It appears to be Friday again, which can only mean it’s time for another mix (yes, another one, stop groaning at the back!), and we’ve got a right mixed bag for you this week.
Yes, from the 80s disco-soul of Jocelyn Brown, a bit of Basement Jaxx for a Friday night (at least one person out there will get that reference), through the indie-guitar pop of The Soup Dragons and Girls At Our Best, through to the fantastically named Beyond the Wizard’s Sleeve via some shouty Swedish rock courtesy of Whale, some shouty Scottish indiepop from bis, some shouty Noo Yawk rap courtesy of the Beastie Boys, some not-very-shouty-at-all French dance dudes, a Bowie classic, Soulwax remixing The Chemical Brothers, a couple of other bits which just sounded good thrown in, and the long overdue return of Half Man Half Biscuit…you’re in for a fun 62:15 tonight, tomorrow, whenever you listen to it.
Half Man Half Biscuit – I Was A Teenage Armchair Honved Fan
The Chemical Brothers – Hey Boy, Hey Girl (Soulwax Remix)
Simian Mobile Disco – Hustler
Bedrock – For What You Dream Of
Dr Kucho! & Gregor Salto – Mr Martini
Phoenix – If I Ever Feel Better, I’ll Go To The Disco
Beyond the Wizards Sleeve – Don’t Cry Girl
I’ll be back tomorrow, with either the next part of my review of the Now… albums, maybe something a bit Eurovision-y, or maybe I’ll just have a bit of a Rant. We’ll see what kind of mood I’m in later once I’ve had me an end-of-week tipple.
I had to travel into the office in London today; on the way home, I checked to see what time I had scheduled tonight’s post for, only to find that, to my horror, I hadn’t written it last weekend as I thought I had.
So, I’m afraid this week, there’s no sleeve notes or tediously long preamble, because I’ve messed up and I don’t have time. Besides, you know how this works by now: it’s an hour of tunes, starting off slowly, some (hopefully) unexpected selections, the occasional link between songs (some more obvious than others), reintroducing some long-forgotten old buddies and throwing in more than one banger.
Which is a shame, because tonight is the 21st edition of Friday Night Music Club (if you ignore all of the additonal mixes) and I had wanted to mark the occasion appropriately, but that will have to keep for the next milestone, I guess.
Woo-hoo!
That’ll have to do.
So, here’s this week’s mixed bag of genre-jumping mixedness. I hope you enjoy it:
Tonight’s mix is not the one I had planned to post.
The one I had prepared was a little too upbeat for such a momentous weekend; whilst I personally won’t be joining in the nation’s mouring, I didn’t want to disrespect those that are.
And so I decided to create a mix “on the fly”; I decided what the first and last track would be, and then started recording as I journeyed from one to the other.
I tell you this instead of offering sleeve notes, as there will doubtless be those who think some of my selections are….disrespectful. That wasn’t the intention. The intention was simply to pick tunes which sounded good next to each other – any which may seem to have been chosen as some sort of comment on any recent high profile passings are entirely coincidental.
Honest.
So let’s crack on, shall we?
(By the way, because this mix is just shy of 2 hours, Google Drive can’t cope and won’t let me upload it, so the link below takes you to my old Soundcloud account. Hope it works ok!)
Happy to oblige. Here’s Volume 4 of the monster that was the 4th part of the original mix, if that make sense.
Last week, I said this: “Volume 4 clocked in at 4:41 minutes, so to make it to a round hour, I either had to add 20 minutes or lose 41. You can guess which of the two won, I think.”
And this week you’ll see how those fruits are born, with a load of tunes which weren’t in the original 4:41 mix, but which – I think, I hope – sit just beautifully amongst it all.
For example, there’s Air, Robbie and the Pet Shop Boys at the top of the mix, and at the end a majestic Greg Wilson mash-up of Massive Attack, The Rolling Stones and Amerie’s 1 Thing, the latter of which is grossly overlooked because a) it happened to be released at roughly the same time as Beyonce’s Crazy in Love, and b) it sounds not entirely dissimilar to Beyonce’s Crazy in Love.
And yes, when I say Robbie I mean Robbie Williams – deal with it.
Firstly, I wanted to do a mix unlike the Not Christmas one, which I thought strayed a bit too far into the territories of cheese or chart music. Whilst it served a purpose, it wasn’t really indicative of the sort of tunes which usually feature here.
This one, though is a corker, even if I do say so myself.
Regular readers may recall that way back in the late 1980s, I started DJ’ing at college because I was fed up with being able to guess what song the indie DJs would play next. So imagine my annoyance when my own brother told me that on a previous mix he’d been able to predict my next choice a couple of times. Grrr.
