Dust On The Stylus

The Spotnicks - Hava Nagila mp3

2009-10-18T17:16:00.002+01:00

Oriole
45-CB1790
1963

Several years ago I had my musical gland squeezed in the middle of the night by a track played on Charlie Gillett's show for the BBC World Service. He was playing a selection of tracks that first made the West aware of other musics, antecedents for what we call world music. The one that made me sit bolt upright, switch the light on and write the details down so I could buy a copy was Soul Makossa by Manu Dibango. It has a couple of killer funk-soul hooks but with this great spacey loose funk groove that was unlike any of the American funk or soul I knew.

That was the clue that 70s soul wasn't just an American affair, that there was stuff around the world that would be every bit as rich, dirty and face-twistingly funky.

Earlier this year my dear friend the venerable Gyrus sent me a copy of Nigeria Disco Funk Special: The Sound Of The Underground Lagos Dancefloor 1974-79. Like most various artist compilations it's not of consistent calibre, but fuck me when the spectrum ranges from the good to utter riproarers that's no bad thing.

Then more recently I found this page of 70s Iranian funk. Who'd have thunk the funk would be out that far? The authorities banned pop music in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution, but it seems up till then there was some magnificent stuff being made and played in Iran. As an extra reason to hate their vicious regime, the Iranian funk page gives us a clue to what musical talent has been suppressed.

Weirdest of all is the version of Hava Nagila, a traditional Hebrew tune of celebration. Iranians doing an African-American style version of a Jewish tune. It'd be worth hearing just for the on-paper incongruous nutness of it, but play it and hear that it stands tall and firm on its own merits too.

This, in turn, sent me off to dig out the version I already have, an equally improbable early 1960s Tarantino style surf guitar version done by a Swedish band who wore spacesuits on stage.

download Hava Nagila (3.4MB MP3)

The Freshies - I'm In Love With The Girl On The Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk mp3

2009-09-04T10:35:00.004+01:00

Razz (through MCA)
MCA 670
1980

This fabulous piece of perky provincial powerpop faintly pestered the charts outside the top 40. Nice postpunk Skidsy guitars combine with 60s harmonies to give it a crisp playful momentum that matches the lyrics.

Mistakenly seen at the time as something of a novelty record, it's actually more the kind of indie wit that the Wonder Stuff would make a career of.

The lyrics are a fine documentation of that attitude, so common at the time but slightly mystifying now, that records were in and of themselves sacred and wonderful artefacts. And so, just like the way people disproportionately fancy bar staff due to some subconscious primal understanding of them as providers, we'd readily swoon at cool people working in record shops.

It takes the minimum of effort to have this song remind me of the woman who worked in Our Price in Southport. How I hoped she would be impressed by my pre-ordering cool records like Starfish by The Church. If she was, she hid it very well.

The Freshies continued that vinylophilic theme with their ploddy follow-up 45 I Can't Get 'Bouncing Babies' by The Teardrop Explodes.

But before that there was a problem to overcome with the Virgin Megastore single. This being the 1980s before everything was sponsored, and with the BBC putting masking tape over brand names when using cereal boxes to make stuff with sticky-backed plastic on Blue Peter, the namecheck in this single's title was a commercial hindrance. So it was recut as I'm In Love With The Girl On A Certain Manchester Megastore Checkout Desk. (Hear that version here).

Perhaps the rewording accounts for the words bring in the wrong order on this version's label ('Virgin Manchester Megastore' instead of 'Manchester Virgin Megastore').

Freshies mainman Chris Sievey later invented a Freshies fan, the staggeringly unfunny 'comedy' character Frank Sidebottom. Somehow he ended up doing Sidebottom for years on end, along the way spawning a cohort, Caroline Aherne's - who'd have thunk it possible - even less funny Mrs Merton character.

But never mind, because this single is such a glorious uplift.

download I'm In Love With The Girl On The Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk (4.1MB MP3)

Lunar Funk - Mr Penguin Pt.1 mp3

2009-05-26T18:57:00.001+01:00

Bell (USA)
45 172 (Bell 1225 in the UK)
1972

Over at one of my favourite blogs, The Quiet Road, Jim has posted a Youtube video of the Mothership Connection. I see no reason why we shouldn't let the funk seep on over to our place.

If, like me, you had never heard of this record before you saw a second hand copy, I sincerely hope you would feel as I did. Namely, any record called Mr Penguin by something called Lunar Funk has to be worth hearing.

Whilst it doesn't have the heavier sturm und thang delivered by some of their contemporaries, it grooves along with fuzzy guitar, trippy vibes and tricky rhythm.

Most importantly, it has what - as the venerable Adam Warne rightly observed - any track needs to be truly funky: a man with a deep voice saying funky stuff.

download Mr Penguin (4.1MB MP3)

If you're a funkafreak and want me to email you the Part 2 that appears on the B-side (pretty much another three minutes of the same), leave your email address in the Comments.

Salford Jets - Who You Looking At mp3

2009-04-29T11:31:00.002+01:00

RCA
PB5239
1980

Dexys Midnight Runners' first album, a humid soul tangle, was brought to the limelight by the number 1 hit Geno. The second album, all that soul but with celtic folk sounds woven in, had it happen with the bigger hit Come On Eileen.

Then there was a huge wait before Don't Stand Me Down, a third album released with no flagship single and had them sat in corporate suits on the cover. It bombed. Yet it is every bit the equal of the first two, and in many respects excels them. A true lost classic.

To me, the giant on there is This Is What She's Like, one of the most extraordinary and brilliant love songs I've ever heard. A twelve minute epic, the lyric is a conversation, one party asking what 'she' is like and the other trying to explain. But he does it with non-verbal phonetics as words fail him.

Before that, he tries by listing a lot of disparate, curiously specific things that she's not. All those things that annoy, the things that denote people who are clueless and hopeless at root, things that make you want to give up on people, things that 'she' is such a refreshing change from.

Well you know how the English upper classes are thick and ignorant?

You know the newly wealthy peasants with their home bars and hi-fis?

People who describe nice things as wonderful.

And, first on the list, the kind of people that put creases in their old Levi's.

Imagine the level of tosserliness required to do it to the extent that your jeans have a discernible lightening down those creases. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Salford Jets.

I find it heard to believe the crease could be lightened by mere ironing. What did they do, delicately paint down their kecks with a bleachy cotton bud?

The EP pictured is a 1979 collection of I Want To Hold Your Handish beaty pop, with an arrow logo and a couple of skinny ties to cash in on the waning mod revival.

Fed Up of Stalybridge had the main letter in last Thursday's Manchester Evening News. They complained young people had abused them in the street.

Such hostility to strangers is, they assert, getting 'increasingly common'. 'Have people always displayed such an aggressive "watchoo lookin at?" attitude?'

To answer that question let us welcome back Greater Manchester's all-time most negligible band. Ladies and gentlemen, once again I give you the Salford Jets.

The year after the EP they released a single of breathtakingly brainless, affected spilt-pintery. Scraping into the charts at number 72, Who You Looking At? features two verses and a chorus of cod-punk twaddle. They even drift into that Estuary English accent so essential for pseudo-punk.

Who you looking at
When you're walking down the street?
Who you looking at?
You better not be looking at me
I said who you looking at?
Who you looking at?
Who you looking at?
It better not be me

Fractionally redeemed by a brief tasty organ break, nonetheless it's one of the most ludicrous, risible records ever manufactured.

download Who You Looking At (3.1MB MP3)

Seventeen - Bank Holiday Weekend mp3

2009-04-02T22:12:00.001+01:00

Vendetta
VD001
1979

I said in an earlier post that I couldn't remember if I'd seen The Alarm in December 1985. Well, for those of you who who've bitten their nails to the quick awaiting an answer, relief is at hand.

A rummage around brings to light the ticket stubs. Saw them in November 84 (I remember hitch-hiking home and listening to the American election results on the radio. Reagan re-elected. Fuck.)

And again the following May.

With another tour in December they certainly weren't slacking. And they undoubtedly did really good gigs, but by late 1985 my interest in them had waned. They were becoming a bit too straightforward, a bit - as it was known at the time - rockist.

They'd come through a couple of years earlier with several bristling singles and an aptly titled confident and earnest debut album, Declaration.

Lyrically they had broad-brush politics about justice, hope and the concerns of the ordinary person, a gift for terrace-anthem choruses, and a specific obsession with war imagery (soon adopting a splattery poppy as their logo).

Musically they had real gusto yet tempered it sonically with sweeping layers of strident acoustic guitars and emotionally with a melancholy tint.

The sound was thus intricate yet epic, bold and provocative yet ornate and even wistful, it could curl like a creeper vine or explode as big and startling as their hairstyles.

If you could repress your cynicism - or had yet to form any to speak of - then they were fresh, exciting and involving. I still stand by that first album as being all those things.

Though I'd personally lose interest as my tastes went a little toward darker and more oblique music (REM, The Church), at least The Alarm didn't go as dull as Big Country. And you've gotta respect a band that would cut their fourth album, Change, in two different vocal versions, one in English and one in Welsh. Especially a band from as anglophone a part of Wales as Rhyl.

