More Best old Music

Thinking back over what were my favourite things in music, these songs stick out from the seventies and eighties. Here's a bunch of YouTube links:

Golden Earring "Radar Love" (What a cool groove. I never owned this single but it was always one of my favourites - and check out the skin-tight jumpsuits on those guys!)
Elvis Costello "Watching the Detectives" (for skanky rhythm and lyrics sharp as a stick)
P.P. Arnold "The First Cut is the Deepest" (for as much soul you could get from a little piece of vinyl. I thought that song was written by Steve Winwood or Jim Capaldi, but apparently not - Cat Stevens wrote it!)
Chaka Khan "Ain't Nobody" (Great disco shakes. Mmmm what a fabulous bass line. Sorry I couldn't find a better quality clip.)
Evelyne Champagne King "Shame" (Brill riff, sparkling and fizzy)
Parliament Funcadelic "One Nation Under a Groove" (For the funkiest funk ever)

All these are still great songs, I get a rush just thinking about each one; it's just a pity I couldn't find good links for them all. I did find several great links on TheBurnleyBoy YouTube channel

John Coltrane

John Coltrane (1926-1967) is one of my favourite jazz musicians and has been for a long time. I think him and Miles Davis were the Kings of Jazz for a while and when I first heard their music at college I thought it was the best thing ever. The Official John Coltrane site has (Flash movie, with no controls - you have to close the browser to stop it) a cool set you can listen to while reading up about his life (though his life was really just the music). There's not so much to say about Coltrane except that he was a great musician who produced some fabulous music (particularly A Love Supreme), not always appreciated in his time. His wife, Alice Coltrane, also a jazz musician, recently died.

Favourite Tracks from 2006

We (me, my partner and daughter) generally do a "best tracks of the year" excercise and this year came up with these:

Kanye West - Spaceship
Sufjan Stevens - Decatur
Trivium - Rain
Head Automatica - Please Please Please (Young Hollywood)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Date With The Night
Manu Chao - Clandestino
Orchestre de la Pailotte - Kadia Blues
Novalima - Malato
Evanescence - Going Under
Toumani Diabate's Symmetric Orchestra - Ya Fama
Lost Prophets - A Town Called Hypocrisy

Actually some of these have been around for a while, but I guess some years we just don't discover a lot of new music. Last Christmas I got given Kanye West's "Late Registration" and this year I thought I'd buy the first one for my daughter but she doesn't like it much, so I'm listening to it. The Sufjan Stevens album "(Come on Feel the) Illinoise" was my favourite music last year and this Christmas I got another one by him. Trivium and Head Automatica are both my daughter's choices; Trivium in particular is a bit heavy for me. I like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs though, me and sprog can agree on that. We've been into Manu Chao for a while and learnt Clandestino together in the car driving around Wales this Christmas. Orchestre de la Pailotte and Novalima are my partner's choices, Novalima is great stuff, we've been playing that all year. Evanescence is another of the young lass's - that's the name that most people have recognised, I've been going round saying "Oh, this year is quite mixed, our tastes have diverged a bit", thinking the daughter's heavy stuff might be a bit over the top for most people, but Evanescence is the one everyone said they knew and liked. Toumani Diabate is a great african musician playing lovely music. We went to see him in Brighton this year and had a great time.

TWBN#6: Novelty Records in the Charts

This may not be a great comparison because the nature of the charts has changed in the past few years; a lot of songs are downloaded rather than bought from record shops. Also I don't watch Top of The Pops as I used to, but there were lots of songs that were basically just jokes "sung" by crap groups or one-off gimmick records that sold on the basis of celebrity or I don't know what.

The Goodies "Do the Funky Gibbon"
The Wurzells "I've got a Brand New Combine Harvester"
Black Lace "Agadoo"
Rolf Harris "Two Little Boys"
Clive Dunn "Grandad"
Telly Savalas "If"

Groan groan. I used to watch the Goodies tv show and it was funny, sometimes hilarious, though I only remember one sketch that they would regularly repeat: A young boy was doing an advert or a piece to camera and fluffing it. The producer would let him get away with it a few times and then swat him round the head and shout "Get it right!". Not hugely funny in retrospect, you had to be there. I can't remember what episode this song came from (I think it came from a sketch), but there's an article here which purports to be from Bill Oddie, talking about listening at the time to Parliament (unbelieveably he means George Clinton's Parliament Funcadelic, or P-Funk and not this. I can't believe Bill Oddie was into that stuff!), Sly Stone and Miles Davis! Wha?

