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Post by raliverpool on Jul 1, 2010 21:55:42 GMT 1
Great reviews - you can tell that you love and have a passion for music, but I shudder at the thought of doing something similar with my iPod Classic (17417 different tracks and rising ...)
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borneoman
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love is tough, when enough is not enough
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Post by borneoman on Jul 1, 2010 22:12:57 GMT 1
I read your review of Foundations and totally agree. I still listen to the song all the time and never get bored of it, incidentally I think the whole Made of Bricks album is amazing!! But imo she does sing, at least a little, it's not that's she's talking...
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SheriffFatman
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Post by SheriffFatman on Jul 2, 2010 12:41:32 GMT 1
Girl From Mars by Ash Like a lot of people, I had never heard of Ash until Girl From Mars was released as their second single, so their almost-as-brilliant debut, Kung Fu, remained a secret until months later when I went out and bought their album 1977 on mid-price cassette. It was June 1977, and it had started to seem like anyone under the age of 25 who picked up a guitar was guaranteed a record deal. Some fantastic music came out of that heady time for indie rock, but very few singles from the period deserve to be called a classic more than Girl From Mars.
Listening to Girl From Mars now, I am struck by how little has changed about the way it makes me fell. Most singles lose some of their magic over time, especially if you really like them and play them hundreds of times, however good they are they just become part of the furniture. I can’t really explain why, but this song just hasn’t done that, I still get the same thrill bouncing around to it now as I did when I first heard it aged 18. Maybe it makes a difference that most of the band at the time were the same age as me, I just connected with this record in a way that went beyond most of the rest of Britpop.
If I really analyse it, I suppose there are a lot of things about this track that make it virtually perfect. Fist of all, there is the story of the band themselves. Much like the Undertones 20 odd years earlier, they formed at school in Northern Ireland and somehow seem to have launched straight into making classic guitar pop, bypassing the usual dirge you would expect a bunch of teenagers to be coming out with, at least at first. Girl From Mars itself though is a simple pop song about falling in love from the point of view of a teenage boy, again much like The Undertones most celebrated work. It is a sub-genre that has produced many excellent pop moments, but when punk guitars and home made sounding production are thrown into the mix it becomes too charming for words.
It says on Wikipedia that the song was originally written as Girl From Ards, a district in County Down. If that’s true I guess they just changed it because Mars was a slightly more interesting place for a girlfriend to be from, and it’s that sort of song writing logic that gives this track an other-wordly feel and makes it so magical.
I had this single on 7” vinyl, and not being very keen on CDs I carried on buying most of their output in this format long after a lot of bands had given up on records altogether. Eventually I begrudgingly did the same thing, which is a shame because it means most of my Ash remains shut in a plastic box under the bed in my spare room. One day when the Mrs is out I’m going to get it out, play it loud, and remember what a great band they were. I should probably check out some of their new stuff too, although I fear it will be nowhere near as good as the music they were making when they were 18.
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SheriffFatman
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Post by SheriffFatman on Jul 2, 2010 12:44:31 GMT 1
Thanks for all the positive reviews of my reviews!
I realised posting about 10 at a time from my archive would have been better, but it would also have taken me forever! I promise just one at a time from now on!
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borneoman
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love is tough, when enough is not enough
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Post by borneoman on Jul 2, 2010 13:24:01 GMT 1
I love early Ash, and agree Girl from Mars (Ards) is fantastic. Both the 1977 and the Free All Angels are great solid albums. The rest, not so much...
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Post by o on Jul 2, 2010 19:40:38 GMT 1
Thanks for all the positive reviews of my reviews! I realised posting about 10 at a time from my archive would have been better, but it would also have taken me forever! I promise just one at a time from now on! As long as we get one every day
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Post by raliverpool on Jul 2, 2010 20:32:39 GMT 1
Ash = a very good Northern Irish band. I have their Intergalactic Sonic 7″s singles compilation.
Personally I rate Goldfinger; Burn Baby Burn & Shining Light as their top 3 singles.