But let's let the screen go into that heat-haze effect that tells you it's a flashback.

Before they were The Alarm they were a post-new wave mod band called Seventeen. Taking that Merseybeat brightness with a bit of solidly chuggy new-wave guitar, like The Members or The Chords or the Lambrettas, only they don't seem to have been as good as those ones. Who, in turn, weren't that good themselves.

(Before this, incidentally, singer Mike Peters was in a punk band called The Toilets. Worth doing it just for the name I reckon).

Seventeen issued a single, both sides written by the future Alarm mainstay team of MacDonald and Peters. The A-side was Don't Let Go, but it's the B-side, Bank Holiday Weekend, that catches my ear. You can see them trying to latch on to the mod iconography of bank holiday punch-ups on Brighton beach, but as its fifteen years later and they actually live in a seaside town they know that the truth is somewhat different. Bored families, tacky tat for sale, the deflation of something looked forward to being dull.

I've no idea, but I'm guessing this was their only release and quite possibly a DIY job, given that it has the catalogue number VD 001. I love that prefix. When I was in a band, our fake record company for what turned out to be our only release was Rampant Records, letting us use PANTS 001. You've got to take the opportunities for smut where you find them.

There's no clue at all that these people would go on to do anything of worth. In that way, it's opposite of the Johnny and the Self-Abusers single (a piece of slinky arty punk that, after a namechange to Simple Minds, gave way to one of the most vacuous and execrable careers in the history of eardrums).

download Bank Holiday Weekend (4.4MB MP3)

By the way, if you're some Alarm completist gagging for the MP3 of Don't Let Go as well, leave your email address in the Comments and I'll send it to you.

Tom Robinson - Never Gonna Fall In Love (Again) mp3

2009-03-11T19:20:00.001Z

EMI
EMI2967
1979

I found this in Oxfam in Headingley circa 1993. I knew Tom Robinson's raised fist classics (2468 Motorway, Glad To Be Gay) and the more thoughtful mysterious side (War Baby, Atmospherics), and that he'd just returned to form as an acoustic troubadour with a new batch of songs with his trademark mix of biting cynicism and warm hearted optimism.

But nothing prepared me for what I was about to receive. It's a smirky saucy swirly gay disco track with a hands-in-the-air chorus. This bright shiny setting is a great juxtaposition for Robinson's dry throaty vocal tone.

Never meant to be so friendly
Never made the room look nice
Never heed a word of warning
Never take my own advice
Ooh, I got a brand new problem
He's pretty and he's five foot ten
I've been in love three times this week
I'm just about to fall again

In a 2004 interview for the excellent radio show and online resource Queer Music Heritage, Tom said

In many ways one of my favorite gay songs of all the ones that I wrote that had a specifically openly amorously gay theme, I like "Never Gonna Fall In Love Again" because I sent the lyric to Elton John and he came back with the music for it, and so it was a collaboration between two gay artists. And he is a great songwriter, there's no question, so it's got good changes and a decent melody. And his version of course was a slow ballad and…a bit drippy to be honest.

And although he sent me back a demo which had all the pronouns as I'd written them, when he recorded it himself he kind of slurred them a bit, so where it's "I wish he didn't make me rabid" his is "I wish-he didn't make…" you know it was just a little bit on the ambiguous side.

Ah, but that's all right. That's where he was at the time and what Elton has done (A) for the gay movement, and (B) in the fight against AIDS, with the Elton John AIDS Foundation, you know, is fantastic and we owe a huge debt to the man, so I think he's allowed to slur a few of his pronouns here and there

A wild collision of talents, it's not only co-written by Tom Robinson and Elton John, but produced and engineered by Nick Drake's guy John Wood, and mixed by Sex Pistols producer Bill Price.

To make it stranger still, while the B-side is credited to Tom Robinson Band, the A-side is 'Tom Robinson With The Voice Squad'. Who might this shady group be? Er, it's the Tom Robinson Band.

According to Tom's official site

Although TRB were playing on the record, its hamfisted disco style was so alien to what the band was about that at the other members' request it was released as a Tom Robinson solo single and the group split shortly afterwards.

Robinson didn't let his step falter, swiftly putting on a solo gig of gay songs to mark the tenth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. That show was released as the Cabaret 79 album which, generous gent that he is, is available for free download from his site.

Whilst Never Gonna Fall In Love (Again) is not disco proper - crank it up and there's no Chic-esque bass whoomf - it's a great piece of perky cheeky pop-disco and a real unexpected delight.

download Never Gonna Fall In Love (Again) (4.6MB MP3)

The single donated all performance royalties to London Gay Switchboard, which is still very much in action. If you download the MP3, why not make a donation? Just £1 covers the cost of a ten minute call.

The Charles Randolph Grean Sounde - Star Trek mp3

2009-02-26T18:48:00.001Z

Ranwood (USA)
R1044
1975

The Star Trek theme.

Disco version from the mid-1970s.

Oh yes indeed.

download Star Trek (5MB MP3)

Faith Brothers - Easter Parade mp3

2009-02-11T13:32:00.004Z

Siren
SIREND2
1985

Over on my other blog I did a post about going to see the hybrid reunion-tribute band From The Jam.

In digging around to find old gig tickets from the 80s with which to illustrate it, I found this old listings flyer from 1985.

I love the way bands are expensive in proportion to how long they've been going, and almost in inverse proportion to how good they are.

The cheapest gig on the list and the only one I went to was REM (with the possible exception of The Alarm, saw them a couple of times, can't remember if that Royal Court gig was one). REM's listed support act, as with a ton of gigs at the Royal Court around that time, was the Faith Brothers.

As Sly and Robbie told Michael Franti, reggae isn't a nationality, its a rhythm and it belongs to everyone. In the same way, soul is what you play and what you are, not where you're from.

The Faith Brothers were, like Immaculate Fools, a band who got a mid-80s Big Push from their record company (Virgin, using their Siren imprint) with a double-pack single, Country of The Blind.

They packed a political punch in bright bouncy soul and, despite the universality of musical styles, there was nonetheless something a little arch and polished, just a smidgen of The Commitments in them.

Still, coming out in the year of the miners strike as Thatcher's talons dug into the fabric of society, anything that proclaimed compassion with passion was welcome.

Tucked away on that extra single, Easter Parade is a world apart from the mainstay of their brass-augmented soul kick. Clearly written for just one acoustic guitar, it's propelled by Billy Franks' driven sincerity and - quite an achievement for the mid-80s - is given a subtle and haunting production job, doing justice to its subject, the six week long Falklands War of 1982.

It tells the story from the perspective of a soldier and, unusually for lefties of the time, it has sympathy not only with his injuries but also with him being there in the first place.

Dressed to kill one cool spring morning
Got on board the first from Portsmouth
On the crest of a rising wave
Of hate for strangers of our own kind
But the headlines, cheering crowds and flags
I must admit stirred something in me
That faded as we pulled away
And turned out to be only fear disguised

The bulldogs bayed
The pious prayed
I think it rained
On the Easter Parade

Down south the old and desperate men
Sacrifice the young and ready
On the altar of their crumbling gods
Mourning for a long-lost glory
For nineteen years you chart my life
With your morals and your incentives
In six weeks pull it all apart
For horror's real and you are far away

My mind ingrained
I came home maimed
So was kept away
From the Easter Parade

Hooked on a kind of freedom
I still need to hurt somebody
Too estranged to talk about it
Or get close to anyone

The mother of the nation cries 'Rejoice!'
And I can hardly shuffle
Struck down by what the mean can do
For political ambition
And now the truth begins to surface
Like a spectre from dark water
Rising up to bring them down
I can't take heart, only wonder why

Is our conscience lame
Is a fall to shame
All to be gained
From the Easter Parade

= = =

'The headlines, cheering crowds and flags I must admit stirred something in me'

As the ships sailed from Portsmouth for the Falklands there were vast crowds of union jack waving crowds. In these times of the ongoing unpopular wars of occupation, it's hard for people to realise how much we were still in thrall to jingoistic flag-waving bullshit back then. These days, saved for occasions like the football, it's lost much of its arrogant imperialist overtones.

It's surprising how the atmosphere has changed in a relatively short time. 1982 was only five years since the queen's silver jubilee, an occasion marked by public holidays and everything. I know of people who grew up in fervent Welsh nationalist households who still had a street party with red whit and blue bunting.

Yet look how underwhelming the celebrations for the golden jubilee were in 2002. Anyone over the age of five in 1977 remembers the silver jubilee, yet none of us can remember anything about the golden jubilee without looking it up.

As Thatcher talked to the press when the Argentinian forces had surrendered, you can hear the crowd in the background singing Rule Brittania.

That refrain 'rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves, Britons never never never shall be slaves' has a much more sinister meaning than first appears. Written in 1740 as the slave trade was peaking, with Britain the foremost slave-trading nation, it is not a song about our liberation. It is a song that declares our superiority over all others and that we shall never suffer the kind of slavery that we inflict.