"I've Got a Brand New Combine Harvester" was a hit by the Worzels. It was a dreadful rewrite / ripoff of the earlier and much better "I've Got a Brand New Pair of Rollerskates" by Melanie Safka. Actually her song was called "Brand New Key", but most people remember it by the first line I think.

Aaaaarghgadoo (my spelling) was unleashed on the nation by Black Lace. It was deliberately targetted at unwitting club and party goers, wholly innocent of the group's desire to take control of them by the means of making them learn a ridiculous dance, perform it in groups on the dance floor, in the process turning their minds to mush. Here is a link (follow with care) to a demo of the dance done by a pineapple no less, on the Black Lace website. Luckily their plan for World Domination via the drunken minds of UK youth failed.

Rolf Harris' "Two Little Boys" was just mush. Just enjoy your life and don't try to find it. Take my advice.

Clive Dunn was an actor in the popular comedy series "Dad's Army". His character, Corporal Jones, was a popular part of that show and he obviously capitalised on that when he released the shocker that became number one "Grandad". This one made me feel particularly queasy because it was basically a bunch of kids singing "Grandad, Grandad, we love you". On Top of The Pops they had him in a rocking chair surrounded by adoring schoolkids. He later went on to make a children's programme also called "Grandad".

Telly Savalas was the big bald cop in the American tv series "Kojak". He was known for sucking lollipops and saying "Who loves ya baby?" a lot. I guess someone told him he had a nice voice, so he spoke the words of that "if a picture paints a thousand words" thing. It was kind of like a car crash at number one. There's a picture of one of his records (called simply "Telly") here, and several fans defend the great man!

There's a sub-genre of revolting novelty for football records. Many people have moaned about this before, so I'll just briefly mention that my Dad once bought me "Blue is the Colour" by Chelsea Football Team. I think it's healthy if you face up to the difficult issues in your life.

Parallel Trousers and Bags

Clothes were never very important to me, but there was a time when I very much wanted to get specific styles in clothes. I was at school and must have been thirteen or so. Suddenly certain clothes were very attractive; I think it was all about being part of a gang. It started with parallel trousers and platform shoes. I don't know all the cultural history of these trousers, but a few of my mates wore them and they seemed the biz. This was around the time Slade were wearing their outlandish garb of high heeled boots and trousers that came just above their ankles. The best of the trousers were made of a shot cotton material that looked different colours in different lights. There's a good page here about 70s clothes, this guy seems to know his stuff - I remember Scratch 'n' Sniff t-shirts! We also liked shirts with round collars; nice deep colours they were. I think the shirts were called Brutus; they looked very good. I think a bit before that Ben Shermans were supposed to be very cool (worn a lot by skinheads; did mods wear them as well?) Later the trousers got wider and were called Bags or Oxford Bags and the shoes got fatter with less of a heel. That was round about when the Bay City Rollers took the nation's female youth by storm - 1974 apparently, though that seems very close now to the start of Punk; well I guess things were moving faster then. Anyway, the Rollers wore their bags high with tartan trim. I remember we asked each other a lot how wide each others bags were (! Idiots). Anyway I don't remember it lasting long, so that was my brief flirtation with fashion then.

Music Players Through the Years in my Family

Writing about "the family stereogram" earlier started me thinking about the different things we played music on in our family. We weren't musicians, except for the obligatory recorders soon given up on and my sister's piano similarly foresaken, but we certainly loved music, well I did anyway; I won't speak for the others except to say Dad had a Roger Whittaker cassette with RW singing, playing his flute (he did play a flute didn't he?) and whistling. By the way, don't click on the link for Roger's fan site if you don't like his music, you'll get an earful (I suppose you could turn your speakers down) and Mum only really listened to music when she did the ironing - she liked Strauss' Blue Danube Waltz. No, I mean the music machines we used, as in:

The first I remember was a light blue transistor radio with an extendable aerial. It had a plastic case with holes and my memory of it now is as a dinky little thing, like something you'd see in the Design Museum. I had a quick look for some pictures but I don't see anything like it and having looked I think our radio must have been mid-sixties, because the early sixties models look much bigger and older. I remember hearing "She's Got a Ticket to Ride" on this one. That link goes to an interesting story about how John Lennon got the idea for the song, but I'm not sure I believe it (also, check out the small gold heads of the Fab Foursome in the top left gif). So I guess the design of transistor radios went through quite a revolution in the first half of the sixties, Japanese designers at the top of their game I guess.