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borneoman
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Post by borneoman on Jul 2, 2010 22:20:58 GMT 1
Ash also had great album tracks that never were singles like Let It Flow, Someday, Walking Barefoot... My #1 Ash song is probably Shining Light
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SheriffFatman
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Post by SheriffFatman on Jul 4, 2010 11:30:51 GMT 1
A Girl Like You by Edwyn Collins I’ve mentioned before that one of the things which always amazes me when I look back at the mid nineties is the many different directions from which the fantastic music taking over the charts was coming. The central theme was young men with guitars – Oasis, Blur etc – but there was so much else going on at the fringes of Britpop which just made the whole scene even more exciting.
Take Edwyn Collins for example, a Scottish singer song writer who had made the top 40 only once before, 12 years earlier, as lead singer in a band called Orange Juice who reached number 7 with Rip It Up. These days, a Scottish singer song writer who had been briefly successful over a decade ago could release all the singles and albums he likes, no one would take any notice. In the mid nineties though it felt as if everyone was considered on their merits, and the result was songs as good as this one came to prominence and are still radio favourites to this day. If you need proof this wasn’t just a one off, consider Echo and the Bunnymen, whose brilliant Nothing Lasts Forever became their joint biggest hit in 1997, 13 years after they’d last reached the top 10. For a few years in the mid 90s, the record buying public opened their minds like never before, and the usual pop star career trajectory no longer mattered.
Surprisingly it wasn’t just Britain that fell for A Girl Like You either, it was actually a hit all over Europe, and even made the top 40 in the US. The reason for all this success is quite simply the quality of the track, a catchy, simple, charming and intriguing song, easy to sing along to and perfect for the radio. It is helped no end by the kind of drum track that you can’t help banging your fingers on a table to, which I learn via Wikipedia is actually sampled from a 1963 song by Len Barry called 1-2-3. I can certainly forgive Collins for borrowing someone else’s drums when the results are this good.
Interestingly, there is a hint of dissatisfaction with the other music of the time in Collins’ lyrics, as he sings about “too many protest singers, not enough protest songs”. The accusation that Britpop artists wasted their direct access to the entire nation’s youth by singing love songs instead of mobilising them into action is a well worn argument. Personally I just love the idea of writing a protest song bemoaning the lack of protest songs, I don’t know much about Collins’ sense of humour but I imagine that was deliberate.
Although he tried a few times, Edwyn Collins never recreated the commercial success of A Girl Like You, scraping one more top 40 hit in 1997 The Magic Piper (Of Love). In 2005, two days after doing an interview on 6 Music in which he complained of feeling nauseous, he had a brain haemorrhage. His long recovery has been the subject of a BBC Scotland documentary, and in 2008 he performed at Glastonbury. I didn’t see it, but I bet A Girl Like You went down a storm.
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Post by Admin on Jul 4, 2010 13:49:22 GMT 1
Now that's a brilliant tune, and is on my ipod as well I remember being hooked in by the guitar, it's just so infectious, I also remember seeing it in some Scottish family drama, as someone snogged a girl against a car, so it always makes me think of that now I'm glad to hear he has recovered. I also bought Magic piper of love on cd single, never did like Orange Juice either.
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borneoman
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Post by borneoman on Jul 4, 2010 15:12:34 GMT 1
agree, amazing track, that guitar riff. Didn't know he had been in Orange Juice
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SheriffFatman
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Post by SheriffFatman on Jul 5, 2010 7:54:21 GMT 1
Girlfriend In A Coma by The Smiths I really dislike the way a certain popular sticky brown yeast extract has recently become a byword for things that people either love or hate, with no one at all sitting on the fence going “I don’t mind really”. It’s partly because I refuse to acknowledge Marketing as a serious career, stupid of me because many people have made an awful lot of money out of it, but I have principles, and I can’t see how anyone whose life is dedicated to persuading the public to spend money on things they probably don’t even want can, or even should, sleep at night. Especially not when the product in question tastes as sh*t as Marmite.