'The mother of the nation cries 'rejoice!' and I can hardly shuffle'

On 26 April 1982 Thatcher stood outside 10 Downing Street as the Defence Secretary announced the recapture of South Georgia. Afterwards, she refused to answer questions, telling the press to just 'rejoice at that news'.

'I came home maimed so was kept away from the Easter Parade'

The jaw-dropping cynicism of Thatcher's victory parade still angers me today. It was to be an overtly jingoistic celebration. Troops who had fought were to march along with their bayonets fixed and buttons gleaming. Except the ones who'd come home with unsightly injuries. They - the ones who'd given the most for the cause - weren't invited in case they spoilt the jubilation with the horror of truth. After a media furore, some were belatedly asked along.

There are still resonances now. Even though we no longer have so much patriotic poppycock about our wars, we are manipulated. The American government makes sure their electorate don't get too riled by what happens to their troops. Just as Thatcher barred maimed Falklands veterans, there are no pictures allowed of American coffins and bodybags coming home from Iraq. Around a third of American troops in Iraq aren't American at all, they're foreigners who will get fast-tracked for American citizenship if they come back alive, thus reducing the pressure on American public opinion.

Timed for the autumn before a general election, the Falklands victory parade pushed Thatcher's popularity higher. It was calculated to do so - she took the salute of the troops, a job normally reserved for royalty.

The Labour party had just split (four senior members setting up the Social Democratic Party, which eventually merged with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats), and with it the Labour vote was divided. Thus a prime minister who came to power on a ticket of law and order and lowering unemployment yet presided over the worst rioting in living memory and a trebling of the number of jobless managed to get re-elected with the biggest landslide in 40 years.

Labour's bold manifesto - unilateral nuclear disarmament, nationalise the banks, abolish the House of Lords - and the fact that, in Michael Foot, they had the most untelegenic leader imaginable was blamed for their defeat, rather than the war and the fucking SDP.

A dashing charismatic young Labour candidate who entered parliament on that manifesto would sweep to power in 1997 on a pro-Trident pro-privatisation ticket. His successor entered parliament at that same election, and whilst he's done a little nationalising of banks under duress, he's still yet to make good on the promised House of Lords reform.

The musical lift into the bridge of the song ('hooked on a kind of freedom...') still catches the pit of my stomach every time like a rollercoaster, which is fitting for the words that allude to the personal disconnection, to what was then only just starting to have a name as post-traumatic stress disorder.

'And now the truth begins to surface like a spectre from dark water'

On 2nd May 1982 the Argentine ship Belgrano was sunk, killing over 300 men, around a third of the total killed in the war. The ship was outside the 200 mile exclusion zone around the Falklands and was sailing away at the time. In July 1984 a senior civil servant leaked documents proving the government knew this, and the ship had been spotted a day earlier than claimed.

The civil servant, Clive Ponting, was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. His defence was that it was in the public interest to know the truth. The judged begged to differ, telling the jury 'the public interest is what the government of the day says it is'. Despite this the jury - being the public rather than the establishment - acquitted him. It was in this atmosphere that Faith Brothers frontman Billy Franks wrote Easter Parade.

Sadly, it was not the start of a flood of leaks on government lies, and Thatcher responded with a new Official Secrets Act that doesn't have a 'public interest' defence.

Truths still come out occasionally, though. In 2003 the government finally admitted that nuclear weapons had been on warships in the Falklands.

Clive Ponting resigned from the civil service and became an academic and a history author, writing a number of books including a critical biography of Winston Churchill and the classic Green History of The World, recently revised and expanded as A New Green History of the World. Check out this excerpt, The Lessons of Easter Island.

Billy Franks has continued songwriting, seemingly as committed and passionate as ever.

download Easter Parade (5MB MP3)

Johnny Johnson & His Bandwagon - Mr Tambourine Man mp3

2009-01-08T13:52:00.001Z

Bell
BLL 1154
1971

Tony Macaulay was one of the great British bubblegum songwriters of the 60s and early 70s, but he was obviously in thrall to Motown and usually put a dose of soul in the mix to leaven the sweetness.

His first major hit - he was only 23 and had written the song two years earlier - was Baby Now That I've Found You by The Foundations, and then a year later Build Me Up Buttercup. In between there were a couple of singles you're less likely to have heard of, of which I strongly recommend Back On My Feet Again, another sunny stomper cut from the same cloth as the biggies.

He wrote a bunch of other singles in the same wide-eyed catchy bouncy vein usually recorded by non-existent bands such as Edison Lighthouse's Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes.

Meanwhile, at the same time as Build Me Up Buttercup, there was a punchy pop-soul band called The Bandwagon in the charts with Breakin' Down The Walls of Heartache. Subsequently something of a northern soul staple and covered by Dexys Midnight Runners on the B-side of Geno, this corker was released on the CBS imprint Direction.

You just know from the name and artwork that the label's a winner. Any time you see a single on Direction, unless it's a piece of Sly Stone perfection, it's something you've never heard of. And yet, if you like the tang of some later northern soul urgency, it rarely disappoints. If you come across anything on Direction, always give it the benefit of the doubt and buy it.

The talents collided in Love Grows' year 1970 with Macaulay writing and producing the (now 'Johnny Johnson and His...') Bandwagon hits Sweet Inspiration and Blame It On The Pony Express as the flagship singles for the Soul Survivor album.

The following year there was this single. You've got a real soul band and a bubblegum producer at the helm, so whether you're thinking Byrds or Bringing It all Back Home it's a scarcely recognisable version of Mr Tambourine Man. Bright, bouncy, brilliant and a bit baffling, it's a fabulous little corner of pop weirdness.

Later in the 70s Macaulay teamed up with another British bubblegum mainstay, Roger Greenaway, to do You’re More Than a Number in My Little Red Book and Kissin’ in the Back Row of The Movies for the Drifters.

Then he swapped soul for Soul, writing and producing Don't Give Up On Us, Silver Lady and other fucking awful sickly syrupy shite for the Starskyless Hutch gone dewy-eyed romance singer David Soul. They sold gazillions and clutter up charity shops to this day.

download Mr Tambourine Man (4.4MB MP3)

Millie - My Boy Lollipop (German) mp3

2008-11-07T12:06:00.000Z

Fontana (Germany)
267376TF
1964

Millie Small recorded a load of stuff (including one of only two Nick Drake covers recorded during his lifetime, an inexplicable take on Mayfair), but it's this utterly perfect two minutes that she'll always be best known for.

It's the song that brought ska to global attention, a delightful skippy groove with a harsh slap of a production.

When I'm DJing I keep My Boy Lollipop and Superstition separate and always visible. If ever I paint myself into a corner or summat's floundering and flagging, I throw either of them on. They set themselves completely apart from any tune you may have just played, and they are utterly incendiary to a dancefloor.

This isn't the version you know, mind. It is, as the sleeve proudly proclaims, the Deutsche Originalaufnahme.

Unlike others who sang versions of songs entirely in German, Millie veers randomly between that language and her native English. This, though, only serves to make it all the weirder.

Corker.

download My Boy Lollipop (German version) (2.9MB MP3)

The Wasters - Accept My Love & Don't Stop mp3

2008-10-26T17:41:00.001Z

Uni (USA)
55148
1969

I know absolutely nothing about this band, but what does that matter when the music is sooooo good?

They have a mix of early 60s sweet soul vocals with a late 60s warmth underneath, something about the way bass amps have been invented bringing proper bottom end on to records, but there's much more, a gorgeous summery sweep with outstretched arms that exalt and uplift.

Although the vocals do remind me of early Smokey Robinson and even earlier rich romantic doo-wop groups like the Five Satins, there's also another foot in the Stylistics-style 70s soul.

Accept My Love is a melty ballad that swoons and languidly sparkles, but the one that really really gets me is the flip, Don't Stop. You wouldn't believe how many times in a row I get compelled to play this sucker.

Loose wah-twangs droop and snag around a brass punch and a gossamer funky beat, late 60s Northern Soul at its irresistible best. Turn it up and let your feet show you what they were made for.

download Accept My Love (3.5MB MP3)

download Don't Stop (4MB MP3)

Little Stevie Wonder - Workout Stevie Workout mp3

2008-09-07T14:52:00.001+01:00

Tamla (USA)
TAMLA 54086
1963

I remain profoundly and, in all likelihood, immovably unconvinced by the freemarketeering pro-nuclear corn ethanol salesman Barack Obama. Anyone who can say 'clean coal' with a straight face is not to be trusted on anything.

But seeing Stevie Wonder singing Obama's name, though. Before I saw that I didn't think anything could ever persuade me to step into the ring and be the puppet of ecocidal vested interests. Now, however, I totally get why Obama's up for it and suspect that in his position I'd go for it too.

Just imagine it, only with Stevie Wonder singing your name.

.

Even allowing for the tracksuit misjudgement, tell me this wouldn't do it for you too;

Those, though, are as nowt. Check out Superstition on Sesame Street.