We also had an old record player. It was the property of one of my parents, can't remember which, and I can't reliably remember when my brother and I started playing records on it. My parents had some old 45s, including Tommy Steele's "Little White Bull". The player was red and cream and had a stacker pole where you could pile several records and lift an arm across the top of them to hold them in place. If you piled up too many though, they would start to skate and slip.

The next thing I remember was called a "stereogram". It was a kind of sideboard record player that you could also keep records in and I think ours was a kind of teak colour. No idea what we played on that, perhaps Dad upgraded the player to the stereogram and my brother and I got the old player.

There was a small radio that I got for Christmas because I wanted to listen to pop music. I think it was a Ferguson. My memories of it are of lying in bed listening to John Peel's Radio One show.

Dad replaced the stereogram with a Sony music centre. I think that was the start of his love affair with Sony, because since then he's always regarded their stuff as likely to be good quality. I listened to my Christmas present for 1973 ("Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd) on that.

But the best thing I ever had to play music on (after the radio) was a turntable, amp and speakers that Dad bought me for my eighteenth and yes it was a Sony machine. I loved that thing.

Blimey haha hmm eh?

Very confident (video link) guy gets his dad on the phone for the million dollar question on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Hilarious (audio link) prank played on a telemarketing cold caller. Article about the history of the PC market and the struggle between Microsoft and its competitors. This woman says she doesn't know who Bob Dylan is.

The first single I bought was Telegram Sam

I started buying records when I was about 10 in 1971. I got 50 pence pocket money and that was enough for a single. Singles were more important than they are now and being able to buy one per week was great. I don't remember the first one I bought, I think I might be romanticising to say it was "Telegram Sam" by T-Rex, but that was probably the coolest thing I bought around that time; brilliant song, very slick and sexy (probably as much to do with Tony Visconti's production as Marc Bolan's lyrics and looks). Heh, I just found a lyrics website with Telegram Sam on it. Reminds me of Disco 45, this raggedy mag I used to get around the time I'm talking about. I wrote about it here. So Telegram Sam was ace. I also remember something by Chicory Tip called "Son Of My Father" - here's a site with all the UK number ones (they claim) since it started. That's enough lyrics sites. Like I say, it's probably romanticising to say the first was "Telegram Sam", because I also bought lots of rubbish.

The group I really got into at that point was Slade. Noddy, Dave, Don and Jim had a lot of energy and made a lot of noise but the only song of their's I still like much is "Goodbye to Jane". There's a blog by Fury Animal called Musicnews with a piece about Slade featuring the cover of "Slayed", an album of their's I bought later. I did buy Jean Genie by David Bowie but I can't remember much else.

As for albums, the first one I bought was "A Nod's as Good as a Wink to a Blind Horse" by The Faces, who later became Rod Stewart and the Faces. I still play this, usually just for one track called "That's All You Need", as much for Ron Wood's guitar as Rod's voice. When I bought it there was a poster inside and this site has a copy of it. The album cost £2.50 and I still love it for "That's All You Need", though at the time I probably bought it on the strength of "Stay With Me", a classic v. sexist Rod Stewart rocker. I bought other albums as well, but I haven't played "Slayed" or Gary Glitter's album for ages now. The only other album I bought around that time that is still worth playing is "The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars" by Bowie. It's even possible that I didn't get that until later, when I was at Secondary School (the equivalent in those days of high school). I do remember getting "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd one Christmas and playing it on the family stereogram.

Remembering Punk and My First Spam

I was 15 in 1976 when my rural North West town started to hear about Punk Rock. In fact I don't remember it as Punk Rock, but New Wave (was that later?). The first record that seemed different as I remember it was "Do Anything You Wanna Do" by Eddie and the Hot Rods. It had energy anyway. The first nw record I bought was a double A-side by the Stranglers called "London Lady / Get a Grip on Yourself". The stuff I listened to was The Jam, The Ramones, The Clash, Elvis Costello and The Damned. I wasn't really an angry punk, more a fun punk, but I thought The Clash were great - they talked about making their own clothes and they had a reggae track on their album. I listened to a lot of this stuff on John Peel's show some time around midnight, in bed with a transistor radio next to my ear so my brother in the top bunk wouldn't hear. Peel played that kind of music mixed with Ivor Cutler's stories called "Scenes From a Scottish Living Room". I remember one about a bird called Fremsley (if you've never heard Ivor Cutler, give the linked site above a go, it's worth a listen). The Peel Show was a strange and wonderful mixture.