But this mix has proved to be such a pain to complete; when I came to do it today, it tells me that some of the tunes have been played 22 times, which gives you an idea of how many times I’ve tried to get this one right. Pretty much once a week, since Christmas.
What’s gone wrong all those times? Well, on more than one occasion professional pride kicked in: I’ve messed up a mix between tunes, so have elected to start again.
On more than one occasion, preoccupied with playing Solitaire or Candy Crush just to have something to do whilst recording the mix, there’s a sudden, irretrievable silence where the next record should be. Oops!
Once I forgot to stop recording until an hour later, and, triumphant at how the mixes had worked out, I couldn’t understand why the mix lasted over 5 hours, until I listened to it.
The other problem is booze. More than once, I’ve taken drink to such an extent that I’ve forgotten I was doing a mix until the silence after one record has finished hits home and startled me awake.
Last weekend, I got to the third record from the end, and suddenly woke up to silence and realised I’d messed up again. That’s not an indictment of the standard of the mix, by the way, more an example of how drunk I’d gotten.
Even last night, when I finally nailed it, it was my second attempt of the night, having got through most of the mix when I had a drink-spillage event, which I thought I’d sorted, until, four records from the end, suddenly the sound cut out whilst the tunes kept playing and I had no idea if it was still recording the sound or the sound of silence.
Anyway, we’ve got here, and this has been a real pain, so if you could take a listen, that would be great.
I will confess that I have broken the golden rule of not featuring the same act more than once in this mix; this wasn’t intentional, but as the various run-throughs progressed, I simply forgot said acts already appeared as “featuring” acts. One is deliberate. Sue me (Please don’t).
Time for the usual disclaimer: any glitches, skips or jumps are down to the software or the uploading/downloading process, and nothing to do with my limited mixing skills.
Oh, and the usual “effing and jeffing” warning applies; it seems I’m incapable of doing a mix which doesn’t include more than the occasional swear.
I’m not posting a link to download here, other than the one to Soundcloud, where you can either download or stream it.
I couldn’t be bothered with the last ones, but I’ve done it this time: you’ll see a list of all the acts featured in this mix at the bottom of the page, so you can check whether this one’s likely to be your cup of tea before going to the hassle of actually listening to it. If you’re particularly short of things to do, you can try to guess which song I’ve picked by which artist. There’s fun.
But by way of a description: pretty much all life is here, from indie rock to 60s California hippy-shtick, some Old Skool dance classics, some hip-hop and some soul classics via some Northern Soul belters via some TV show theme tunes (sort of); there’s some hoary old rock and some psychobilly, and a couple of tracks which should have featured in a New post by now, but the bands in question played the 6Music festival last weekend so you’ll probably know them intimately by now. And, of course, there’s The Fall.
Easy on the cheese this time, there’s even some poetry so we can all pretend we’re intellectual. You’ll have chance to dance, sit and recover for a few moments, before getting back on it again.
Available for a limited time (i.e. until I do the next one), you can download or stream this on Soundcloud here:
In all honesty, I’d intended to post something else by now, but my efforts have been somewhat hampered by me apparently losing the cable which connects my external hard drive (where 99.9% of my music is stored) to my laptop.
Correction: not apparently, actually.
So until the new one I have ordered has arrived (at which point, I will doubtless locate the missing one) I’ll just have to make do and track down the song(s) I wish to post.
Starting with tonight’s choices.
(I mention all of this purely so that you realise the lengths I’ve gone to so that I might post something tonight. I truly suffer for my art.)
Several years ago, when Hel and I shared a flat, we threw a New Year’s Eve party. I’ve written about this before, here, should you care to revisit it. For hopefully obvious reasons, I’ve not refreshed the mp3 links. (By the way, if ever you want me to do so, just leave a comment on the relevant page and I’ll sort it as soon as I am able to.)
Our living room had been transformed, with netting Christmas lights on every wall, flashing away to such an extent that one party pooper, at around 21:00, asked if I could stop them flashing as he was getting a headache. Oh yes, my friends know how to party alright.
All of the sofas had been pushed back to create a dancefloor, and I’d installed a glitter ball underneath the main light in the room. It didn’t revolve, but it did catch the light from the Christmas lights and reflect them back out. It looked pretty good, I thought.
Against the back wall was my vinyl and CD collection, and in the middle of them I’d bought and placed a (very cheap) set of CD decks, with a rudimentary cross-fader, which I’d rigged up to play through my fairly decent speakers. The idea was that I’d DJ most of the night, but anyone else could have a go if they liked, and they could see what music was available to them before they did so.