Culturally though, there is no question that a few things are loved and hated in equal measure, with neither side seeing the other’s point of view. I love The Smiths, and whenever one of their songs pops up on iPod shuffle I find myself silently listing all of the reasons they are so fantastic, a kind of mental defence against my many friends and family who insist the music goes off as soon as Morrissey opens his mouth.
Girlfriend In A Coma is simply genius. To find the most obvious reason, simply look at the title – who else would ever have called a song that? If you didn’t already know the song, which at some point I suppose I didn’t, it would be almost impossible to read that title and not want to hear the it. Is it morbid? Is it funny? Thinking about it, I think it might just actually be very good marketing. Bugger.
Furthermore, it is not just the title, this song really is actually about a girlfriend who is in a coma. A jaunty little tune that clocks in at barely two minutes long turns out to be about what is really a very serious situation. The ridiculousness of this track becomes very evident quite quickly, as there is no sign at all of how she found herself in this situation, just Morrissey as a grief stricken boyfriend singing entirely inappropriate but sincere sounding lines like “there were times when I could have murdered her, but you know I would hate anything to happen to her”. So is this his fault? We never find out, but a tragic ending is almost assured with him ending the song singing “Let me whisper my last goodbyes, I know it’s serious”.
I sometimes wonder if Morrissey wrote songs like this deliberately in response to people saying he was too miserable. In the process he made The Smiths the ultimate antidote to the light, fluffy pop rubbish that colonised the charts in the 80s. It is clever and multi-layered, managing to be deeply moribund in subject matter but at the same time infused with a sense of humour that was otherwise completely lacking in the music business at the time. There were lots and lots of people having hits with songs about their girlfriends in the 80s, but Morrissey’s was the only one in a coma. In a nutshell, that’s what made The Smiths so brilliant.
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borneoman
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Post by borneoman on Jul 5, 2010 8:54:43 GMT 1
Again you nailed it!! Amazing song, sure in my Smiths top 3, probably my #2 fav Smiths song behind There is a Light...
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SheriffFatman
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Post by SheriffFatman on Jul 9, 2010 9:18:13 GMT 1
Girls And Boys by Blur In a bizarre alphabetical co-incidence, the first 14 seconds of Girls And Boys has always sounded to me distinctly similar the first eight seconds of Girlfriend In A Coma by The Smiths. The similarities end there though – this track is the ultimate sound of the nineties, and any hint of a reminder of the previous decade evaporates almost immediately.
I have argued before that musically the nineties didn’t really start until 1994. If you want to narrow it down further I reckon it might be the release of this very single, on March 14th, which heralded a massive change in the type of music that would made the charts, a change that only began to be reversed as the decade ended. It is a sad fact that the decline of indie’s popularity, although gradual, was eventually so pronounced that by 2010 a previously unheard of band playing catchy guitar music is no more likely to be found in the top 10 than it was in 1993. Still, people like me have many happy memories of the years in between.
It is ironic really that the arrival of Girls And Boys in the charts heralded a move to guitar based music, as both its sound and its subject matter hint at something quite different. The bouncy, synthesised pop backing to the track, with guitars added over the top afterwards, makes it quite different to just about anything else Blur had any success with, and although a few Pulp tracks were in a similar vein, it is actually quite distinct from the more raw, arguably more authentic sound of most Britpop. Maybe the public needed easing into guitar music with a record that was really as much pop as anything else. Even the rest of the singles from Parklife, which went on to become one of the defining albums of the decade, were basically straightforward indie records.
Where Girls And Boys was really documenting the age it was released in though is in its subject matter. Masses of Brits had been heading on package holidays to the Mediterranean since the 70s, but it was only in the 90s that such things came within the spending ability of the nation’s youth. Hedonism and wanton sexual abandon was the order of the day. Awash with alcohol and pills, the constraints and morals of society back home could be forgotten for a couple of weeks, by the “girls who are boys who like boys to be girls who do boys like they’re girls who do girls like they’re boys”.