It's the song as we know it but with - is it possible? - even more funk. Then it goes into an uber-funky jam for two minutes, then a false ending. Then - you fucking what? - a minute of Stevie singing 'Sesame Street'! Over Superstition!

Bear in mind that, ten years into a career of classics, the guy was only 22 or 23 here; he has the kudos, the track record, the long-term immersion in music that make it seem to be something he breathes. Set free from the bonds of this earth, he's adrift in funk heaven. At the same age 'young' pop stars like Noel Gallagher and Morten Harket were still years away from making their first records.

But it's way back to the start we're going to go now. As Little Stevie Wonder, he released his first single in 1962 aged 12. Already he was good enough to not only sing but play drums on it too.

The breakthrough came the following year with the storming live single Fingertips Part 2 (Marvin Gaye on drums that time), a spontaneous freakout that sounded like a James Brown's band squirting gospel as they fell down a stairwell.

The follow-up was this equally frenetic riproaring gospel swirl, Workout Stevie Workout. It's an irresistably joyous, contagious, uplifting soulful geyser to bounce you round the room.

download Workout Stevie Workout (3.9MB MP3)

Immaculate Fools - Immaculate Fools mp3

2008-08-21T18:34:00.006+01:00

A&M
AM227
1985

Belle and Sebastian. The Selecter. Living In A Box. Slowdive. Tin Machine. Talk Talk. The Colour Field. Goodbye Mr MacKenzie. Madness.

The list of bands with eponymous songs is an unsurprisingly short one. I suppose Big Country almost got there with In A Big Country, and Dexy's had an oblique stab at it with Kevin Rowland's Band.

It's surely a tougher thing to do when you're a solo artist, so kudos to Bo Diddley and two other nearly-made-its, Julian Cope's Julian H Cope (his middle name's actually David) and Mr Jeays by Philip Jeays, a songwriter and performer whose talent is only matched by his gobsmackingly inexplicable obscurity.

Anyway, in 1985 there was this proper eponysong, Immaculate Fools. They appeared out of nowhere and had the smell of a serious wedge of record company loot behind them. Production by Colin Thurston (Duran Duran, Magazine, Human League) and mixing by the legendary Glyn Johns (Beatles, Stones, Who, Zeppelin, you name it). Beyond the big name techies there was the real mid-80s sign of a Big Hype, the double pack 7 inch.

They were another of those bands who, like Bauhaus, Tubeway Army or Psychedelic Furs, made something decent out of having plainly spent their adolescence obsessing over Bowie. This may even have been a reason they went with producer Thurston. He was, with Bowie and Iggy Pop, one of the 'Bewlay Brothers' team that produced Lust For Life.

The song is a glorious pop swooner. The way it just rolls in from the intro, the stately glide, a little arty and knowing, somehow simultaneously contrived and effortless, graceful and swaggering, and a chorus that sticks in your head for days.

There is a video on Youtube, but I'd recommend just listening first. They look soooo 80s. Floppy fringe? Check. Waistcoats? Check. Mullets, too many tom-toms, big glasses, peroxide? Yep, all there. It distracts from the real worth here, the richness of tone, the way the dry English voice cuts over the warm, woody soar of the chorus.

It scraped to number 51 in the charts, no other hits. A one-hit wonder I bought at the time and know very little about, but it still sounds great today and more people should hear it. Now that's what doing an MP3 blog's all about.

The back cover warns me that home taping is killing music and it's illegal.

It's also anachronistic. Don't tape this track, help yourself to the MP3 instead.

download Immaculate Fools (6.2MB MP3)

The Flaming Ember - Westbound No.9 mp3

2008-07-25T19:37:00.003+01:00

Hot Wax (USA)
HS7003
1969

Holland-Dozier-Holland were the powerhouse songwriting team at Motown. Dozens and dozens of the finest soul and pop songs you'll ever hear. Reach Out I'll Be There, Where Did Our Love Go, This Old Heart Of Mine, You Can't Hurry Love, and one I've had on repeat play recently, Baby I Need Your Loving.

By 1967 they felt they weren't getting a chunky enough cut of the Motown financial pie. Failing to get redress, they left the label. Motown pointed out that they were under contract until the early 70s and couldn't write anywhere else.

Holland-Dozier-Holland started their own labels, Invictus and Hot Wax. They were just producing, you understand. Not writing, no, because that wouldn't be legal. Instead, song after wonderful song was being written by a mysterious team called Ronald Dunbar and Edith Wayne.

You know that gradual yet total way that Elton John went from supposedly straight and married to out and proud? Well over the years denial has morphed into complete acceptance that Dunbar-Wayne is Holland-Dozier-Holland.

Oddly, their performers overlapped with Motown a fair bit. Their first signing, 100 Proof Aged in Soul, featured Joe Stubbs, ex-Contour and brother of the mighty Levi.

Soon they got an established Detroit band, the Flaming Ember. They'd released half a dozen singles on the great soul label Ric-Tic but when Motown bought up the label the band got dropped, and Motown's former employees stepped forward to catch them.

This single's got that fabulous sharp twangy distorted guitar like on Behind A Painted Smile (the thing Edwyn Collins appropriated for A Girl Like You), it's got a dose of that late 60s/early 70s soul thing for gritty social description and a sticky catchy chorus, all belted out by a great gutsy voice.

I've done it again; misheard a white record for a black one. And, again, I'm not alone. Flaming Ember bassist Jim Bugnel says

Eddie Holland held off releasing our Westbound No. 9 Album in L.A. because there were two black stations in L.A. that would not play songs by white artists, so he waited until Westbound No. 9 hit No.1 on those stations and then he released the album in Los Angeles and booked us on Bandstand.

There's a lot more of this post-Motown Holland-Dozier-Holland that's worth checking out. I'm presuming you know already Freda Payne's belter Band Of Gold (but maybe didn't know it was Holland-Dozier-Holland).

Chairmen of The Board did some wonderful singles (check out Give Me Just A Little More Time, Everything's Tuesday) and then they, like so many of their contemporaries, got the funk (go get their version of Sly Stone's Life & Death). Now it was time to step into the funk-light, and no less a funkadeity than Parliament released their first album on Invictus.

This MP3, though, is from a very specific point in soul history as the gloss of the 60s has peeled away and yet the dirt of funk is yet to be revealed.

download Westbound #9 (4.9MB MP3)

Teardrop Explodes - Traison (C'est Juste Une Histoire) mp3

2008-07-17T13:27:00.003+01:00

Mercury
TEAR312
1981

And those foreign language versions just keep on coming.

Today I discovered what is already one of my favourite MP3 blogs Crying All the Way To The Chip Shop - superb writing and equally good choice of eclectic tunes - and because its recently posted a Teardrop Explodes track, I feel moved to post one too.

By 1981 Julian Cope had already made one or two weird corners in his back catalogue, and on the B-side of the 12 inch of Treason he made another, re-recording the vocal in French for no apparent reason. At least with the Motown ones they presumably were made for a purpose, to sell better in places that spoke the language.

This track, though, registers low on the Cope scale of weirdness, compared to stuff like the LAMF 'ambient metal' album, or forming a band called Queen Elizabeth and calling the second album Queen Elizabeth 2 - Elizabeth Vagina, or his 1999 CD Odin; one track, 73 minutes and 42 seconds of him going aaaaaawwwwwwwhhhhmmmmm.

I'm guessing you wouldn't want to listen to that one very much, so I'm sticking with Traison (C'est Juste Une Histoire).

download Traison (C'est Juste un Histoire) (4.2MB MP3)

If you don't already know it, check out Cope's website. It's a lot more than the usual biog and merchandise. The man himself has a lot of personal input - there's a monthly Address Drudion piece as well as his album of the month review. But there's a lot more beyond too, with the Unsung section of album reviews posted by anyone, the Modern Antiquarian featuring a gazeteer of over 3,000 stone circles and ancient sites, and the political bit that I helm, U-Know.

Four Tops - Gira Gira & Piangono Gli Uomini mp3

2008-07-09T16:12:00.001+01:00

Tamla Motown (Italy)
TM8023
1967

Time for another foreign language version. Two, actually.

Motown did quite a lot of these. The Supremes' Where Did Our Love go becoming Wo Ist Unsere Liebe for the German market, the Velvelettes francophonically turning As Long As I Know He's Mine into Puisque Je Sais Qu'il Est Moi, and Martha and the Vandellas blueprint for Town Called Malice, I'm Ready For Love, became the Spanish single Yo Necesito De Tu Amor.

The Temptations did My Girl both in German (although calling it Mein Girl was kind of cheating) and in Motown's second language, Italian. The lightness and delicacy of that song somehow makes it one of the funniest to hear in a different language.

But my favourites are these, a great Italian 45 with Gira Gira (Reach Out I'll Be There) and Piangono Gli Uomini (I Can't Help Myself).

Levi Stubbs' great aching yawp is one of the most affecting things ever recorded. Such power and pleading, such a cry, such soul.

