We write about the songs that make the whole world sing, we write about the songs of love and special things, we write about the songs that make the young girls cry, we write about the songs, we write about the songs.
So, our friend Rhian has had a baby girl called Ella, our friend Cathy has just had a baby girl called Esther, what are the chances of Ellen having a baby girl called Elizabeth? I've opened a book if you'd care to place your bets. Although being the father you should probably be disqualified from such book-making practices. Lovely video from Aretha too. She says hello and all the best.
This news just in: Ozzy Oscbourne is currently stranded in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego. There's a been a spot of snow and he can't fly out. It's quite a nostalgia trip for Ozzy, as he hasn't been surrounded by this much white stuff since the late 80s.
Two Sundays ago, I decided to reorganise all my records by order of release. Man has yet to find a worse way to waste four and half hours. It did at least refresh my memory on this 1978 album. My record collection is full-to-brimming with cheap tat I picked up for 2 pesos while scouring various dusty parks and second hand shops in Buenos Aires (I have an alarmingly complete Cat Stevens and Carpenters collection) and no album is more indicative of this misspent time and money than the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Soundtrack.
This film, loosely-based on an off-broadway musical, tells the story of The Beatles, looking suspiciously like The Bee Gees, battling against the music industry and trying to stop people from stealing their instruments. Back in the 70s there was much demand for films about bearded men hanging on to their no-claims bonuses.
The album, as you might expect from the above video, is unrepentant shite. There are a couple of half-decent performances: Aerosmith manage a passable cover of "Come Together", while Earth, Wind and Fire flogged a million copies of their "Got To Get You Into My Life".
My friend Brandon Therun tells me that Rolling Stone magazine voted the album the worst album of all time. Rolling Stone evidently didn't get stoned and watch the movie before passing such judgement. And anyway, Rolling Stone's list of the best 100 songs of all time doesn't feature a single solitary Queen song, so they're stupid.
You'd think that one Beatles rip-off film would be enough for one decade, but you´d be wrong. SPLHCB came only two years after All This and World War Two. While having less emphasis on instrument theft and more stress on planes and bombs and stuff, ATAWWT had an even odder hotchpotch of artistes and Beatles songs: Keith Moon making When I'm 64 worse than you could ever have imagined it; Status Quo doing a Disney-flavoured version of Getting Better (interesting that Kaiser Chiefs later covered the same song); and, you'll like this, Leo Sayer doing a throat-busting version of "I Am The Walrus".
You'll remember many years ago when we were young I made the crass error of living in Brussels for five months. I didn't have any music while there, so when I wasn't pretending to read Jean-Paul Sartre I listened to Belgian radio, particularly an evening radio show called "Le Vieil Méchin", which I think means "The Old Devil" but may actually mean "The Vile Messin". Most of what they played was old tat from the 60s and 70s, with a particular fondness for this Tremeloes hit, number one for 3 weeks in May 1967. I like to think that my over-posting of songs from the 60s and 70s can be traced back to Le Vieil Méchin, but the same station had Baader Meinhof's Mogadishu on daily rotation, so I'm probably just making excuses.
The song was written by Bob Gaudio, one of the Four Seasons (I think he was Autumn) and producer Bob Crewe, who as producer of the Four Seasons was probably nicknamed Vivaldi. Or God. They were responsible for similarly ridiculous falsetto on "Big Girls Don't Cry", wrote the Walker Brothers' "The Sun Ain't Gonna Cry Anymore" and also wrote one of my favourite wedding songs ever, "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You".
Sadly for Frankie Valli, that song is best known for Andy Williams' rendition, meaning that the song most people associate with Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons is the comparatively rubbish "Oh What A Night". It turns out that old Frankie gets around more than the clap: it was his Beggín that those advertising people sampled to sell gym slips, he sang lead vocals on the theme from Grease and also released a somewhat jaunty version of The Beatles' "A Day in the Life" for the 1976 "ephemeral documentary", All This and World War II . More of which later. Or earlier, if you're reading this blog from top to bottom in traditional style.
And another thing: do you know how Bob Gaudio and Frankie Valli met? Joe Pesci introduced them.
Here's a more tender happy birthday song you, courtesy of Mr. Bird. I've been listening to a lot of Bird recently. I downloaded two of his albums over a year ago so it was round about time to start listening to them. I like to let these albums settle and mature a bit before opening.
