Stars that Play with Laughing Sam's Dice

Dear James,

I was watching one of those rock biography films last night of the type that should appear on the Hallmark channel but in this case appeared on VH1. You know the type, like the one which imagines what the conversation might have gone like when Paul McCartney and John Lennon met up in New York in 1975, with actors with a passing resemblance to the people in question and questionable accents. This particular one was about Jimi Hendrix, although the filmmakers didn't appear to have obtained the rights to include any Jimi Hendrix songs, so had him singing "Like A Rolling Stone" in a Hendrix styley, and also recreating the Wild Thing guitar burning bit. It was so dull, I switched over to Ray on the other channel, but even heroin and the devil's music couldn't keep me from going to bed.

Before turning over, I noted with curiosity that The Jimi Hendrix Experience once toured with The Soft Machine in support. The Soft Machine, who may even be called plain Soft Machine, is a band that has frequently piqued my interest, though never enough to bother watching anything on Youtube or download any of their songs illegally. Even now, in what is by all rights a Soft Machine post, I can't be bothered to look for videos, although this is mostly down to knowing that you'll have something up your sleeve and my being at work.

This much I know about The Soft Machine:
1. Robert Fripp was in them, and he's supposed to be this really good guitarist who features frequently in magazines like "Guitarist Monthly".
2. They were named after a William Burroughs novel. I used to be interested in William Burroughs, back in my subversive days, but the film for Naked Lunch was just a bit too boring.
3. Brian Eno might have had something to do with them, or I'm just making that up to suggest some tie-in with my previous post.
4. The chap in the wheelchair who sang "Shipbuilding" was in them too.

So as you can see, I'm at a bit of a loss and would appreciate any assistance. In return, I can tell you that Stars who Play with Laughing Sam's Dice was a b-side to Burning of the Midnight Lamp, the title includes a reference to LSD and to STP, and in common with most songs off Smash Hits, it brings back fond memories of my first girlfriend, Lucy.

Dear Daniel,

If Stars That Play... was the B-side of Burning of the Midnight Lamp, then that's my two favourite Hendrix moments in one concise package. If they'd put Crosstown Traffic and Fire (or just the comedy "let Jimi take over..." bit) in the run-off grooves, that would be the only Hendrix record I'd listen to.

I want to continue this reply as a new post, so that I can bring more attention to one of my favourite guitarists... it'll be Bowie's Fashion.

Dear James,

You don´t like Hendrix? All this time, and you never told me.

Psycho Killer

Dear James,

I reckon this interview with David Byrne and Uncle Eno could give us a whole week's worth of blogging. I'll start with this one, then go back to work, then buy some computer speakers and start getting up at 7am like normal people. It's the last weekend away this weekend, Funseeker cousin's wedding in Rosario, and then we're staying in FOREVER.

Brothersport

Dear Daniel,

You're gonna love this.

I went to see Animal Collective last night. 4-piece electronica psych folk noise rock (currently 3-piece). Things have moved on so much in music thanks to the internet that this genre now has a section in HMV: 4PEPFNR(C3P), next to world music and jazz.

Imagine standing in a corridor of a club so that you are able to hear three DJs playing three different songs in three seperate rooms and it's a tremendous cacophony until, bizarrely and from time to time, all three tracks seem to work together and the result is glorious, an experience beyond the sum of its parts.

There's a fine line between madness and Animal Collective.

This seems like as good a time as any to mention Silver Apples, seen here in 2008 but performing Oscillations, which is 40 years old...



Which leads us to Spacemen 3, Suicide, Eno, Sonic Youth. I'm going to post all of these at some point. Who'd have thought nonsense could be so exciting?

I wonder what she's doing tonight

Dear James,

I was just thinking, it's been three weeks since we posted a serious video. So I was going to post Glen Campbell's I Guess I'm Dumb, seeing as it was written by Brian Wilson, but I've already shown you that during our two weeks of live blogging, and I have nothing more to say about it although I've at least managed to fill up one paragraph before I try to think of something to say about Boyce and Hart, which frankly I'm going to crib from Wikipedia anyway. And it's something I've already told you as well.

So, Boyce and Hart first of all provided the inspiration for Mike Myer's wardrobe in Austin Powers, but that's a given. I like how they make it look like an album cover at the start. What I didn't know, and judging by this clip I'm not sure anyone knew, was that they wrote Last Train to Clarksville. AND that Last Train to Clarksville was a Vietnam song, Clarksville being the station troops went to to catch the cheap flights to Ho Chi Minh City, probably.