I think I somewhat missed the point of the scene that Blur are describing here. Call me grumpy, but as far as I can see the two main things that these types of holidays have given the world are an increase in sexually transmitted diseases, and some of the absolute worst music in the history of recorded sound. On the upside, at least this one glorious record, a fantastic salute to people I never liked or understood, came into being as a result. And happily, although hardly any indie music makes the charts any more, not very much dance music does either, so it’s not all bad.
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SheriffFatman
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Post by SheriffFatman on Jul 9, 2010 13:13:33 GMT 1
Gloria by Patti Smith One evening early last year, killing time in George at Asda while the Mrs was in the changing rooms, I spotted a 3 CD compilation album called NME Classics. I’ve no idea when it was released, but it can’t have been that long ago because it had Chasing Cars on it. Aside from that slightly questionable nod to middle of the road rock, almost every track on there that I already knew was one that I really liked, and that made me quite excited about the 20 or so tracks I didn’t know. It was £6.99, and turned out to be a very wise investment.
I had never heard Gloria before, or anything by Patti Smith for that matter. I had a vague expectation that it would sound like Disco 2000, because I remembered reading somewhere that Pulp had copied the guitar of a song called Gloria. It turns out the Gloria that Pulp used was an early 80s pop song by someone called Laura Branigan, and Patti Smith’s song of the same name couldn’t be more different to Disco 2000. It is absolute genius though.
The track starts with quiet and low piano, before Smith sneers the incredible opening line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”. The track just seems to keep building up and up for over three minutes without ever quite getting to a chorus, and then as Gloria approached “here she comes, walking down the street, here she comes, coming through my door, here she comes, crawling up my stairs” you realise it doesn’t actually have one. In fact it is quite bizarre in structure, almost six minutes long with verses of different lengths and ultimately culminating in a manic rapid fire spelling of Gloria’s name, taken in turns with singing it. First time I heard it, as it faded out to the repeated sound of “Glooooria, G.L.O.R.I.A., Glooooria, G.L.O.R.I.A…” I couldn’t quite believe what I’d heard, but I was certain I wanted to hear it again.
Gloria sounds to me like it was heavily influenced by punk, but in fact the truth must be dramatically the other way around because it was released in 1975. Smith’s sneering vocal style, half not caring and half angry, would become a familiar sound in music over the coming years, both from the UK and her native New York. In the mid seventies though, over a year before anyone had heard of the Sex Pistols, it must have seemed extremely unusual, and quite mad.
Interestingly, it turns out that Gloria is has it’s roots far away from punk, having originally been written by Van Morrison and recorded by his band Them in 1964. Smith’s version is apparently a radical reworking, with mostly different lyrics apart from the “G.L.O.R.I.A.” bit. I was somewhat disappointed to realise that this means Patti’s declaration “I’m gonna ah-ah make her mine” is probably not therefore a screaming declaration of lesbianism, but actually a mild declaration of desire from the teenage Morrison. This is an incredible track though, very unusual and with a fascinating past. I’m off to iTunes to download some Them.
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Post by Earl Purple on Jul 9, 2010 17:57:08 GMT 1
Wow I don't have time to read all this, you need to arrange it on a website though with look-up.
Strangely Carter USM were one of my favourite bands of the 1990s yet failed to have any #1 singles in my chart. They did have 4 #1 albums though, 3 of them #1 of the year.
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SheriffFatman
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Post by SheriffFatman on Jul 19, 2010 14:10:12 GMT 1
Go Your Own Way by Fleetwood Mac I have already mentioned how my quest to find the track with the bass line from a feature on Mark Radcliffe’s Radio 2 show led me to listening, completely confused , to the first three and a half minutes of Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain before it suddenly all made sense. Once I had solved that mystery I took a look at iTunes and found that Go Your Own Way was another track from the same album, Rumours. I remembered the chorus from hearing it on the radio when I was a kid, and I was intrigued by an album that I knew very little about even though world wide it had apparently sold 40 million copies, so I downloaded this track too.
