Review 2012: The Projects: Mystery Music March.

Music  Over a year after Forgotten Films, Mystery Music March was my attempt (in 2008) to force myself to write about music, not something I'd ever been comfortable with.  I'm still not.  When was the last time this blog carried a music review of any kind?  Unlike the previous blogcapade, this was ultimately even more autobiographical and the culture under consideration mostly available.  Which is why I've gone through and updated these old posts with illustrative YouTube clips of nearly everything.

41 Original Hits from the Soundtrack of American Graffiti
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
Carla Bruni’s quelqu'un m'a dit
The Doctor Who Theme – David Arnold
Bold Street – Eugene McGuiness
Funny How -- Airhead
Godspeed You Black Emperor's Raise Yr Skinny Fists To Heaven
The Elements – Tom Lehrer
I’m Like A Bird – Nelly Furtado
The 59th Bridge Street Song (Feeling Groovy) – Woodstock
Intro / Tokyo -- Richard Beggs
Me To Be – I Am The World Trade Center
BBC Music Magazine
Once More With Feeling – The Cast of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer
The Rough Guides To World Music
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised – Gil Scott-Heron
Losing My Religion – Tori Amos
Qui-Gon's Noble End – John Williams
Imperial Bedroom -- Elvis Costello and The Attractions
Supermarioland -- Ambassadors Of Funk Featuring M.C. Mario
The JCB Song – Nizpoli
Plays The Music of Oasis – The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Video Killed The Radio Star – Buggles
Zadok The Priest -- George Frideric Handel
What a Wonderful World – Louis Armstrong
Guilty Pleasures
Answer Machine Message (Baby Call Me Back) -- Britney Spears
By The Sea – Roosta
The 'Internet'
God Be With You Till We Meet Again – Ralph Vaughn Williams
Thank You -- Dido

Perhaps one of the most interesting isn't directly about music.  In the post, I condescendingly include a scan of an old BBC Music Magazine article about the dawn of the internet as an illustration of how far we'd come.  Ironically, two of applications mentioned underneath would be superseded by Spotify just a few years later, the Wired blog was shut down and the other posts far less than it used to.

Not long after I completed Mystery Music March, which due to illness was some time that May (!), on a visit to Vinyl Exchange in Manchester, I stumbled upon a promo copy of Scarlett Johansson's album Anywhere I Lay My Head.  Having noted the richness of her singing voice in her cover of Summertime a few years before, I was looking forward to more of the same.

Anywhere I Lay My Head disappointed me.  Her register seemed an octave too low, the content of the songs was, I thought, too maudlin, and not really understanding the music of Tom Waits then, decided it just wasn't my sort of thing.  So I put it in a drawer and forgot about it for the next four years.  Four years is a surprisingly long time.  Four years in my case is the difference between being in my early thirties and late thirties.

Four years is long enough to realise what I've been missing.  Over the past month, along with a bunch of Christmas music, my mp3 player's been filled with curiosities, albums which I've not listened to for some time if barely at all and so threaded through Chrissie Hynde and Wizzard have been Johannson's what I now realise, magical, lustrous cover versions of Tom Wait's songs.

Now it's one of my favourite albums.  Scarlett's voice is low, wrecked almost (see above) with that slightly tuneless Dylan quality, but there's a poignancy to the way they're communicated, especially with the multi-layered production filled with uncommon sounds and percussive experimentation.  It's all the more extraordinary because of its very concept, however potentially vanity driven, of Scarlett Johansson singing the songs of Tom Waits.

Waits himself turns up in a couple of tracks, notably the finale Who Are You in which Scarlett, having apparently tried her best throughout seems to finally find Tom's trademark growl, amid synthesised noodlings from the band including what sounds like one of the basic rhythm selections from a Bontempi.  All of which sounds utterly bonkers, and it is, especially when you consider that this is the actress who played the female lead in one of the biggest films of this year.