As you'll now, in recreational mathematics 33 is the smallest odd repdigit which is not a prime. What is this recreational mathematics? Is it less hard maths that people like you do in your free time?
I went to a birthday party last night and am going to another tonight. I don't know whether it's age or a desire to copy Lary David in as many aspects of my life as possible, but I'm going increasingly bored of the happy birthday song. It's become depressing. Can we not establish some kind of agreement where we tell our friends which song we'd like to have sung at our birthdays? Instead of having the Coldplay-equivalent of birthdayness sung at you every year. I know what my birthday song would be, if only to add Queen to the list of 18 entries in the column of tags to your right.
A few months ago I was trying to work out the name of this song in my head that went "Emaline I think you're swell and you really give me hell". Couldn't find a sausage. I'd got the lyrics all mixed up into a twisted version of a Ben Folds Five number. Then while looking for number ones of 1969, like you do, I came across this toppermost of the poppermost hit from January that year.
A typical Leeds lad, in 1978 Barry Ryan married Her Highness Tunku (Princess) Miriam binti al-Marhum Sultan Sir Ibrahim, the daughter of the Sultan of Johor. It didn't last.
As you'll know, today is the 40th anniversary of the moon landings, a fact we are reminded of every year here because it's also Friends' Day, the stupidest celebration known to man, where you spend the day phoning and texting your friends to wish them a happy day, and then meet up with them in the evening for pizza. Surely this is what friends do every day? Anyway, here's a pop quiz question for you: who was number one at the time of the moon landings? As you've probably already guessed, it was The Who's roadie (he also wrote this number) and his short-lived beat combo Thunderclap Newman with an aptly named song.
So what was number one in the USA on the same day? Well as coincidence would have it, it was another aptly named song, Exordium and Terminus by Zager and Evans. You'll know it as In The Year 2525. I don't pretend to know it as Exordium and Terminus, I'm just pretending I do.
Zager and Evans have the dubious honour of being the only band to have a number one debut single on both sides of the Atlantic and then never ever chart again.
The meaningful moon-landing title hits continued that summer, with Creedence Clearwater Revival's Bad Moon Rising. You'll remember me telling you back in March during the live blog how Creedence are one of the most popular US bands in Argentina, while in the UK we only know them for their contribution to An American Werewolf In London.
What's this funk, That you call junk? To me it's just monkey business.
Back in the summer of 92, the cool metal kids who wouldn't let me join their gang were listening to something heavy which I didn't recognise. This came as a shock. I'd spent the previous two years watching my Raw Power videos over and over again to become the ultimate metal geek. "Who is this?" I cried over the wanky guitar solo. "Skid Row", said one of the metal boys. "Damn!" I thought.
You see, Skid Row didn't used to be like this. They used to be hair metal and sing songs about Ricky, the lost kid acting tough on the streets. My friend Gary who listened to Bon Jovi and Def Leppard, listened to them, which made them officially crap and for girls only. Then Sebastian Bach (real name Sebastian Berk) got into Pantera and they went heavy. It was OK to like them, even though Sebastian Bach had luscious long hair and looked like a girl.
We'll have more on Sebastian Berk later, as his Wikipedia page is ripe for piss-taking, but for now I'll tell you about my bass guitar idol between the summer of 92 and the autumn of 92, Rachel Bolan (real name James Southworth), who wrote this song with Dave "The Snake" Sabo (real name David "Michael" Sabo). The thing I idolised most in MRs. Bolan was his nose chain, which went all the way from his nose piercing to his pierced ear (see here). I tried to pull off the look myself, but those chains are really heavy. Plus, you can get away with that look in certain circles in Los Angeles, but you go out with that in in your nose in Stockport on a Friday night and there's no way you go home with it.
Monkey Business has some of the best rock lyrics ever, such as "Kangeroo lady with her bourbon in her pouch, can't afford the rental on her bamboo couch". Eh? Who rents a bamboo sofa? "Little kiddies playing dollies in the New York rain, thinking Bowie's just a knife". That one had me when I was 16. What's a Bowie knife? how could anyone not have heard of David Bowie? The song also includes two of my favourite rock guitar moments: At 0:59 ("widdly widdly phrooom!") and at 2:01 ("phroom -kjnk, kjnk, kjnk!").