Other than sorting out a few “must play” tunes, I don’t usually sort out what I’m going to play in advance, preferring to play it by ear: see what goes down well, then try and find something similar to keep the mood going. But being New Year’s Eve, I had planned what I was going to play at midnight: I’d decided we needed something which included a clock striking, which I would time to happen at midnight.
I had landed on these, the first as the last record before midnight….:
…which I’d cut off after the chimes and, after a moment or two of silence to allow those who wanted to cheer and/or snog their other halves, go into this:
But then, early doors, one of my mates approached me and told me he’d sussed out what I’d be playing at midnight. He was wrong, of course, but when he told me what he thought I’d play, I had to agree that his idea bested mine.
I shouldn’t need an excuse to post anything by the Beastie Boys, but just in case any of you were feeling sold short by their all-too-brief appearance in last night’s post, here’s the full version of Sabotage:
I’ve been struggling all week to come up with anything to play this week. And then, tonight, Friday, a day later than I usually start writing these posts, on my way home from work I found myself thinking about how the way that I get to hear about new music has changed so much.
Nowadays, I’m pretty much reliant on my blogging chums to flag new stuff to me; bar Jools Holland’s “Later…” there’s next to no music television programmes on in the UK these days (Friday night BBC4 documentaries excepted); or occasionally a friend will text, tweet or email me to ask if I’ve heard of someone or other, or to see if I want to go see someone I’ve never heard of live (the answer’s generally yes, as long as a) I’m not skint; b) I can track down at least one song that I like by the suggested act, and c) whether or not I value the opinion of the person asking or not).
When I was a kid, new music did not appear on the Multi-Coloured Swap Shop. Songs that were already hits appeared on Top of the Pops. And I had no idea what the Old Grey Whistle Test was, and would probably would have avoided it even if I did.
No, when I was growing up the only way I heard anything new was via the radio.
And that gave me an idea for tonight’s post. Four words to strike fear into the heart of any of you who endured my recent run of TV show titled posts. To misquote Martin Luther King: “I have a theme..”
Radio.
So I got home, cranked the laptop up, opened iTunes and typed “Radio” into the search window.
427 songs were suggested.
Jesus, this thread is going to finish me off, I thought.
But fear not: by the time I’d eliminated all the songs I have by TV on the Radio, or by Radiohead, or were on a rather fine Radio Soulwax mix I downloaded recently, or any that were on the list because they were the Radio Edit of a single, I was down to a much more palatable amount.
So, let’s crack on, shall we?
And what better place to start than with this stone cold classic:
I’ve had a life-long love affair with R.E.M. Well, not quite life-long. I wish I could say I bought this when it first came out, but no. I first heard it on the third R.E.M. album I ever bought, a Best of (regular readers will perhaps be surprised to learn it wasn’t the first record I ever bought by the band) called “Eponymous”.
Radio Free Europe first came out in 1981, the band’s first single, later resurfacing as the opening track on their debut album “Murmur” two years later. I didn’t buy anything by the band until 1987’s “Document”, four years and five albums later, but I’d still like to think I was a little ahead of the majority of the pack here in the UK, where most were unaware of them until 1988’s “Green” album, interest growing somewhat by the time 1991’s “Out of Time” came out, and hitting absolute peak with 1992’s flawless “Automatic For The People”.
In the summer of 1989, I somehow found myself at quite a posh garden party, full of young darlings, public school types, who had been quite astonished that I didn’t know I was supposed to kiss the proffered hand of a young lady I was introduced to. Yes, THAT posh. (I shook it, an act which was greeted by quite the round of disbelieving guffaws.)
Anyway, feeling ever so-slightly out of place, I proceeded to get phenomenally pissed, and wandered into a barn where a DJ was trying had to tempt the fops onto the dancefloor. He played R.E.M.’s “Orange Crush” from their Green album, which pleased me (not enough to dance, mind), that was until the DJ took to the microphone and said: “That was R.E.M. a new, up and coming band from the U.S.of A.”
I couldn’t take it, marched over and started to berate him about how they were neither new nor up and coming, how they’d been around for years, how that track was from their sixth album and how that was the sort of thing he really should know if he was going to make it in the cut-throat world of DJ’ing, quietly omitting to mention that I’d only been a fan since the album before.
Musical snobbery, eh? Never gets you anywhere. Oh, what do you philistines know, anyway?
Moving on to 1993, and another of my favourite bands:
I don’t have much to say about this, apart from it being the lead single from their “Thirteen” album, that it’s a quite magnificent single from a quite magnificent album, which, for reasons that I don’t think I’ll ever really understand, saw the band completely fail to capitalise on their break-through album “Bandwagonesque”. If you don’t own them, kids, go get ’em. Or, if you hang around here long enough, I’ll probably end up posting every song from them both sooner or later.