"I haven't ever really found a place to call home ..." -- Dido, 'Life For Rent'

About In the comments to the Dido post, Matthew wondered where the lyrics "The implication I mistook, told on whose side you took; and now with paper in my hand, I'm beginning to understand..." are from. I can say with some confidence (admittedly after a hunt round Google), they're from The Housemartins's track Freedom and should read:

"But the implications I mistook
Until I found out whose side you took
And now with paper in my hand I'm beginning to understand "

I'm listening to the song as I type from their compilation, Now That's What I Call Quite Good. They're right. I can't quite believe how good The Housemartins were and unlike some bands I can mention, they knew when to call it a day (after just five years) before their talent turned to mush in the face of success. There is not a single poor song on this album and despite the vintage, the mid-80s, doesn't sound at all dated largely because they didn't give in to voguish temptation to include any of the electric noises which were in vogue at the time even on ostensibly acoustic albums.

Lead singer Paul Heaton's later band was of course The Beautiful South and one of their lost classics is a cover version of Dream A Little Dream which appears on the soundtrack to French Kiss (the Meg Ryan/Kevin Kline rom-com). It's on there twice in English and French and I can't help but prefer the latter simply it's so unusual to hear the style of the group with a vocal in a different language.

Incidentally, Amazon are listing a new Dido release for September called TBA. It looks like a single judging by the price -- unless they're so worried about sales that they're discounting an album even before it's released. Which is unlikely.

Mystery Music: Post Mortem

Every morning I make a point of watching the local weather report on the BBC just before seven o’clock. It’s provided by the national weather centre and whichever presenter has been put on the rota for the morning records one for each of the regions (which on my Freeview box means that its possible to click between three different channels and see said presenter pretending that the North-West, London or Wales are special). The other morning, Laura Tobin, the Christina Ricci of the bureau was describing how it would cold but sunny (and it was) and as usual I let the mass of numbers and statistics wash over me, just about grasping what’s what as I dozed. Some presenter’s voices are more useful than others and Tobin’s is a particularly soothing way to start the day.

It occurred to me that morning, that the weather report is the most technically complex piece of exposition on television. Even more than the business news, the audience is supposed to have a grasp of all kinds of jargon and be able to follow a scientific narrative or projection over a three or four minute period. It’s a daily lecture with a very specific subject area – the weather for the day or sometimes weekend – in an information burst that expects a lot in terms of retention from the audience. And I suspect that most people, like me, don’t remember it all – they can’t possibly. In the end, they focus on the essentials they need – whether it will rain and the temperature – so that they can decide if they should take an umbrella and/or wear a coat. Everything else is extraneous data which is mentally discarded even as it leaves the lips of the forecaster.

Which offers the best explanation as to why writing about music for the best part of the past two months has been so difficult. As I arduously tapped away on my keyboard some mornings and evenings, the reason I simply couldn’t as predicted put my real ideas into words was because I hadn’t absorbed as many of the fundamentals of the process as I’d thought. Despite scanning The Guardian’s music columns, the aforementioned websites and flirting with Q Magazine and Rolling Stone in the past, I simply didn’t have the background knowledge, the instinct ability to give an opinion that I really needed, because what I’d done was looked to see if a cd or artist was worth searching for and setting everything else adie. Especially the art of writing a review, of expressing in words something that can only be experienced authentically through sound.

It hasn't been easy. In the desperation to grind the material out I attempted to give myself a few rules; try and write about as many genres as possible, don’t write about too many film soundtracks or female singer/songwriters and affect a journalistic rather than ‘bloggy’ tone. Sure enough the first post was about the American Graffiti soundtrack and by the third post I was already writing about Carla Bruni with the Beethoven sandwiched in between very much autobiographical. The plan was that having gotten those out of the way I could move forward into other territories, but slowly it became all to clear that if I was going to fill all of the slots, even with the month’s gap in the middle, I would have to keep returning to the genres I really enjoyed and knew something about.

But I did enjoy the challenge even if I think there were more failures than successes. Most of the time I couldn’t decide what tone to write in and even though this was supposed to be a list of my favourite music you haven't heard of, often I’d find myself writing about something I didn’t necessarily love too much or everyone had heard of because I simply wanted to get the words out. The most fun was the post in which I picked my five least favourite tracks and then realised that most of my criticisms were rather petty and attempted to be even pettier. Lord knows what you all made of it, but my readers through site meter have certainly dipped and a few more Bloglines subscribes have deserted the rss feed – which also happened last year for Forgotten Films by the way.