But Monkey Business wasn't the song the cool boys were listening to. No, I got into Skid Row for the same reason I got into Guns N Roses through "It's So Easy": They said "fuck" in a song. In fact, in "Get The Fuck Out", they said it loads. It was great.
Here's popular beat combo The Scroops with their first interweb appearance, and it's an oldie and a goodie. Some boat people make an impromptu appearance at the end, which is nice.
Remember when the Bluetones were the coolest thing around? Granted this was a very brief period between about October 1994 and November 1994, and yet I still managed to see them five times. If ever there was a sign of their declining cool, it's the fact that this blog has taken nine months to mention them. By the summer of 96, they were so uncool that when they appeared on the same Jules Holland show with ZZ Top, it was the weirdo beardos on the cover of NME the following week.
Here's a find: Keith Richards playing a nice piano piece on the piano there. Very nice, but can't help but think of another piano piece associated with another great rock guitarist of our time.
A splodge of good taste for you from staunch heterosexualist and Mr. Showmanship himself, Wladziu Valentino Liberace. I have so many keyboards in my flat, it's starting to look a little like old Wlad's place. I had a bubble bath the other day as well. Very relaxing. I'll let you know when I start parking a Rolls in the kitchen.
Having previously been portrayed by Bugs Buggy, Liberace will be played by Michael Douglas in a 2010 film directed by Steven Soderbergh. No, really.
As a child, Liberace suffered "from the taunts of neighborhood children who mocked his avoidance of sports and his fondness for the piano". A bit like Richard Carpenter, then. (Embedding disabled, but don't miss the video).
In my eternal search for a video of Duels' "What We Did Wrong" (I'm beginning to think they never made one) I found this review at Said the Gramaphone:
"Three images: 1. David Bowie hitting a row of tee-balls out of the park. One, two, three, four, five, six home runs, no outs.
2. Matthew Friedberger's piano, finally fixed, rushing downstream, him laughing from inside.
3. The Harlem Shakes, wrapped in a Beatles flag, jumping off a ten-storey building into a waiting hammock.
Duels are loud, without being compensatory, regular without being uninteresting. This should be a "hit". As in, it should hit you."
So my previous post got me thinking: "What ever happened to Five Star?" Well, not much as it happens. They broke up, had some babies, moved to LA and are reported to be "working on solo projects", which may be a euphemism for wanking a lot but probably isn't, considering the squeaky-clean image of Romford's finest. Not one of them went on to live in a bubble with a chimpanzee, form a relationship with Bobby Brown based around the magic of crack cocaine, shoot their faces off with a shotgun or shave their heads in a high-profile LA boutique. Very dull. In fact, the most scandalous event in their existence came about on children's television, one Saturday morning in April 1989. Which means that on a TV-presenter scale of scandal, they're a "Sarah Greene".
One of the many joys of Pandora.com before it got taken away from non-US users was finding bands no one had ever heard of and which you never then heard of again in any media. Such is the case with Aqueduct, whose Wikipedia page reads like it was written by David Terry himself, and the band is so obscure that Wikipedia hasn't bothered to look into it. I downloaded their "I Sold Gold" album nearly three years ago and I haven't heard them mentioned by anyone else anywhere. They'd be my favourite band ever if it wasn't for the fact that the album isn't all that great shakes, and I've spent the last three years listening to my other big pandora find, Dr. Dog, over and over again.
As a Wilko fan you'll know that all average albums by average American indie bands have one great song. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has Jesus, etc. and I Sold Gold has Five Star Day. I worked out how to play it on the piano the other day, and it's really easy, to the extent that I've now completely gone off the song and have nothing to say about. Instead I'll tell you about the film "Five Star Day", about a man who sets out to disprove astrology, like you do, by getting together with three people born at the same hospital and on the same night as him. It's a promising premise, but the execution is poor and the trailer looks like a cheese-fest made by a first-year film student.
Interestingly, the first line of Aqueduct's "Five Star Day" is
I don't believe in astrology but you can read me your horoscope I like to hear your voice.
which as far as first lines go is write up there with Heroes and Villains.
As I just mentioned to you elsewhere (I just make these allusions about enigmatic private conversations here so we can sell our private correspondence in a couple of years to the highest bidder), after posting the comment in the Guardian website for the post below, we got 160 readers in a day. As opposed to the usual 6. However, my post there has now been removed by the moderator. Does this make me a spammer? Even though it was an ironic post about spamming? Oh well.