So hearing him apply that to what you're sure must be a phonetic lyric sheet that he doesn't understand is just brilliant.

download Gira Gira [Reach Out I'll Be There - Italian] (4.3MB MP3)

download Piangono Gli Uomini [I Can't Help Myself - Italian] (3.9MB MP3)

The Dovells - You Can't Sit Down mp3

2008-06-12T23:02:00.003+01:00

Parkway
P867
1963

I bought this single not knowing anything about the group, but just from listening to the first minute and being blown away. I love the way it bursts into life, no slow intro or gradual build-up but a flying kick to the head before you've had any warning. It's a rip-roaring early 60s beat freakout, but who were the band?

I hadn't consciously thought about it, but I presumed they were a black group. Evidently so did a lot of people listening to American radio in the 60s, and this band of white cleancuts would play more black venues than white, including shows at the Apollo and with Ray Charles.

It wasn't necessarily the vocal sound that made me think it wasn't a white record so much as the looseness and kinetic energy of the track.

The very early 60s was a strange time, as rock n roll's first thunder rolled away and diminished and the world was unknowingly waiting for the Beatles to rejuvenate everything. Into the void stepped a lot of twee and sanitised Connie Francis pop, the sort of thing Radio 2 still loves to play in the daytime.

There were also a lot of dance-craze records. As a generation of white folks emerged who'd grown up with rock n roll, they came out on to the dance floor. It was still unknown territory so they needed a bit of instruction, hence records came out that would have specific moves. It also regulated rock n roll dancing and thereby made it less threatening. There was the Hitch-Hike, the Twist, the Watusi, the Mashed Potato, the Stomp and loads more.

And then once there was a hit record, every artist desperate for a hit - and not caring about much creative worth or any long-term prospects - would jump the bandwagon and do a new tune about the dance, telling us how all the kids love doing this all night long.

The Dovells were labelmates with Chubby Checker, whose The Twist had started the biggest dance craze of them all (even though his version was in fact a cover of a Hank Ballard track).

You name it, some bugger twisted it; Florida Twist, Peppermint Twist, Spanish Twist, everybody Twisting The Night Away even though Mama Don't Allow No Twistin'.

Oddly, that general 'sequels are never better' rule is bucked, and two of the best twist records are bandwagon jumpers, Twist and Shout and Chubby Checker's own Let's Twist Again (on which, incidentally, the uncredited backing singers are the Dovells).

Even though these were as unashamedly commercial as a toy given away with a Happy Meal, some of the tracks are genuinely great. As Julian Cope pointed out, the funny thing about rock n roll as an art form is that anyone can make it work; paradoxically, a facsimile of rock n roll is usually the real thing.

The Dovells grabbed on to the stomp bandwagon in late 1961 with The Bristol Stomp. Check out this vintage performance. Despite the suits and ties, the shit-eating grins and the hilariously sedate audience (I can laugh for hours watching a loop of the bit from 0.32 to 0.37), there is some real pace and verve. There's this thin veneer of corny choreography struggling to cover the volatile bubbling youth energy. They just don't stop moving, it reminds me of footage of the Two Tone bands.

See what I mean?

By the way, they claim that 'the kids in Bristol are sharp as a pistol when they do the Bristol Stomp'. Does this mean the kids are rather blunt then? I mean, pistols can be pointy at best, but hardly sharp.

Whatever, that fizzing energy really burst through on You Can't Sit Down, everything good in them to the fore with a real wildness, jittering, pounding and then exploding, a contagious sense of raucous party that propels you skywards. It's one of those records that could be issued to hospitals - if a patient doesn't start dancing to this then it's time to pronounce them clinically dead.

The Dovells' lead singer and - when they took the occasional break from cover versions - main songwriter Leonard Borisoff quit in late 1963, and then came back in 65 with an utterly brilliant solo single. As Len Barry, he wrote and recorded 1-2-3.

I've known and loved that record since I was a teenager but, yet again, I'd not thought about it but sort of just presumed it was a black singer. It ranks right up alongside any mid-60s Motown and soul you can find, great production and even though it's a song of devotion there's such a gorgeous melancholic edge to his voice.

Motown also thought it was like their stuff. Specifically, they thought it was like Ask Any Girl, the B-side of the Supremes' Baby Love. Barry denied it, but Motown sued and the courts thought Motown were half right and split the royalties.

There is one bit you can spot, the chords dropping after the title's said, but really it was a bit harsh to have Motown trousering half the money. I find little sense in a world that takes royalties from 1-2-3 and My Sweet Lord but leaves Noel Gallagher alone despite using All The Young Dudes for not one but two big-earning hit singles (Stand By Me and Don't Look Back in Anger).

If you haven't already got it, go and get Len Barry's 1-2-3.

Meantime, roll back the carpet, get ready to air-sax and stick this one on.

download You Can't Sit Down (3.4MB MP3)

Roddy Frame & Edwyn Collins - Consolation Prize mp3

2008-05-15T22:38:00.002+01:00

WEA
YZ521CD
1990

Paul Weller said he split The Jam because they'd become too big to make a difference. It sounds a bit odd until you think it through. He'd hit a level where normal life was impossible, where there were a small army of people dependent on him for a job and, worst, where fans adored anything he did simply because it was him. If he'd released an album of him reading Benny Hill scripts it would've sold shitloads.

So I think good fortune comes not with being a megastar, but in having the space to really explore and express. That means a certain level of commercial success, but still an ability to walk down the street unnoticed so you're still in the real world, and nobody wanting you to do a record just like your last one.

However, being so unnoticed can mean you get one hit and for the rest of your life everyone wants you to sing that one song to them. Marc Almond's autobiography starts off with yet another cabbie calling his wife saying 'you'll never guess who I've got in the back' and making him sing Tainted Love.

How much worse it must be when the one everyone knows you for is, like Tainted Love, a cover, or some novelty nonsense. Consider Jeff Beck's prowess and then the fact that Hi Ho Silver Lining is his best selling record.

Occasionally, fate is fairer and the one hit is representative. The Church's Under The Milky Way is a case in point, and so was Aztec Camera's Oblivious. Sparkling, sensitive, a mysterious lyrical swirl curling round some soaring and unfeasibly complex jubilant intelligent acoustic guitar driven pop.

That sanity protection lower level of fame can perhaps be assisted a little by hiding behind a band name. Like Matt Johnson's The The, Aztec Camera is just Roddy Frame and whoever's with him, or like Mark E Smith put it, 'if it's me and your gran on bongos, it's The Fall'.

When he was 16, Roddy left school at Easter without taking exams because he already had a record deal lined up with legendary Glasgow indie label Postcard. Releasing beautiful songs with that trademark intricate guitar playing and a bracing freshness that he'd written himself. And he was dead good looking too.

There's just no justifying all that, is there? You can explain away something that comes to you from luck, or the fruits of hard work, but sheer talent has no excuse at all.

A jump to Rough Trade for an album, then a major label deal followed and a big world tour. And he was still only 19.

A couple of years later he was back with the Love album, a bit laden with late 80s polish, whose first two singles - including the wonderful How Men Are - slow burned into the lower end of the charts. Then came his second stab at being a one-hit wonder, the monster hit and soundtrack of summer 1988, Somewhere In My Heart.

So a lot was expected of the next album, Stray. Creatively it delivered, commercially it didn't.

Second single was Good Morning Britain. It gave a verse each to the four nations of the UK and their tribulations. Scotland and its suffering at the hands of Thatcher (they got the poll tax earlier than the rest of us) and new prisons (a fine use of money saved by cutting health and education spending), and getting the backhanded accolade of European Capital of Culture. Northern Ireland and the Troubles; Wales and the housing crisis caused by large numbers of English people buying second homes but the dream that then Labour leader Neil Kinnock would displace Thatcher (any port in a storm, I suppose). England and its institutionalised violent bigotry.

Yet the whole thing was interspersed with a chorus that said the shame of the past is easily discarded and held a bright hope for the future, culminating in a key change for the final verse that declared love is international and you've got to give what you can; you don't fight to win, you fight because there's things worth fighting for.

Frame said the song was written in honour of Mick Jones and the Clash, and indeed it sounds a lot like Big Audio Dynamite and features Mick himself. The last line is 'worry about it later', lifted from Complete Control (while I mention that, check out this hilarious mishearing).

Frame was clearly very proud to have worked with his hero, crediting the record to Aztec Camera and Mick Jones, and having a picture of the two of them on stage on the cover.

I saw three gigs on the tour. At Liverpool, Jones came on for the encore to do a couple of songs.

A week later in London, he was on for a good half dozen.

By the last night of the tour, a glorious hometown Saturday night in Glasgow, Jones came on for half the gig.

It was the early 90s and a hideous hybrid was occurring in the music industry. It was still 80s enough that remixes were shitty, repetitive, clumsy affairs, but dance music culture had become widespread enough to make people do multiple remixes of the same track (anyone else get the Chilli Peppers' Give It Away? Sheesh).