Boyce and Hart also wrote the Monkees b-side and old-favourite "Words" for The Leaves, who were the first band to release Hey Joe as a rock standard, whatever that means. As I told you on the bus to Iguazú, "Words" is a song about haemmorhoids, although I can´t remember the punchline for that one. I once lost a five pound bet to first girlfriend Lucy over the authorship of "Hey Joe". I said it was Hendrix, she said it was Billy Roberts. Turns out she wasn't completely right.

Dear Daniel,

Oh God, if ever there was inspiration for tireless search and research for the secret of time travel, it's poor Bobby Hart's expression throughout this video. He should stay at home and enjoy the PRS. Nobody should make him stand in front of a camera dressed like that, moving like that and slightly, awkwardly smiling like that. His left foot tries to make a break for it at 2'14", before the trousers put a stop to it.

Thankfully, we have a tasteful modern version made cleverly in one shot by the funny guy from the IT Crowd, Mighty Boosh and Time Trumpet, Richard Ayoade...



... which goes to show, of course, that we're a lot more wise and intelligent now than anyone was in the 60s. Stanley Unwin aside.

And just to prove that I listen to what you say, it was "words with lies inside: piles." Far more intelligent, you see, far more wise.

Jesus Take the Wheel

Dear James,

As you know, we had a wedding in Gualeguaychú last Saturday. It was quite possibly the most boring wedding I've ever been to, and I'm not afraid to say so in this public forum as we've been absent from duty for the last 3 weeks and are bound to have bored off our last reader(s). And even if one of the wedding guests discovers this post, we can just say that we thought it was a private conversation and didn't realise we'd set the settings to public.

The cheese was flavourless, the leg of parma ham a mound of fat, the main course was chicken with five tiny potatoes and the profiteroles were hard and had dulce de leche inside them. But the crowning turd in the evening's entertainment was that the bride and groom had chosen to hire a cumbia band as the main attraction of the night. Cummerband at a wedding, good. Cumbia band, very bad. (I must credit my mum's boyfriend Andrew for that joke). If you can't remember what cumbia is like. here's a little reminder.



That's the inimitable Pibes Chorros (The Young Scalliwags) with "La Colorada". A brief translation of the Spanish lyrics:

Her make-up smudged and well perfumed
Her friends say she never bathes.
The Red-haired girlalways wears the same trousers
and a Rolling Stones t-shirt,

She's alright from the front and from behind,
but soap and water? No way!
She has sensational hair, and when she walks by,
all the boys sing:

Oh what beautiful hair you have,
Wash it with shampoo!

Nothing much going on there, but as Funseeker so kindly explained to us, the beauty lies in the pun "lavatela con champú", which may be read innocently as "wash your hair with shampoo" or "wash your fanny, whore". It's the gentle charm of the cumbia that makes it the thinking man's street music.

So anyway, the highlight of the wedding came a few hours before the ceremony. Funseeker was getting spruced up so I kicked back with a Quilmes and enjoyed a bit of American Idol. Danny Gokey performed this song. I'd never heard it before, and was just enjoying the "every song tells a story" lyric when he hit me with the chorus punchline. I laughed so much, Funseeker had to curtail her showering activities to help me off the floor. Though I've probably spoiled the punchline for anyone else who hasn't heard the song by printing it in big letters at the top of this post.

Dear Daniel,

If you are asking me to choose, and I know that you are, I'll take the Young Scalliwags every time. Thinking man's street music? More like the Hale and Pace of international pop.

What's the equivalent of "biting my tongue" for when I'm writing to somebody? (I'm also yet to work out what to say instead of "as we speak" - leave the lol rofl acronyms, somebody needs to get working on that...) Whatever it is (Breaking my fingers? Corterising my hands?), I'm doing it about Jesus Take the Wheel. Just one thing: "Sleeping like a rock."

Like a rock?

A rock?

Noughts and Crosses

Dear Daniel,

I'm surprised neither one of us has posted George Formby yet. Actually, I'm rather surprised you haven't posted George Formby yet. I thought you had, but a quick look back proves otherwise. I must have mis-remembered Noel Cowerd.

The first time I heard this song, it was being played by a young man called Benjamin Wetherill in a Leeds bar. Could be five years ago. I was enthralled and knew that one day I would drive from London to Leeds with him. Two years ago, I did.





It's a shame that the George Formby performance is part of the 1938 movie "I See Ice" which appears to be filmed using three immovable cameras and have been directed by a hen, randomly pecking at the buttons which switch between each.