If I’ve understood anything it’s that like any other art form, there simply isn’t one way to write about music and that your approach really does change depending upon what’s being presented to you. That pop music demands that you be funny and skittish and that classical by its nature hope you’ll have some deference. I’ve certainly discovered that my musical taste is surprisingly wide ranging and that in fact I quite like some country and dance music, that you simply can’t make those kinds of distinctions any more. I’ve also discovered how important music is to me, far more than I’d been aware of, and how my ears are always open. As I write I’m listening to Pete Seeger’s live cover of The Byrds (or Ecclesiastes) Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season) and it’s about the most perfect track you’re likely to hear.

Mystery Music March which was in April and is now briefly in May

Thank You -- Dido

Finally then, as promised, Dido. I thought most of the criticism which greeted Dido's first album No Angel was a bit unwarranted. It wasn’t too far away from the jibes James Blunt received a few years later, but whereas in his case he deserved it (not least for spoiling the memory of watching Bill Bixby in The Incredible Hulk by borrowing the theme tune), Dido’s doubters seemed to simply dislike the woman because her music sudden popularity was surely going to herald the return of the light ballad, the soulful music for the soulless once epitomized by Sade and Beverley Craven. And so it was as Dido was followed by the Norah Joneses and Madeleine Peyrouxes to the supermarket shelves – a slightly bluesier sound clearly but still hitting the same aural comfort zone.

If Dido’s second album, Life For Rent descended into maudlin territory, to these ears, No Angel is a treat from top to bottom with Thank You the highlight. This isn’t challenging music, but it doesn’t want to be; it’s an attempt to capture honest feelings without anger, a musical Bridget Jones’ Diary without some American stealing the part played in my head whilst reading the book by Sally Philips. The singer describes a typically shitty day in Dido-land – having to go to work on a rainy day with a hangover, missing the bus, late for work but throughout she encounters her lover, in photographs and in person and to quote another lyricist it's all ok. In her subsequently much copied naturalistic singing voice she tells him or her that they’re the best thing about her day, no matter what’s happening.

Of course, never having been in a relationship, these are emotions I can’t really tap into, and so I’ll admit there’s a certain wish fulfillment involved in my attachment to the song. Blokes and other spouses should love this song though because it suggests that just by being there they can turn their girlfriends and partner’s life around. Lyrically it isn’t exactly economic, or as impressive as Regina Spector or Kate Nash, but it’s still a lucid daydream, the listener romantically projecting themselves inside. It’s clever too, somehow managing to use the word ‘imply’, something I’ve not heard in a song before or since. The production is deceptively simple – the bongo drums, echoing choral bits double banking some of the lyrics (shades of Nelly Furtado when she was good) and rather looser to these ears the first time it appeared in public with other Music From The Motion Picture Sliding Doors.

I can absolutely understand why some of you hate its breeziness, and I’ll never convince you. There are just some people who hate music which fails to challenge the ear, which is passable background fare sometimes, but emotionally useful otherwise. Predictably, I loved Dido as I love all this music, from Diana Krall through Natalie Imbruglia to Stacey Kent, drawing the line only at Katie Melua who at no point has or does sound authentic or as though she has much at all to do with the music. I bought The Closest Thing To Crazy the day it came out, and regretted it ever since, sounding as it does like a mechanized attempt at recreating Norah Jones in much the same way as Avril Lavigne stole Alanis’s thunder. Oh and Natasha Beddingfield, who is just scary. I suppose it takes a fan to see the difference between all of this stuff.

We know that only a fraction of the music that made the playlist of Michael Parkinson's Radio Two show was any good.