The 12 inch of Good Morning Britain features three mixes. The CD has a further two but, mercifully, it also had two live tracks taken from that effervescent last night of the tour. One was, unsurprisingly, Good Morning Britain. The other was something really special.

In the encore Roddy had got his companero and old Postcard labelmate Edwyn Collins out. Edwyn inexplicably wore a big furry hat, and the euphoric night - end of the tour, home town, audience really vibing - combined with their clear affection for one another as they performed Consolation Prize, a song from Orange Juice's debut album.

That lovelorn literate wit that we too often think of as being a Morrissey invention is already there, in 1982, coming out of Collins' pen.

A thousand violins will play for you
While you sit and roll your deep blue eyes
A thousand to win, a thousand you lose
But I'll be your consolation prize
All you do is sigh

I wore my fringe like Roger McGuinn's
I wore it hoping to impress
So frightfully camp, it made you laugh
Tomorrow I'll buy myself a dress
So ludicrous

I don't mean to pry, but didn't that guy
Crumple up your face a thousand times?
He made you cry

I'll be your consolation prize
Although I know
I'll never be man enough for you

The two men alternating verses, doing call and response and both enjoying the strum and roll of the guitars, it's warm, funny, and touching.

Even then, Collins felt like an elder statesman, early 80s indie so far back in time, yet he can only have been about 30. And Jones must've only been about 35, now I think about it, and he seemed like he was from properly far back in music history like Charlie Parker or Gustav Mahler or someone.

Three years ago Edwyn had a double stroke that left him unable to speak, read, write, walk or sit up. He has determinedly regained much of what he lost, and continues to improve. His memory has been severely impaired, as he explains

After my stroke I'd lost all the songs I ever wrote. I could recognise them as mine when I heard them on a stereo but I couldn't remember any lyrics. That took ages, writing them out and relearning all the phrasing.

Yet he did it. Far from being beaten or maudlin, in interviews he seems genuinely happy and keen to keep writing, with songs already written since the release of his new album. Furthermore, he's just finished a tour. Taking over on guitar was none other than Roddy Frame.

download Consolation Prize (live) (MB MP3)

Oh, while we're here, check out this fabulous picture from my Strawberry Switchblade site of Edwyn with Postcard founder Alan Horne and future Strawberry Switchblade guitarist Jill Bryson. It's 1981 and they're outside Postcard HQ in Glasgow.
[pic:Peter Mcarthur]

David Bellamy - Brontosaurus, Will You Wait For Me mp3

2008-05-03T23:56:00.002+01:00

MD
BWON1
1980

Ye gods! It turns out that The Dinosaur Record isn't the only time those songs got an outing.

There's this single from everyone's favourite climate change denier, hirsute TV naturalist (but not, as far as I know, a TV naturist), David Bellamy.

Led by squidgy 70s synths, Brontosaurus, Will You Wait For Me gives us Bellamy all over-excited and a tad forced-wacky, sort of like an adult trying to hide how much MDMA is still in their system as they have to amuse a toddler.

Flip the disc and we get O Stegosaurus. Eschewing the tender verse vocals of the Dinosaur Record's version, the bits between choruses feature Bellamy telling us some fun facts about Stegosaurii. Where they lived, when, how big they were (demolishing that 'half a mile long and ten feet tall' claim once and for all).

But, it's a Mike Croft composition. If we're not going to have a factual error about a triceratops inventing rock n roll or an 800 metre stegosaurus, what can we have instead?

Bellamy doesn't let us down. He tells us that stegosaurii were 'gentle monsters who always ate up their vegetables as they went about their everyday business in their own prehistoric world'.

The single is dated 1980, the same year as the album, so I don't know which came first. Did the single come first and then Mike Croft's own versions come later, much like Carole King kept us waiting for Tapestry before we got her own renditions of Natural Woman and Will You Love Me Tomorrow?

Or is it that the album came first and then Bellamy picked up on it, much like Aretha Franklin brought Otis Redding's Respect to greater prominence?

The cover (upon both sides of which original owner Susan Wooller has written her name - did she think people mightn't notice the first one, or was she expecting the cover to be torn asunder by a frenzied audience thus requiring her name on both halves?) says 'Dinosaur characters (Bron and Delilah) copyright of Dusty and The Dinosaurs'.

It turns out there's a 1982 book, Dusty and The Dinosaurs - Primeval Pop, by that same Mike Croft.

A book, an album, getting established stars to do the vocals? It's all gone a bit Jeff Wayne.

Then, like Thomas Pynchon, Croft kept us waiting. It was ten years before we saw the two sequels.

It was a heady time for Moses style two-tablet deliveries from major artists; almost as if it were planned, three of them were equally spaced over a year.

In September 1991 Guns n Roses simultaneously released Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II.

March 1992 saw Bruce Springsteen simultaneously release Lucky Town and Human Touch.

Then in September 1992 Mike Croft simultaneously published Dusty and the Dinosaurs - Drakula Island and Dusty and the Dinosaurs - Delilah's Rescue.

Proper music will return next post, promise.

download Brontosaurus Will You Wait For Me? (5.2MB MP3)
download O Stegosaurus (3.8MB MP3)

The Dinosaur Record

2008-04-28T23:17:00.002+01:00

Super Tempo
STMP 9017
1980

Several years back I was one of a team of committed audio monganauts called Radio Savage Houndy Beasty. We blagged space on the local student radio station and did some late night far out stuff, really abrasive challenging stuff, some really beautiful stuff, some blissed out dreamy soundscapes, spoken word comedy, lots of swearing, all powerfully fuelled by a big blue bong. Trawl the downloads if that intrigues you.

It felt like a band that jammed, but we used other peoples recordings as our instruments. Lots of sound effect records, samples and loops (where other people tend to pick good beats and breaks, we'd be more likely to have foghorns and washing machine noises), and a lot of crap records found in charity shops.

When I first saw The Dinosaur Record I presumed it'd be an album of stories or something. But it's actually ten twee anthropomorphic songs for children.

Written by a team of Mike Croft and Chris Croft, with backing vocals from Janine Croft, Rachel Croft and Emma Croft, it's clearly a family affair. Thank fuck for that, I'd hate to think anyone had paid kids who sing so badly out of tune.

Brontosaurus, Will You Wait For Me is a song about a child wanting a pet and finding a brontosaurus to whom the youngster implausibly asserts 'I could take you home, nobody would know'.

Our credulity is stretched even further in Triceratops Rock by the bold claim that 'the rocking triceratops invented the rock n roll'.

Reggae rhythms lope away under the lyrics of O Stegasaurus, which at least stays closer to the facts. Praising the animal's 'own special style', the singer laments not sharing a world with them. Describing himself as the 'biggest fan' of this particular dinosaur, we get somewhat unnerved by the declaration that it is 'lovelier than any man'.

And then, just unable to go a whole song without a ludicrous factual error, he describes it as being 'half a mile long and ten feet tall'.

The stegosaurus was in fact around 30 feet long and 14 feet tall, and looked like this.

If it were half a mile long and ten feet tall, it would look like this.

I'm sure you'll agree that, compared to other stegosaurii, that stegosaurus does indeed have its own special style.

The RSHB reworking of Brontosaurus Will You Wait For Me can be downloaded here, but frankly nothing can make you as baffled as the straightforward originals, one of the all-time great 'what the fuck?' albums.

As you'd expect from a record designed to be cared for by small children, there's a hell of a lot of crackle.

[MP3s deleted to make way for new ones. If you'd like me to send you them - via a transferbigfiles.com link so they don't overload your inbox - then leave your email address in the Comments]

Madness & Elvis Costello - Tomorrow's (Just Another Day) mp3

2008-03-11T01:37:00.002Z

Stiff
BUYIT169
1983

Abba. Everyone neatly summarises and dismisses them in their mind as garish pop with big bouncy choruses and lots of female-fronted twee tackiness. Shiny, shallow, samey.

Yet even the most cursory flick through their singles tells another story. There are several dark disco classics, the blokes get to sing one, there's another with reggae rhythm, and an ominous brooding six minute single with no chorus.

By the same token, Madness are often seen as cheery cockerney chappies, a sort of seven man Two Tone Tommy Steele. But even early on they tackled other things, the lyrics to Embarrassment dealing with mixed race unmarried parenthood, the elegant gossamer anti-tory Yesterday's Men, and numerous darker lyrics such as Grey Day and Tomorrow's (Just Another Day).

Which is where we find ourselves. The 12 inch featured one of those irritating 80s remixes, all n-n-n-n-nineteen stutters and superfluous sections of the bass and drums on their own. I'll not waste your time with that.

Flip it over though and there's this re-recording with Elvis Costello on vocals. The jazzy setting is perfect for Costello's plaintive-with a-hint-of-malevolent tone. It hangs uneasily and brings so much more out of the song than the proper version, really pulling forward the alienation and depression's paradoxical turmoil/drudgery blend that flows through the lyric.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

You don't really think of Madness as having weird corners to their output, yet this is the third one of theirs I've posted (the others were the Spanish version of One Step Beyond and Listen to Your Father).