Honorable mentions for the versatility of noughts and crosses:

Famous sporting noughts and crosses.
Nostaligic promotional noughts and crosses. (Petrol stations don't advertise any more. Did the "tiger in your tank" not work?) Noughts and Crosses in the movies. And finally,
Noughts and Crosses as a way to pass time in the supermarket. Alternatively, buy what you need quickly, leave the supermarket and do something more interesting in the big, wide, world; possibly in the sunshine.

Dear James,

I'll tell you something, George Formby's girl is rubbish at noughts and crosses. He's letting her win and she still fucks up. Useless. Maybe she wanted to get it over and done with so she could go to the pictures. Or the zoo.

That´s a very nice cover of Leaning on a Lamppost. It must be very hard to do a George Formby cover without a) sounding like a tosser or b) crying out "turned out nice again!" at the end of the song, so Mr. Wetherill pulls himself off with considerable panache, and you can tell him I said so. Reminds me of the John Hegley poem:

London Kings Cross
To Leeds
You don't have to change your underwear
Or trains.

I've never previously posted George Formby because a) I kept getting his name wrong and youtube would only give me boxing clips and b) when I got his name right I couldn't find my favourite Formby song, The Blue-Eyed Blonde Next Door. Favourite nudge-nudge line
"She calls me in there daily to sing and have a chat, she plays my ukulele
And she’s getting good at that." You can see the lyrics here.

Re: Petrol station adverts. I fondly recall the football coin games. You had to match, say, the Liverpool club crest coin with the Ian Rush coin and you'd win 10,000 quid. I remember we had the two Liverpool crests, and sister Clare knew of someone on the estate who had a spare Ian Rush, but my parents felt that to swap them would go against the spirit of the game. And if you cheated, you were only cheating yourself. Out of 10,000 quid, clearly. And to think, they had moral issues about cheating in a game run by ExxonMobil, the world's most evil enterprise. Of course, I've worked for them as well as Mr. Murdoch. I'm hoping to get some kind of internship with Nestlé soon, make up an evil trinity.

She Bangs The Drums

Dear Daniel,

You sent me this link. Twenty years of the Stone Roses, eh? I was going to say that makes me feel old. But truth be told, I first heard their debut album in 1993 so I've got at least 4 years before I should worry about that.

Penny Anderson didn't like the record, but then there are plenty of people who are happy to line up and deliver their contrary opinions in an attempt to prompt interest by bucking convention. And I guess that 20 years down the line, it's healthy to challenge received wisdom. But - and here I'm referring back a few months on this very blog - it's all a bit Bill Drummond. To a wide group of people, they sparkled. If they didn't sparkle for you, I assume you liked something else. Let's talk about that instead. Didn't that make you feel alive with joy?



I liked Where Angels Play. Although it is so very true that they were not up to it live. Bizzarely, it's impossible to embed any videos from the first album from youtube. The very-nearly-cuts-it performance of She Bangs The Drums is the best I could muster and it's still an abomination thanks to Ian Brown. I remember being appalled in Reading Rivermead in December 1995. Less so two weeks earlier in Bridlington Spa, but then we always had a nice time on days out.

As an aside, here's the comment on this article from itisjim (it's not by the way):

It was crap though, wasn't it? So were all those albums from that particular period of time: Loveless, Nevermind, Surfer Rosa, Bummed, etc. How lucky we are today to have the likes of Keane and Kaiser Chiefs, music for all generations...

I couldn't disagree more. They all broke new ground whereas Keane have just delivered Ashes to Ashes almost thirty years too late. But there you go. To quote Alex James, "At the end of the day, talking about music is like wanking about rain."



[I think my band could be a go-er: here's the cover of the debut album by Camille Pin entitled The End of Your Arm.]

Dear James,

Well among the move and your visit I've finally got round to posting again on this blog, though I still haven't got speakers for the computer so I'm doing this by telepathy. And by looking at the videos on Funseeker's Mac in the lounge. "Where Angels Play" is one of those awful jangly indie songs that remind me of living with you in first year of university. I'd come home from classes and you'd be listening to this or Gene or some other shit, I'd wait until you'd left the room and slip on a Barkmarket record. Actually that's a lie, I didn't even wait until you'd left the room.

The Stone Roses at Bridlington Spa was until now one of my most fondly remembered gigs. I may have to adjust my mental top ten now. That Keane song is vaguely shocking, but not half as shocking as their cover of Under Pressure, which I'm not even going to link to so as not to encourage these people.