Mystery Music March in April

God Be With You Till We Meet Again – Ralph Vaughn Williams

At the Liverpool Blue Coat, the then all-boys, mostly a grammar school, officially a comprehensive school, that over seven years shaped some of who I am, assemblies were very important. Every morning the school would unite either in the main hall of the school chapel for the same routine – organ voluntary, reading, hymn, prayer and school messages – what club and society activities there would be that day and whether anyone in particular was doing something worthy of a telling off. Every Tuesday, a charity speaker would attend and tell us exactly why we should give our pennies to Amnesty International, Oxfam, Friends of the Earth or the PDSA. Randomly what can best be described as an evangelist would turn up and give us a sermon, which these days would be considered very curious indeed considering it wasn’t what modern jargon might be labeled a faith school.

Being a contrary person, even though I’d dabbled with Christianity in my first year but rejected it soon afterwards, I really appreciated these assemblies – the voluntaries were often spectacular, the collective experience of singing hymns and being able to hear the appalling notes drawing from nearby teachers and the readings, which through some bizarre twist of fate (and volunteering) I managed to give a hell of a lot of in the sixth form (once an exhibitionist etc). I even helped to pick the charity speakers as one of the class representatives who bothered to show up for the termly meeting to look through the box of leaflets which had been sent pleading for money. We’d always seem to end up choosing the same ones and often on the basis of who would be speaking. Friends of the Earth always did well because their visitor had a funny name.

At the end of each year there would be a final assembly at the close of the last day. The format was roughly the same as in the morning, but the aspects were rather more fixed – the same reading, the same voluntary (I think) and the same hymn, no 740 in Hymns Ancient and Modern, God Be With You Till We Meet Again. It was a school tradition which fled across the decades and happened each and every year. The words, by Jeremiah E. Rankin, cumulatively inspired one sentiment. Take care, and I’ll see you soon. Even though I was bullied horrendously for years at the place, habitually had a horrible time all told, and leaving the discussion of what I thought 'God' meant in this context, I often choked up during this part of the assembly because I was still intensely proud of the fact that I went to that school and that once you were a Blue Coat boy, you were always a Blue Coat boy.

Inevitably after seven years I was sitting in the final ever assembly in the school. I remember it oddly just being my year group and for some it being quite a chore (they wanted to get to the pub, which was predictably called the Coffee House). By then, girls had joined the school, there we no longer borders living there, and some of the other traditions had fallen away but we were still singing this hymn, and yes I did get as emotional as I’d hoped. This had been my final proper day at a school I’d worked so hard to get into at the beginning of my teens letting me loose towards the end. Just exams to go and then hopefully university. We were finally becoming adults (!) and there certainly would be people here we wouldn’t see again (until the invention of FriendsReunited and Facebook) and yet we still sang those lyrics – and loudly – it sounded like a soccer chant. But it still seemed right to say take care, one more time.

Mystery Music March in April

The 'Internet'

In September 1995, BBC Music Magazine published this article which helpfully introduces the internet to a readership who may still be getting used to hearing their music on cd:

It’s the kind of writing which still needs to put the words like browser and phrases like World Wide Web into apostrophes and which spends a lot of time explaining what the Usenet is. This is pre-Google and the search engine of choice, Lycos didn’t even have its own domain name yet.

Over a decade later the various news groups are still there (rec.music.classical, rec.music.early, rec.music.makers.piano) and can be seen though Google Groups, but the WWW Vitual Library’s been lost and I’m pleased to see Lycos is still in the topic five web portals along with their doggy logo. Most impressively though, the Viola Jokes domain still works and takes you to a page which notes that the magazine made a typographical error in the URL before usefully pointing you in the right direction!

With the exception of this organ, I haven’t been in sight of a high street magazine about music in years. Most of anything I read about music is in the papers or online which probably explains why I still haven’t understood exactly how writing process works despite spending the best part of two months in the attempt. As a homage to John Warburton’s fantastic piece of journalism, here are the five music related ‘websites’ ‘online’ which I’m using right now. Don't expect any great revelations ...

No Rock And Roll Fun
I’m not subscribed to too many music-related gossip websites largely because Simon seems to read them all for me (and us). Covering everything from the business to what the tabloids are saying I might not always have a clue who he’s talking about but his posting rate is impressive and the writing between the links is often funny and acerbic.