My overwhelming lack of Fleetwood Mac knowledge is demonstrated by the fact that I have only discovered today that Lindsey Buckingham, who wrote this track, is a man. I did already know that Stevie Nicks, who the song is about, is a woman, but I can’t help feeling that a band made up largely of people whose name suggests they are the opposite gender are not exactly making it easy for new fans to get into them. Having said that, it doesn’t really seem to have done them any harm.
Go your own way is a classic piece of FM rock, pop enough to be all over the radio, rock enough to remain credible with people who are serious about music. It is the very definition of perfect radio music, enough to make Scouting For Girls go to bed at night quietly weeping in the knowledge that however many times their bland pap gets played on commercial radio, they will never make anything even a zillionth as good as this. I expect their royalties provide them some comfort though.
Another sign that this is a radio classic, if a slightly odd one, is that it was not an enormous success as a single, not in the UK anyway, peaking at a mere number 38 in March 1977. I am guilty sometimes of seeing chart success as the best way to measure a song’s popularity, but that’s clearly not always the case. From the point of view of a record company, I guess a single has pretty much done its job if it creates airplay which causes interest in the album, and any subsequent singles sales are a bonus. Go Your Own Way was the first single released from Rumours, and while it did not set the charts alight in its own right it certainly played a part in sustaining Rumours’ huge but slow burning sales, the like have which have only ever been seen a few times.
Also Go Your Own Way may be a fairly small seller, but it is certainly a critics’ favourite - Rolling Stone ranked it the 119th best song of all time, and it’s on the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock & Roll list. Personally I heading south on holiday later this week, and as I cruise down the M5 singing along to this I’ll be wishing I had a convertible, and that it was the wind in my hair not my Astra’s recently repaired air conditioning. Still, in my head the moment is almost perfect.
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SheriffFatman
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Post by SheriffFatman on Jul 20, 2010 16:40:02 GMT 1
God Only Knows by the Beach Boys I was driving to work this morning, and sneaking back home again to make the wife breakfast a couple of hours later, wondering whether it was fate that I would be reviewing a song with the line “God only knows what I’d be without you” in the chorus on her 30th birthday. I’m not the most romantic soul, probably not romantic enough in fact, but God only knows what I’d be without her. Croissants in bed was the least I could do.
Often when I write these reviews I feel like a lone voice championing a song that either everyone else has forgotten or not many people liked in the first place. Today is different though, in fact it’s the second day running that I’ve reviewed a track in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock & Roll list. I really must find out what the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame actually is if I’m going to keep referring to it.
It’s not just me and the Fame Hall either – Mojo magazine ranked it as the 13th best song ever, and in an interview with a Japanese radio station Paul McCartney said it was his all time favourite song. Although I love it myself, I find it fascinating that it is not just highly regarded by the critics but also seen by the wider public as one of the Beach Boys best songs, because it is really quite a complicated track. Unusual in structure and melody, it has multiple instruments and sounds highly produced when you consider it was released in 1966. At the time the sound the band achieved was seen as quite a technical feat, a world away from the simplicity of their earlier, equally popular work.
The track was also quite groundbreaking lyrically as well, not least because it actually referred to God. This was new territory for pop music and some people around the band were genuinely concerned about how it would be received. It’s interesting that a lot has been written about this fear since but as far as I can tell there were no major protests in the end. I guess the sheer loveliness of the track made it quite a difficult thing to complain about.
God Only Knows peaked at number 2 in the UK chart, surprisingly 37 places higher than it managed in the US. This is another track for which singles chart performance is hardly relevant though – its parent album Pet Sounds is still seen today as one of the seminal works in the history of pop. Even so, as a track in its own right, it is one of the most captivating songs I know, a song I love to lose myself in.
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SheriffFatman
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Post by SheriffFatman on Jul 23, 2010 8:06:21 GMT 1
I am on holiday now but will carry on with these in mid August
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Post by o on Jul 23, 2010 12:25:58 GMT 1
Cheers Sherriff looking forward to it.
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