Moving on to another artist whose work I’ve admired for a great many years:
This is from 1978, when Mr McManus was at his snarling best, so much so that following an appearance on US show Saturday Night Live in 1977, he found himself banned from appearing again.
Here’s the story: The Sex Pistols were booked to appear on the show, but for one reason or another – reportedly, a lack of visas – they couldn’t make it and Elvis and his band The Attractions were roped in. His record company wanted them to perform their current UK single “Less Than Zero” – which was about Oswald Moseley, leader of the fascist movement in the UK – but Costello was less keen, thinking the song wasn’t exactly going to resonate with an American audience.
So Costello took the stage, started to play “Less Than Zero” before calling proceedings to a halt a few bars in, announcing “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but there’s no reason to do this song here” before launching into “Radio Radio” instead.
Going so far off message was not appreciated by the powers that be; he wasn’t invited back until 1989. He did, later, however reference it on the 25th Anniversary Show, when, as Beastie Boys were just getting going on “Sabotage”, this happened:
Wow.
Where do you go to top that? Well, you can’t, but I know someone who’ll give it a bloody good go:
Ironically, this track, written by popular rhyming slang Miles Hunt, was only ever released as a single in the US, and not here in the UK, where it remained just another track from their second, not-quite-as-good-as-their-first album “Hup!”. Quite how they got away with lines like “Bugger the plugger” is beyond me. But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised: many years ago I saw Phil Collins being interviewed after he had appeared in US hit TV show “Miami Vice”. Collins related how when he attended the script run through, he’d found that his character repeatedly used the phrase “wanker”, and Collins asked the producers if they knew what it meant.
“Sure,” came the response, “it’s English slang for ‘idiot’, right?”
Fortuitously, there was nobody better qualified than Collins to enlighten them as to the true meaning.
One of the other acts who were approached to appear on Saturday Night Live on that night Costello so infuriated the TV bosses, were this next lot. They declined the invitation, giving this as their explanation: “We don’t substitute for anybody.” Bonus cool points.
Denver is probably best known over here for a) Annie’s Song, b) looking like the Milky Bar Kid, c) his love of the Rocky Mountains, and d) his love of flying. Sadly, he failed to survive the occasion when he inadvertently combined those last two by crashing his plane into one of them.
Time for a musical interlude. Not that I’m saying what you’ve had so far wasn’t musical, just…this sounds like a musical interlude. And that’s a good thing. Particularly when it’s provided by a band who most people only know for one song, and that a remixed version of it, and even more so when to the best of my knowledge, this sounds like nothing else they’ve ever done:
Next up, a song which first came to my attention via a compilation album called “The Trip: Created by Saint Etienne”. It’s crammed full of Northern Soul, down-tempo numbers, lost and obscure nuggets from the 60s and 70s; if you’ve never heard it then I urge you to track down a copy.
I say it’s created by Saint Etienne, it’s more likely to just be Etienne stalwart and fountain of all pop knowledge Bob Stanley that compiled it. Bob once was kind enough to retweet a link to these pages once, so I reckon I owe him a name-check.
In the real world, knowing that a member of Saint Etienne had read one of my posts would earn me extra bonus points; alas it was predominantly about Bucks Fizz with a healthy portion of Shakin’ Stevens, so I reckon I’m probably in cool point deficit now. Ho hum.
But I digress. This is Douglas Dillard, banjo player (banjoist? banjoer?) and founder member of bluegrass outfit The Dillards, and Harold Eugene “Gene” Clark, singer, songwriter, guitarist and founder member of The Byrds.
Together, they came together under the inspired name of:
Two to go now, and it’s time for some 2 Tone ska. I don’t feature nearly enough of this kind of stuff on these pages, which some of you poor misguided fools may consider a blessing, so here’s an absolute belter to rectify that:
And so to the last one for tonight, and any post about songs with the word Radio in the title, inspired by my musings on how I rarely listen to the radio these days (6music at the weekends aside, and particularly former Fun Lovin’ Criminal Huey Morgan’s show of a Saturday morning, which is simply unmissable), would not be complete without this polished gem (it features and was produced by Trevor Horn, so it was never going to be anything but polished, now was it?):
What’s extraordinary about that record is that although it’s written from a future perspective, it was actually first released in 1977 (by Bruce Woolley and The Camera Club), before music videos were anywhere near the peak they would become. MTV wouldn’t even be launched for another four years, yet all that the song prophesizes – how polish, image, self-promotion, glamour and glitz would become the prevalent (X) factor, as opposed to, y’know, how good you are and what you sound like – has pretty much come true.
Which is a fairly bleak way to wrap things up, but there you go.
A History of Dubious Taste 