Wired: Listening Post
As you’d expect this offers a slightly more corporate, technology orientated version of the above but with more a more proactive approach. More often than not, I’ll read a story here which isn’t picked up by the rest of the media until days later and with less detail.

Winamp
My music player of choice. Having tried iTunes and found it cloggy and slow on my dial-up connection, Winamp continues to be a lean, useful alternative. A recent overhaul added a little box which appears and tells you unobtrusively which track is just beginning, although I still can’t get the ID3 editor to work as well as before.

Soundamus
A tool which analyses your scrobbling habits through Last.fm and then sends news via an RSS feed of new releases by the artists whose music you’re listening too. It works too – Jewel’s new lillbitcountry album is released in June.

Wikipedia
Well, yes, clearly. Does anyone actually remember what the web was like before the Wikipedia came along and could tell you very quickly why Lou Reed recorded Metal Machine Music? Pointlessly criticised for the few minor errors which are corrected almost as quickly as they’re noticed it’s been the main source for many of these articles. If the coverage isn’t always as detailed as you like, at least you can go in yourself and make it as detailed as you like. Even if you’re wrong.

Mystery Music March in April

By The Sea – Roosta

In the late 90s I worked as a roadie for rock band called Roosta. Well, I used to carry the drums in for my friend Chris who was in a band, but since the opening line sounds cooler, we’ll stick with that. I used to be a roadie for a rock band called Roosta. They were a four, sometimes five piece, who met at university. As well as Chris's drumming, Rick was the lead guitar, Tony on bass and Mark on guitar and vocal, with Eddie around to cover for Mark when his voice was having a few problems.

They played mostly pubs and bars, in Manchester and North Wales, the biggest gigs were at the famous Flying Picket when it was still on Hardman Street in Liverpool (in September 1999). They fooled around with mostly covers -- Oasis, The Stones, U2, The Kinks, Quo and Hendrix. Their signature Radiohead reworking became something of an in-joke as we shouted Creep throughout the gig until they finally relented with a sweary and lengthy rendition.

The best of their own material was By The Sea. On the version I have, recorded at the old Fold & Firkin on Wavertree Highstreet in 1997, the words are largely inaudible, drowned out slightly by the rebound of the drums and excellent guitar work, but the chorus is all too clear ‘By the sea […] Is were I wanna be […] Is were I wanna send me away…’ (with some lyrical duplication in there). I don’t know if it was their best performance of the song, but it was certainly tight, with Rick for once not going off into a ten minute guitar solo.

I know this because Chris recorded a few of these concerts and he passed on a bootleg. The whole set is on here, and between songs you can hear the chatter from pub visitors and even what sounds like the barmaid asking them to turn the amps down. Just as this song begins Mark says ‘This is one of ours…’ and someone from the crowd, our crowd mocks ‘Oh no!’ and boos which is just the kind of support a band needs when it’s starting out. But I remember that night more clearly than most simply because I think everyone turned out to hear them.

I like to believe that By The Sea was autobiographical, that Mark (assuming he wrote it) was lamenting some lost love, last seen on a beach. To these ears it’s as good, if not better than most of the cover versions they played, with great hooks and a complex counterpoint within the wall of sound. It follows some of the rules (ABA) throws out others (guitar solos after each chorus and not just before the bridge) and it improves with each listen. I’m bound to say this, but it’s a tragedy that they never managed to make it into a recording studio to lay down a definitive version, but as it stands this is good enough.

Mystery Music March in April

Answer Machine Message (Baby Call Me Back) -- Britney Spears

Despite every attempt to contrary I seem to know an awful lot about Britney Spears, largely because whenever anything happens to the sometime Disney Club singer (see what I mean) it’s splattered all over the rolling news, sometimes to the embarrassment even of our British presenters. Last month footage of the singer’s emergence from hospital was greeted by a warning from BBC News presenter Simon McCoy who suggested that if we really didn’t care we should "look away now" (then).

It's good to see that lately she's slowly begun to get her life sorted out if only so that her every move isn't turned into breaking news and we have to endure it. How interesting that it seems to be happening now that the cameras and everyone else are generally pointing in a different direction (unless you Heat readers know differently), largely blocked by a beehive hairstyle.

