial, an elegy that lives on in every child who's turned 45 and who can't reconcile their 21st century struggle with the values their 60s parents brought them up with.
"And her mama believed/That every man could be free/So her mama got high, high, high/And her daddy marched on Birmingham/Singing mighty protest songs/And he pictured all the places/That he knew that she belonged/But he failed and taught her young/The only thing she's need to carry on/He taught her how to/Run baby, run baby, run baby, run."
How many are out there still, holding desperately onto the belief in the essential goodness of man despite reams and reams of evidence to the contrary, hoping against hope that one day we'll all realize that all we need, as the Beatles sang, is love. Not romantic love, but respect, kindness, trust.
"She counts out all her money/In the taxi on the way to meet her plane/Stares hopeful out the window/At the workers fighting/Through the pouring rain/She's searching through the stations/For an unfamiliar song/And she pictures all the places/Where she knows she still belongs/And she smiles the secret smile/Because she knows exactly how/To carry on."
Where is that place she's picturing? How can she hold onto that hope? And why does she keep running? Just how much pain and heartbreak does it take for an entire generation to realise it's been chasing a dream that we're not smart enough to earn?

"Beautiful Love"

2006-02-13T00:02:00.000Z

Sometimes I have to spend a long time flipping through my music collection before some song jumps out at me and demands to know why it hasn't been written up. Days, weeks sometimes... either I've been too distracted to really listen to whatever is playing, or I simply can't harness the feeling and wrestle it onto the keyboard. Hence the last two weeks or so. But never fear, Julian's here.
I've got absolutely no idea what to make of Julian Cope. He's a genius, a madman, a child, a wispy cosmic flower child and a frothing anarchist all at once. I get the idea that he lives life on his terms, or rather, on Nature's terms, and from that life come occasional statements from the margins, records that have only a passing acquaintance with the rest of the music business.
What I can't for the life of me understand is how such a gentle, happy, optimistic and generous song as this could ever have got lost in the shuffle of radio executive playlists and marketing departments' brainstorming sessions. It's so simple, so elegant and yet so fresh at the same time. It's the song you'd sing halfway through a rustic getaway holiday, bounding out of bed into the fresh air, leaping into the clear river at the bottom of the garden, hearing the laughter of children and the whisper of a warm breeze through the trees. This is a song for that moment when you say to yourself "Life just doesn't get any better." And, for most of us, even three minutes of feeling like that is going to do us a power of good.