Journal Live - Journal Culture Central

GP's Song of the Day: Lyle Lovett

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:09:49 +0000

Good God: look at Lyle Lovett's hair in the video for Walk Through The Bottomland - it's magnificent!

(A duet with Emmylou Harris must be a rite of passage for male country singers, I think: by my reckoning, Lyle Lovett joins Gram Parsons, Ryan Adams, Elvis Costello, John Denver, Neil Young and Willie Nelson to name but a few.)

GP's Song of the Day: The Strokes

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:02:46 +0000

When I tell you that I bought the first Strokes EP in a little record shop in Greenwich Village, it probably makes me sound a whole lot cooler than I really am.

Anyway, I did and splendid it was too. The Strokes went on to produce a great debut album, a decent follow-up and a not very good third album. Since then they seem to have been on hiatus, with most of them producing solo records.

But last week I was in a shop and heard Last Nite and remembered just how great it sounded.

GP's Song of the Day: Tom Waits (and Crystal Gayle)

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:17:38 +0000

In the early 1980s, film director Francis Ford Coppola was so inspired by a Tom Waits song (a duet with Bette Midler) that he decided to make a film around some of his music.

The result was One From the Heart, a film designed to be a small production after the excesses of Acopolypse Now but which went on to cost $26m and bankrupted Coppola after he insisted on filming it all on sound stages to create an air of artificiality.

The film itself is at best so-so, but there's some great Tom Waits songs on it. Midler wasn't available to do the music so Crystal Gayle did the female parts instead, with Take Me Home just the most beautiful song imaginable.

(Sorry, can't find an online version of the duet, but I have found Waits singing it on a TV show!)

GP's Song of the Day: Tracy Chapman

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:06:21 +0000

It seems odd that singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman seemed so revolutionary in 1988, but after a decade of overblown excess, a woman with an acoustic guitar was a refreshing change.

Fast Car was the song that (briefly) shot her to fame when she played it at the Nelson Mandela tribute concert.

More than 20 years on, it still seems like a great bit of storytelling (as well as a cracking tune.)

GP's Song of the Day: the Rolling Stones

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:13:40 +0000

I don't often do requests, but for a friend who spent her holidays re-acquainting herself with the Rolling Stones' Greatest Hits, here's Jumpin' Jack Flash.

(I am led to believe that he is a gas, gas, gas...)

GP's Song of the Day: Madonna

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:03:21 +0000

Best Madonna single of the century, anyone?

OK, that's not saying much but I'd put Celebration among her best work (some of which are celebrated in the accompanying video).

Cracking little pop song, I reckons.

GP's Song of the Day: Bruce Springsteen

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:48:07 +0000

I think by now we should all be agreed that Bruce Springsteen is completely marvellous.

I'll Work For Your Love is a relatively new song - from the Magic album of 2007 - but from its opening lines - "Pour me a drink Teresa in one of the glasses you dust off/And I'll watch the bones in your back like the stations of the cross" - it is an absolute classic.

I like this home video that someone has put on Youtube to accompany it. Someone has left the message: "Great video. The song matches perfectly. Does this Bruce Springsteen guy have any other good songs?"

Arf.

GP's Song of the Day: Altered Images

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:14:52 +0000

Last night I watched Gregory's Girl for about the 21st time. I do believe it to be the best film ever made.

The music in Gregory's Girl is a bit wretched but the film does feature the fabulous Claire Grogan before she formed Altered Images.

Here is their great song I Should Be Happy.

GP's Song of the Day: Patrick Swayze

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:46:41 +0000

No, honest. Patrick Swayze.

I don't often take requests, but for a mate who's a big Dirty Dancing fan, today's Song of the Day is She's Like The Wind.

As a song, it encapsulates pretty much everything that made the 1980s the decade that music forgot: it's overblown, silly and pompous and has saxaphones on it, for starters. Yet at the same time it's hard not to like it just a little, especially today.

Nobody puts Swayze in a corner.

GP's Song of the Day: Warren Zevon

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:45:53 +0000

Keep Me In Your Heart is the final song from the posthumous album of the great singer-songwriter Warren Zevon.

In that context, it's a bit heartbreaking. I particularly like the line "I'm tied to you than the buttons on your blouse" which seems all the more affecting for it's slight clumsiness.

I've mentioned this before, but Zevon was interviewed shortly before his untimely death in 2003 by David Letterman and had enough humour to be able to quip: " may have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years."

Asked on whether he had gained any insight into life and death, he said: "Enjoy every sandwich," which seems a pretty good epitath.

GP's Song of the Day: Bad Lieutenant

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:39:37 +0000

You probably have to listen to Sink or Swim by Bad Lieutenant for about, ooh, 26 seconds to know that it is the new band of New Order singer Bernard Sumner.

A bit less dancey and a bit more guitary than his previous band, it has that same sense of slightly melacholic melodicism and slightly rubbish lyrics. It is rather good, I think.

GP's song of the day: The Pogues

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:21:07 +0000

The rather excellent Word magazine has a monthly feature in which one page is given over to the 20 worst of a particular topic, with the 20 best over the page.

This month they're doing love songs and it's hard to argue with many of those chosen in the worst category (I Just Called To Say I Love You, More Than Words, Flying Without Wings - wretched songs one and all.)

There's some great ones in the best of list too, not least Rainy Night In Soho, a sometimes neglected Pogues bit of the Pogues' back catalogue described by Word as "Macgowan's real masterpiece, with all of his obsessions (London, booze, doomed love) collided amid a glorious string arrangement."

GP's song of the day: The Crystals

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:02:33 +0000

In honour of Ellie Greenwich - the great Brill Building songwriter who died recently - today's song is Da Doo Ron Ron by the Crystals.

Ellie Greenwich wrote a ton of classic songs in the 1960s for what would now be dismissed by some as "manufactured" pop bands. Among her most famous were Be My Baby (for The Ronettes), Leader of the Pack (The Shangri-Las) and Ike and Tina Turner's River Deep, Mountain High.

There is something utterly joyous about Da Doo Ron Ron, not least its nonsense refrain. It was written by Greenwich and her husband Jeff Barry, though producer Phil Spector also got a songwriting credit and it often said that Da Doo Ron Ron is where he first perfected his "Wall of Sound" style.

GP's Song of the Day: Mazzy Star

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 13:47:32 +0000

It seems unlikely, I know, but I'm pretty sure that Fade into You by Mazzy Star - a song whose loveliness is matched only by its obscurity - was used in a wedding scene on Coronation Street.

Mazzy Star were (are?) an American indie band in the 1990s and though Fade Into You was their biggest hit, it didn't make the Top 40 here or in America. It was pleasantly surprising, then, to hear it in the background of Steve McDonald's wedding to Becky on The Street.

No doubt Roy Cropper is a big fan...

GP's Song of the Day: Loudon Wainwright III

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:14:59 +0000

Further proof that no-one tells stories better than Loudon Wainwright III: the not quite three minutes of OGM are alternating devastating and hilarious.