Everyone seems to have an opinion about the cause of Spears’s problems, ill informed pet theories which don’t really match reality. So here’s mine. I’ve absolutely no idea how I came by this but listening on random one night Baby Call Me Back passed through my ears and although it’s clearly not the actual reason for Britney’s troubles it’s exactly the kind of thing that could at least have contributed. It begins which the familiar piano bass from Baby One More Time and then ‘Oh baby, baby’ and then the creepiness begins as the singer talks directly to us …

“Hi, this is Britney Spears and sometimes my friend can’t come to the phone and this is one of those times so leave a message after the beep and baby they’ll call you back one more time and thanks for calling!”

… or in fact the person who’s calling you up assuming you’re the kind of person who’d want this instead of your own regional tones on your answering machine service.

I’ve only ever heard the pop songtress (description © Smash Hits some time in the last century) actually speak three times before. The first was during an infamous interview in the final week of The Big Breakfast in which the infamous presenter Richard Bacon proposed to her and during this video outtake from her reality television programme being commented on here (was she saying Spawn, Spun or spam?). On each occasion her voice has been completely different and this soliloquy is no exception, young sounding and professional and actually like the opening introduction to Lucky (which would be the third).

It’s not a bad idea I suppose and certainly preferable to the soundalikes which litter this ‘market’, trainee John Culshaws giving us their Simon Callow (‘My God, you’re rubbish, you’re the worst singer I ever heard, leave a message…’) In another universe, this twenty-two seconds could be seen as a blueprint for saving the pop industry. Whoever mixed it, has somehow managed to include both of the major hooks from the song and in the middle what might as well be an advert for the singer’s personality. Throw in the chorus and it’s a quick hit of pop whose only negative point is that its too short to get to the dancefloor.

It’s also the kind of thing a singer might only do early in their career when she’s drumming up support for their first single (is it worth citing here the video for Billie Piper’s single Because I Want To With which features an alien invasion? Thought not.) Do these artistes later on, when they discover that their new album is already half price at Woolworths, long for those days when everything was fresh and new and their career was ahead of them and they were being called upon to record proxy answer machine messages? Is that what led to Britney’s more recent troubles, the remembrances of these times past?

Yes, ok. I know. Three days to go...

Mystery Music March in April

Having spent the best part of a month mostly talking about music I genuinely do like, it seems only fair to inflict some utter rubbish on myself and write about that too. Taking a glance at my mp3 player, I now have enough music on here that it would take over fifty days listening non-stop to get through it all, my entire cd collection. Logically I really should delete the music I don’t like; I've certainly ferreted and filleted already with everything from Simply Red to the Traci Lords album (don’t ask) heading towards the recycling bin.

But there are some tracks which, despite making me scream I just can’t part with. Sometimes they're the early work by artists who turned a corner or rubbish versions of favourite songs or in one case below my own petty annoyance with a single aspect. So even though I can almost hear them festering on there, as though the binary ones and zeros within them might have the ability to melt my hard drive like acid, I'm risking disaster through retention.



We Built This Starbucks On Heart and Soul – Jefferson Starbucks

The original Starship version was my favourite song ever when I was eight years old, just as every song was my favourite song ever if it was getting enough airplay on the local radio station. Now, I’m really not so sure, but it's certainly superior to this corporate reworking created for what they called a ‘leadership conference’ and leaked onto the internet. It’s the kind of work which has the power to make you like your favourite coffee chain just a little bit less each time you hear it.

Two weedy vocalists over a disappointing backing track pass the ethos of the company on to its employees without irony and with horrid, demoralising lyrics such as ‘So many partners / working late at night / living the ways of being / in the green apron look’, a totalitarian message, that knocks on for five whole minutes and blows the impression Starbucks wants us to have of their shops being a comfortable regular third place to be with staff that are our friends.

Reason for keeping: It’s horrendous but hilarious. I’ve started going to Costa Coffee. That fantastic image was borrowed from here.