It was sometime around then that I picked up a Disco 45. I'd not looked at one for a long time since I used to get them when I was around 10 (I wrote about that here. Disco 45 was an awful magazine, consisting of the lyrics of top 40 hits. I bought it every week). I'm not usually good at remembering dates, but I remember I did a project at school which consisted of copying the lyrics of songs from Disco 45. I don't know what the project was supposed to be - poetry? I was shocked when Mr. Brown thought my efforts were not that great! I did concede to myself that the the T-Rex hit "Deborah" was perhaps not the right choice - it went something like:

Dug and redug redug, dug and redug redug
naah naah naah naah naah naah naah
Deborah, you look like a Zeborah
naah naah naah naah naah naah naah
Dug and redug redug, dug and redug redug

...and so on. I wrote down the whole thing concientiously and Mr Brown must have wondered if I was on drugs (he wasn't very hip man). Perhaps I could have chosen a better example by Marc Bolan (he and Micky Finn, who played the bongoes, were T-Rex), but anyway, that was when I loved Disco 45. The time I'm talking about now was about 5 years later, so I think I would have been slightly embarassed by it - it was very uncool. I don't know how I came across it but I was interested in the competition inside. Disco 45 was probably one of the opposites of Punk (there were several opposites of Punk and pappy Top 40 pop songs as a bunch were one). The editor said he wanted people to write in on a postcard what they thought about Punk and the winner would get an album (see how things have changed? I was excited at the prospect of winning an album!) I sent a letter and a few weeks later he phoned our house and asked to talk to me. He said I'd won and would it be OK for him to put my address in the magazine so that people could write to me (heh, see how things have changed? Put my address in a magazine?!)

So I started getting letters from girls who found my address in the next Disco 45. I never wondered why I didn't get any letters from boys, but then I did get one from a boy / man / bloke, I never worked out his age, but his letter certainly stood out and I've still got it. It was my first spam, before email was invented. I can't scan it because it's faded now, and I don't want to write it all down (as you'll see). Difficult to know what to leave out here, but all the square brackets and *** are mine (as if my skinhead penpal would use square brackets). Anyway, knock yourselves out:

TO THE F***** IDIOTIC C***, [my name] WHAT A SHIT NAME.
NOW LISTEN ERE MOUSH I
REALLY HATE PUNK ROCK
WE GO PUNK BASHING UP LONDON EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT AND IF
YOU COME DOWN TO THE ROXY AT COVENT GARDEN WHICH IS A
SPUNK POCKERS CLUB I'LL
[offers to modify my looks] LIKE WE
DONE LAST FRIDAY TO A
C*** WITH GREEN HAIR. WE
WEST HAM SKINHEADS AND
WE'RE F***** RULE EVERYONE
MATE ESPICIALLY PUNK
ROCKERS WHO WE REALLY
HATE. YOU ARE DIRTY, SMELLY
F****** C**** AND IT'S A
WELL KNOWN FACK THAT ALL
PUNK ROCKERS ARE QUEERS
AND YOU MUST BE WITH A
NAME LIKE THAT YOU F*****
SNOB C***. I'M GONNA DRIVE
UP TO [my home town] ONE DAY
AND WAIT FOR YOU AND
[various graphic details] THEN
WHEN YOUR DEAD I'LL PISS
ON YOU AND KICK SHIT
OUT OF YOU AND ANY OTHER
PUNK THAT WE SEE
SKINS RULE AND DON'T
YOU FORGET IT C***
I'LL DO 10 PUNKS TOMMOROW
REALLY BAD AND
I'LL BE THING OF YOU. BY THE
WAY ALL PUNK GIRLS ARE
F***** OLD SLAGS AS WELL.
6 OF US [you don't want to read this bit]
COS SHE WAS A PUNK SLUT
ANYWAY ONE DAY I'M
COMING UP YOUR PLACE
WITH THE BOYS. SO START
SHITTING YOURSELF MATE,
AND REMEMBER
SKINHEADS RULE OK
AND KILL ALL PUNKS
PAKIS AND TEDS
WEST HAM
YOU CAN'T HELP IT
IF YOU YOU SMELL