Frank Wilson - Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) mp3

2008-02-22T02:06:00.002Z

SOUL
S35019
1965
never released

reissued in UK as Tamla Motown, TMG1170, 1979.
reissued again as Tamla Motown 982 153 2, year unknown (2004?)
reissued again (bootlegged?) as Soul, TMG1170, year unknown.

My copy, you'll not be surprised to learn, isn't an original. The last one of those to change hands went for £15,000.

This pressing mocks up the original label design, but uses the catalogue number of the 1979 UK reissue.

I first heard of this record reading Stuart Maconie's book Cider With Roadies, which chronicles his life growing up and the evolution of his marrow-deep love of music.

Whilst not having the profound spiritual depth of Nick Hornby's 31 Songs, nonetheless it's a deeply insightful piece of music writing. Few people can be so genuinely in love with popular music in all its forms that they really truly understand Gentle Giant, punk and Chic, and can explain to you exactly why.

Maconie also has a taste for the extremely experimental, and his weekly Freak Zone radio show is a must-hear. Which you can do not only on the radio but for a week afterwards online (at poorer quality; you can get a podcast of highlights).

He's also a very funny man, and I laughed out loud more times than there are pages in the book. Take this bit about Slade;

Noddy Holder was not, as I originally thought on hearing the phrase, some kind of bizarre Enid Blyton-related implement, but a jolly, worryingly raucous individual from Walsall. His trousers were generally too short, the better to display his 12-hole oxblood docs, the footwear of choice for the man about town with a great many heads to kick in.

He had a penchant for long multicoloured patchwork jackets of the sort favoured by Dr Who and Jesus' favourite stepdad Joseph, although there the similarities with leading religious figures ended. Like Gary Glitter he looked permanently, antagonisingly startled and he had adopted the aforementioned riotously verdant 'sidies' last seen on Jimmy 'Wacko' Edwards.

Best of all though was his hat. He nearly always sported a top hat with small circular mirrors attached. It was the kind of thing desperate mums make for their offspring just before fancy-dress parties when they have no clear idea what to send them as.

Amazingly, though, Noddy Holder was not the most ridiculously dressed person in Slade. That honour has to go to Dave Hill. Dave was the group's second guitarist and had a guitar that bore the legend Superyob. He usually wore a jumpsuit made of the foil that you baste turkeys in and platforms of oil-rig-derrick height. All of this though paled in comparison with his coiffure, a sort of demented tonsure with a great scooping fringe. He looked like a glam rock version of a medieval monk.

Noddy's co-writer in Slade was Jimmy Lea, now, amazingly, a psychotherapist. In 1973 the thought of being psychoanalysed by a member of Slade would have been hilarious and terrifying, rather like Liam Gallagher being Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The line up was completed by the brooding, taciturn drummer Don Powell. Not much to say here other than that, at the height of their fame, Powell was injured in a car crash and afterwards suffered bouts of short-term memory loss. I don't intend to make light of this but even then I used to wonder what it must have felt like to 'come to' in the middle of a set and realise, 'well, I'm obviously a drummer of some sort. Wait a minute, isn't that Noddy Hol- bloody hell, I'm in Slade!'

Anyway, Maconie was also a resident of Wigan in the early 70s. The chapter on the town's legendary soul scene included this description of

what is often regarded as the best and certainly the rarest Northern Soul tune, 'Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)', one copy in existence, current asking price £15,000. More important than the price, it is utterly wonderful.

If you want to know what the magic of Northern Soul is, get yourself a copy (it's readily available on CD compilations, only the vinyl is worth the price of a terraced house in Whitehaven) and allow yourself to be swept away by its life-affirming, luminous, lump-in-the-throat beauty and effervescence.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no ailment or depression so profound and weighty that two and a half minutes in the company of this fabulous tune won't lift and banish. Excuse me while I go and put it on.

You see why that sent me scurrying off to find it?

Wilson was a writer and producer who did a fair few records in the 60s but really hit a winning streak at the end of the decade and into the 70s, notably with the post-Diana Supremes. One of his songs for them, Stoned Love, is a corker in much the same vein as Do I Love You.

But in 1965 he had a dalliance with the idea of being a performer. Just the one single was made. It seems that a few hundred were pressed but it was never properly released. It was forgotten about until discovered in the 70s by Northern Soul fans in Britain.

As Nick Hornby points out in 31 Songs, Ian Dury's Reasons To Be Cheerful Part 3 is an amazing inventory of British traits. The line 'singalonga Smokey' may be about the American singer Smokey Robinson, but the British have always had a big love of black American music. We know we can't do it like them, but we really get what they do, it really speaks to us.

When the Stax Revue came over they were stunned to be mobbed at the airport and play a string of sold out concerts; this simply didn't happen to them anywhere else, not even back home. Even the standard term Northern Soul refers to that North of England scene in the early 70s.

To this day, old soul artists are amazed at the depth of knowledge and appreciation UK fans show compared with anyone else. Just the other week I heard Geno Washington on the radio making that point. No wonder it was British soul fans who discovered Do I Love You. We singalonga Smokey.

I've always loved Motown, and yet I'd kind of presumed that the classics were the best. It's a fair assumption. Anyone who's had a deep trawl through, say, first generation punk bands will know that there's a reason why we only know one song from Eddie and The Hot Rods or a couple from the Members but dozens from the Clash. It's cos the rest were shit.

Motown, however, is a case apart. Check out a compilation of Gladys Knight's Motown years and it's all killer no filler. Go a tad more obscure, get a Tammi Terrell and it's the same. And further it goes, into artists you've never heard of, until frankly if you did the maths Motown seem to have transgressed dimensional boundaries in the 1960s; there seem to be more hours of great Motown recordings than there were hours in the decade.

Then, if the released stuff wasn't enough, came the Motown Connoisseurs compilations. These were put together by Richard Searling, a Northern Soul legend whose credentials stretch as far back as being one of the original Wigan Casino DJs.

On Motown Connoisseurs Volume 1 there's a huge variety of Motown songs, all unreleased or painfully obscure, almost all of them as good as the classics that everybody knows. Volume 2 does more of the same, with the excruciating exception of a Four Tops track from the 80s.

However, Motown Connoisseurs Volume 1 featured Chris Clark's version of Do I Love You. Clark was Motown's first (and, for a long time, only) white signing. She possessed little of the charisma of her label mates and even less of their talent. Her version of Do I Love You is Wilson's backing track with Clark's anaemic voice failing to do it justice. It's like watching a wet tissue break over the front of a speeding train.

Searling then put together Northern Soul Connoisseurs. This has Frank Wilson's Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) on it. But it's a different version, a remake that lacks the urgency and effervescence of the single I've got. (It's quickly distinguished by the ad-lib "here's another thing I wanna say to you now" at about 0.58 just before the second verse).

In a further insult/injury interface, the recent reissue 45 (Tamla Motown 982 153 2) has Frank Wilson's inferior version backed with Chris Clark's!

The other week I was in a bookshop playing a top quality Motown compilation and there amongst all the tunes even your gran knows was Do I Love You, seemingly taking its place among the classics. But, again, it was the inferior version. This made me want to post the more yawping version here.

The single is a slightly shonky affair (hence my suspicion of it being a bootleg) and has endearingly/irritatingly missed off the first note. But three seconds in to the track you just don't care. You're off, soaring away on the greatest euphoric Motown stomper of them all.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Incidentally, Amazon do all those Connoisseurs albums for £3.33 each. If you're buying a £12 CD or DVD, it can be cheaper to buy one of these and qualify for free postage than to just buy your one item. Go get 'em!

Florence's Sad Song 45rpm & 33rpm mp3

2008-02-01T15:09:00.001Z

Music For Pleasure
FP10006
1972

A year or two back Dave Boulter and Stuart Staples of The Tindersticks did an album called Songs For The Young At Heart. They got an impressive range of guest vocalists in to sing songs remembered from childhood.

The dependably heart-squeezing voice of Cerys Matthews doing White Horses, The Go-Betweens' Robert Forster doing Uncle Sigmund's Clockwork Storybook, Puff The Magic Dragon by Bonnie Prince Billy (I can't ever get into using the quotemarks round his middle name, it feels too much like the way newspaper headlines denote allegation).

Jarvis Cocker does a reading of Marriot Edgar's poem The Lion and Albert, and the CD is packaged in a book with pages made of card like books for the under 5s. Stuart Murdoch from Belle and Sebastian does Florence's Sad Song from the feature length film of the Magic Roundabout, Dougal and The Blue Cat.

The Magic Roundabout. Fucking mad as you remember it being. Then there are the songs, words written and sung by narrator Eric Thompson (father of Emma).

Florence's Sad Song is about as depressing a song as you've ever heard, a hopeless emotionally blacked out lament with startling lyrical similarities to I Am A Rock; the singer rues ever having been trusting and open, and resolves to construct a permanent and impenetrable psychic barricade to keep others out.

Yet look what you get on the back, a drawing of the artists to colour in with crayons or paints. You don't get that with System Of A Down.