Big Yellow Taxi (Traffic Jam Mix) – Joni Mitchell

In case you can’t see me right now, I’m putting up my hands in the universal sign of ‘Hold on a minute let me explain’. This isn’t the version you know, from her album Ladies of the Canyon. That’s gorgeous, a beautiful depiction of the destruction city developers continue to wrought on nature. It’s also, you’ll notice, not the cover version by Counting Crows featuring Vanessa Carlton’s ‘um-bap-bap-baps’ which though corporate still has just enough soul to commemorate the original. No, my approbation is reserved for the anodyne, put the vocals and a bunch of clichéd samples into a computer and press a button remix version that appears on the first soundtrack to the sitcom Friends.

I loved Friends and I largely quite liked this album which also features such luminaries as KD Lang, Lou Reed, The Pretenders and Toad The West Sprocket in all their unmessedaboutwith glory. Yet, the producers also include this indigestible slab of chopped liver, Joni’s vocal being chased around a parking lot by the kind of backing track which sounds as though it was made up from the demo version of the old eJay software. How ironic that this song about the ruination of beauty should be subject to this kind of cultural vandalism and appear on an album dedicated to songs about six people living in a big city.

Reason for keeping: Fades out into the moment in Friends when Phoebe sings ‘I made a man with eyes of coal / and a smile so bewitching / how was I supposed to know / my mom was dead in the kitchen’. The soundtrack everyone really wanted was ‘Phoebe sings…’ I think.



Goldberg Variations – Glenn Gould

Bit of a difficult choice because one of my access points to classical music was François Girard’s film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, a biography of the pianist which thematic took ideas from this his most famous recording. It’s undoubtedly a work of genius, both in composer and performer, the two married perfectly and particularly brilliant in the opening aria so beloved of European filmmakers and Woody Allen. Here’s the problem: what critics tactfully call his ‘singing’.

Gould wasn’t a quiet pianist and on this recording of Bach's masterwork, he grunts, breaths, sighs and indeed hums his way through the tunes, the microphone close by picking up his humanity as well as the sound of the piano, essentially everything that would be inaudible in a concert hall. Since Gould gave up playing live, eventually the only way to enjoy his virtuosity was on tape and vinyl, audio interference included, and it’s a distraction that’s sometimes hard to take. A company recently released a computer generated recording which mimicked Gould’s finger work but filtered out his other performing. Critics welcomed it with open arms. There’s a lesson there.

Reason for keeping: It is still Gould playing the Goldberg Variations. It just depends how tolerant I’m feeling on that day.



Real World – Alanis Morissette

I’ve written endlessly about Alanis in the past, eagerly awaiting each new album, even though in my heart of hearts I could be paraphrasing Sickboy from Trainspotting – ‘Jagged Little Pill was a mere peak in an otherwise downward spiral’. Nothing’s been quite as indispensable as that opening salvo and yet mostly loveable and I’m still desperate to hear what her next album Flavors of Entanglement (despite the title), especially after the My Humps cover. Except. Pill was not her first record, no matter how many Best New Artist awards she might have been nominated for and won. Her first two records, released in the very early nineties were Canada only releases and clearly influenced by the likes of Tiffany and particularly Debbie Gibson, only, um, not as good. They might sold reasonably well, giving Morissette the impetuous to move to LA and try again, but they’re nearly impossible to listen to.

The second platinum selling album, Now Is The Time, is doubly dispiriting because she was a co-writer but there’s not a single real emotion throughout. This opening track, an Electric Youth knock-off, begins with a chant ‘We play the game with determination / We don't give a dam 'bout our reputation baby / It's not a game, it's a revelation / Step inside the real world / The real world...yeah yeah yeah... The real world...yeah...” which is about as lyrically complex as it gets. The rest sounds like a London Boy’s seminal Requiem rendered by a Pat Benitar impersonator, with Alanis’s vocal betraying an overbearing producer’s interference. She told Rolling Stone in 1995 that wasn’t “scared (that) people might hear these records. I never did Playboy centerfolds. There's nothing I regret. Maybe people will just understand my lyrics a little more if they hear those records.” Indeed.