That was the second bit of good news today. The first was that in my scriptwriting course, the teacher and script writer Jorge Maestro (think Carla Lane, only without Bread. And an Argentinian man instead of a Liverpudlian woman, clearly) read out my script idea, which was an adaptation for TV of that there novel I was meant to be writing. I was very excited and very embarrassed all at once. It was like that moment with my mum when I was ten I told you about, only far less scarring. And more exciting.
So, I didn't have a title for this future award-winning sitcom, but I came out of the class, turned on my i-pod and Duels' "What We Did Wrong" was the first song that came on, and I thought "Hello, there's a name for a sitcom, and it's also the song I most associate with my divorce, and it would make a great theme tune". Sadly, there's no video of the song available on the web. The second song on the i-pod was John Cale's "Fear's a Man's Best Friend", so I'm going to call the sitcom that instead.
Here's Mr. Cale doing his best at butchering a fine tune, in that timeless former-Velvet-Undergournd-member style. There's a better version, but it cuts out half way.
Here's a thing. I'm a regular reader of Charlie Brooker's column in the Guardian, mostly so that I can get some idea as to what I'll be like in 5 years' time if I don't cheer the fuck up or get married or both. From what I can gather, the 38-year old me is a still a grumpy twat, but at least he's funny and has got a job being funny for the Guardian and other people. Although presumably he also has the wherewithal to get grumpy twat writing jobs, something I've yet to master.
In this week's column he mentions how someone pointed out to him that his doppelganger appears in the Dutch Uncles video above, at 1:05. He does as well. And the song is mysteriously called "Face In". Now, I may be given to willy-nilly conspiracies, but do you think this band thought "let's find a doppelganger of a minor media figure, stick his "face in" our video and watch the whole viral thing kick in and take us to the toppermost of the poppermost"? I think it's a reasonable theory. And it's worked too, because I've now posted this and we made Little Boots famous, so, you know.
I'm back. You'll say I only spoke to you 2 hours ago, but for the purposes of the blog I've been away over a week, pretending to be working.
You may remember my previous posts about Charly Garcia and Sui Generis. Well, after they'd broke up he formed Seru Giran. This song is particularly interesting, I'm told by people who didn't get all their knowledge about Charly Garcia from a cursory glance at Wikipedia, because it was written in the early 80s when people like Charly couldn't get anything past the censors. Although if I was a censor, I probably wouldn't let these lyrics past either.
The innocent are guilty says his lordship, the king of Spades. Don't tell what you saw behind the looking glass you will have no power, lawyers or witnesses.
The music press liked Charly's new direction with Seru Giran, but the fans longed for the good days of twee songs around a piano and tin-flute. I'm with the fans on this one.
Those celestial-types who make the decisions about who lives, who dies and when they go have been particularly active in the world of music recently. Two which were not widely reported last week in the rush to fill airtime/columns with Michael Jackson tributes were the deaths of Jay Bennett and Sky Saxon.
I don't think the former features on the above version of the first track of Wilco's Being There, but he is on this one:
You'll notice that version is a tribute to Jay Bennett although unfortunately his input has reduced it to derivate, Gram Parson-esque, shit-kicking yeeha country. But suffice to say he was involved in the second and third Wilco albums and that should be enough.
Sky Saxon had one of the best names in pop.
This next one is my favourite song by The Seeds. Another sharp Sky suit. Poor lip synching. Good of the bloke from Steptoe and Son to step in on keyboards at the last moment, despite clearly never having seen a keyboard before...
Dear James,
Did you get into The Seeds off a Nuggets collection? They sound like the kind of band you get on a Nuggets collection. As for Wilko, am I the only person who likes them when they play Red Eyed and Blue but then instantly goes off them when they play 6-minute dullness? Surely not.
James and Daniel, or Jim and Danny to an unfortunate few, were going to be like the old men who ran 78 Records in Stockport, but writing a blog about the songs and videos they came across seemed a lot less hassle, and saved them having to move to Stockport. And so they created 78x78 Records, so that other people could know what it was like to be their friend, and what they wrote about when they wrote to each other about music. And so they will post videos of songs you might enjoy 78x78 times. And then they will stop. And then they will do something else. That's 6084 posts. They´ll endeavour to get it done quickly. They'd love to hear from you and any videos or songs you'd like them to post. You can do this by commenting in the pertinent area, or by e-mailing them your suggestions at 78discos@gmail.com