There is one thing that can make this black pit of a song go one darker. Play the fucker at 33rpm.

[MP3s deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Kool & The Gang - Celebramos mp3

2008-01-14T14:13:00.001Z

De-Lite
DEX2
1981

Been a while since I posted one of those foreign language versions, so here's Celebration sung in Spanish, from the B-side of the 12 inch of Take It to The Top.

It was a great day when I found this record. I'd just been to see The Church, one of my favourite bands ever, in Brighton. The Church have been going so long and inspire such fervent devotion that there's quite a community of those of us who go to all their UK gigs. I've not missed one in 20 years. There was a day off after Brighton before the London date so we were going to hang out by the sea.

I rang T when I woke up, and he was in a big record fair he'd found in one of the posh hotels on the seafront, so I met him there. I'd not been to one for years, since the days of trawling the live tapes for those early REM gigs. These days you don't get the acres of live bootlegs at record fairs.

Indeed, I wonder how they can keep going at all in an age of Ebay, Gemm and Netsounds. I wasn't the only one feeling there was something surprising about a concept that felt intrinsically anachronistic, but I'll come to that later.

I mooched around, half interested but a bit skint and frankly looking forward to the pub, when I found a stall with a box of 1960s soul 45s. Always something of a soul boy (my birthday party every year sees me DJing a five hour 60s soul set), in the last couple of years it's started deepening. I'm spending embarrassing amounts of money on vintage American singles. Go and find, say, Real Humdinger by JJ Barnes or You Can't Sit Down by the Dovells and you'll understand why.

There were loads and, as always, I'd not heard of most of them. Some I knew the artist but not the track, others I knew the label but not the artist. The stallholder, as any decent soul stallholder should, had a little record player with him. Fatal. There were a good 50 quid's worth that I fell for.

I went and asked T what I should do. He shall forevermore be held in the highest esteem, for he did what any good friend should. He took me out of the building. To the cashpoint to get out a chunky wedge that I couldn't really afford to spend, then into the pub for a swift pint to loosen my judgement and grease the hinges on my wallet, then back to the record fair.

I stood with him whittling the choices down a little. There was one tune, Out On The Floor by Dobie Gray, that gave me The Grin, that instant liftoff sensation hearing something so irresistably exuberant and uplifting, the feeling I got the first time I heard Do I Love You by Frank Wilson or The Tams' Be Young Be Foolish Be Happy. Worth the cost of everything by itself.

Feeling all pleased and excited, on the way out my eye was caught by an Everything A Pound box of 70s and 80s soul. I picked up Celebramos.

I love the it-is-but-it-isn't feeling of these foreign language versions, the seeing your mum with a nosejob effect of having the same very familiar backing track and voice but a different language.

Spanish was a common choice for many bands as the population of Spanish speaking countries who love Western pop is probably second only to English. Indeed, on Celebramos the lyric is clearly a sop to them with the numerous references to 'los Latinos' and a shoutout listing of assorted Central and South American countries.

Just as I'm paying a bloke comes up to me and says he's doing a study on why people still buy vinyl in the age of the MP3 player. We go off into a room and I fill out a questionnaire about what I've bought and why.

The one that sticks with me is 'If push comes to shove and you were only allowed to listen to one track for the rest of your life, what would it be?'. Apparently other people had problems with that. I didn't. Natural High by Bloodstone (but the original single version, not that one you get on the Jackie Brown soundtrack with the weird double length splice on the intro and the inexplicable unforgivable spell-breaking uptempo bit at the end). The sweetest, softest, most beautiful track ever, like sinking into a warm bath of chocolate duvets.

The guy wants a picture of me with one of my new acquisitions. I want to hold up a real classic, The Contours' Do You Love Me?, original American 7 inch on Gordy. But from a distance it'll just look like a single with a purple label. It's not the Gordy single but the gaudy single that he wants.

There is only one record I've bought with a picture cover. (You're way ahead of me here, aren't you?). A record I only really bought for a laugh, and cos it was cheap. A record that has some blokes looking like twattish 80s Scousers in their tacky tracksuits on the front.

So somewhere out there there's a picture, me being represented and this thing being the archetypal piece of my vinyl, the proudest purchase from a room of thousands of records. Sheesh.

There is, however, a certain neatness in the way that the 'why in the age of the MP3 player?' vinyl he asked me about ends up as your MP3.

[MP3 deleted to make room for new ones. Sorry!]

David Bowie & Bing Crosby - Peace on Earth / Little Drummer Boy

2007-11-23T19:43:00.001Z

RCA
BOWT12
1982

Wikipedia is hardly a reliable source to quote. If anything in it is remotely controversial then it gets attacked. My favourite was Tony Blair's entry saying 'Tony Blair spilled popcorn down his pyjamas last night'.

Still, if you need a quick grasp of something uncontroversial then it usually points the way.

Having railed against anti-rock n roll cardigan wearing singers in my last post, I'm forced to make an exception for Bing Crosby. His Wikipedia entry informs us

Crosby also exerted an important influence on the development of the postwar recording industry. In 1947 he invested US$50,000 in the Ampex company, which developed the world's first commercial reel-to-reel tape recorder, and Crosby became the first performer in the world to prerecord his radio shows and master his commercial recordings on magnetic tape. He gave one of the first Ampex Model 200 recorders to his friend, musician Les Paul, which led directly to Paul's invention of multitrack recording.

Bing is the butterfly that flapped its wings and caused the hurricane of popular music as we know and love it. It's distinctly possible that if there was no Bing, there'd be no multi-track recording, or at least it would have been developed later. Which would mean it wouldn't have tallied chronologically with, say, Brian Wilson's hermit urges or The Beatles' ingestion of LSD.

And talking of drug intake, how about Bing on the bong;

A 2001 biography of Crosby by Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins says that Louis Armstrong's influence on Bing "extended to his love of marijuana." Bing smoked it during his early career when it was legal and "surprised interviewers" in the 1960s and 70s by advocating its decriminalization, as did Armstrong. According to Giddins, Bing told his son Gary to stay away from alcohol ("It killed your mother") and suggested he smoke pot instead. Gary said, "There were other times when marijuana was mentioned and he'd get a smile on his face." Gary thought his father's pot smoking had influenced his easy-going style in his films.

There's a clear clash of drugs in the 1977 Bing and Bowie recording of Little Drummer Boy/Peace On Earth. Bowie, living atop a mountain of cocaine in Berlin with Iggy Pop, careers into Bing and his lifetime of weed.

Bing was recording a Christmas TV special. According to research done by Paul Farhi of the Washington Post,

The original plan had been for Bowie and Crosby to sing just "Little Drummer Boy." But "David came in and said: 'I hate this song. Is there something else I could sing?' " Fraser said. "We didn't know quite what to do."

Fraser, Kohan and Grossman left the set and found a piano in the studios' basement. In about 75 minutes, they wrote "Peace on Earth," an original tune, and worked out an arrangement that weaved together the two songs. Bowie and Crosby nailed the performance with less than an hour of rehearsal.

The duet was released as a single for Christmas 1982, but more, the limited 12 inch featured a peculiarly huge 6 inch label and the spoken preamble to the piece. It's absolutely mad.

It starts with the doorbell going, appropriately enough, 'bing bong'. Bowie asks if Bing's the butler, what happened to Hudson and if Sir Percival is around - I get the strong impression Bing played several roles in the show.

But then Bowie talks about having the usual Christmas 'presents, tree, decorations, agents sliding down the chimney'. There is no meaning to this, it's coked up paranoid weirdness.

Of course these days it's on YouTube. Imagine Bing's just docked out a bammie and press play.

Bowie then went a filmed an episode of Marc Bolan's TV show Marc. He did Heroes on both shows. In a peculiar kiss of death effect, both Bolan and Bing died before their shows were broadcast. Just what the paranoid, magick influenced, narcotic-basted Bowie needed. Imagine how much he quivered and clasped his hands to his head every time his agent called after that. Sadly, the offer from the Jim Davidson Show never came.

The Marc show performance, like all of human history, is also on YouTube. This time it's a specially recorded backing track as well as a live vocal. Imagine watching this in 77, having grown up on the outlandishness of Aladdin Sane and all that, and he's just standing there, no theatrics, normal hair, no make up, with a frankly pedestrian production on the track, somewhat idly delivering the lyric. Then he hits the second verse ('I will be king...') with such force, such a desperate cry in his voice.

Literally gave me tingles first time I watched it. You so see that he was making music he had to make at this point, it's got that artist using their art to figure themselves out feeling, like Woody Allen's criminally overlooked Stardust Memories.

Bowie has more bizarre corners to his career than any other major figure in music. Less than a year later he was releasing his narration of Prokofiev's Peter And The Wolf (which he really does start with 'are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin') and releasing Stage, a live album where all the tracks have been sequenced in their order of original release - why? - and there's a whole side of stuff from Low. A live version of the ambient Eno collaboration Warszawa! With crowds cheering! What the fuck is that about?

Meantime, let the onset of the festive season and this spaced oddity fusilli your mind.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]