Reason for keeping: It’s always good to be reminded of where your favourite musicians came from because it makes their later work seem even better (see also Shelby Lynne before I Am Shelby Lynne) and it cost me fifteen pounds on ebay. A decade later Alanis considered including a couple of her Canadians on her greatest hits compilation but decided against it on the grounds that she only really became an artist when she met Glen Ballard, the Pill producer. To be honest anything here would have been better than the clichéd cover version of Seal’s Crazy which did appear on The Collection. Recorded for a Gap commercial and considered acceptable enough to be released as a single, the video for this opus which actually ‘borrowed’ the twist ending from the promo of Smack My Bitch Up. Great. Perhaps I should have included that instead.



Always Look On The Bright Side of Life (radio edit) – Eric Idle

Because a single word makes all the difference. When Liverpool Football Club last won some European tournament, the city centre filled with people, live footage of the area around St. George’s Hall featuring shoulder-to-shoulder supporters awaiting the arrival of the bus, cup and players. In one voice they sang not only You’ll Never Walk Alone but also in a surreal twist Always Look On The Bright Side of Life which, I think, has become the theme song of the football fan, warming the cockles as each potential defeat beckons. As that lyric loomed I was on the edge of my seat, thousands of people shouting the s-word in one voice. And sure enough, there it was, in all its broadcast glory, with no Ofcom apology forthcoming.

Except they were clearly singing along to this radio edit, blasting out from loudspeakers, rerecorded by Idle on the back of its airplay on Simon Mayo’s Radio One Show in ’91 and totally ignoring the replacement of ‘shit’ for ‘spit’ in the line ‘Life’s a piece of ****, when you look at it’. Radio Edits are entirely understandable – we still live in a world were swearing isn’t acceptable in the afternoons and if that means that the vocal silences in some R&B sonically cripples them, so be it. Except in this case, it sounds like a censor too far. Spoils the record. Even in the early nineties, and entirely pointless on the single release which these days would have welcomed a ‘Parental Advisor’ label and especially since, he inconsistently says ‘bugger’ at the beginning of the fade out. The song is the theme song for a satire about organised religion after all.

Reason for keeping: In this rerecord, Idle slots in some solid new Python material during that fade out ‘It’s nearly the end of the record. You’ll be announcing another tune in a minute. Alright so your wife’s just run off with an Argentinean polo player. OK, so your husband just decamped with a baby sitter – and he’s from Norway. Alright so your team’s lost 15-0 to Barnett. It’s not the end of the world is it?’

Mystery Music March in April

What a Wonderful World – Louis Armstrong

Working towards writing this piece, I was horrified to discover that Clear Channel, the corporation that owns a large percentage of the commercial radio stations in America added Wonderful World to the ‘inappropriate’ list of songs that should not be played in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. As well as completely misunderstanding the meaning of the song, surely exactly the thing you need in times like those is something which reminds you that actually this world is a wonderful place to live even if there’s minority of people existing on it who have a habit of doing some very, very evil things.

I’ve no compunction about saying that this is one of my favourite songs. Top ten, any list, John Lennon’s a hack for appropriating the sentiment. From hearing it over the closing titles of the non-rubbish radio and tv versions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy to the closing titles of the film Twelve Monkeys, I can’t think many songs infused with such hope and beauty that were also originally sung by someone who sounds as though they’ve been swallowing gravel at every meal time for their entire life. The simple accompaniment on that version, a small orchestra emphasising that voice is perfect and it’s absolutely right it should have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.

It’s been covered often but rarely well. The Joey Ramone is a gold standard because it’s different enough from the original to stand alone. All too often though, balladeers, female usually, overdo that sentiment to the point of rancidity, emphasising the chorus to the point of absurdity and, well, making it sound like every other ballad they’ve ever sung. Orchestral versions fare better, The Pavão Quartet inevitably hitting just about the right tone, even if, by the mid-section you could imagine it being used on a daytime charity commercial with a Paul McGann voiceover.

The problem is, in the midst of all that, I can’t really talk. In November 2006, at a quarter to midnight according to the file’s date stamp, I recorded my own version. I don’t remember now exactly why it happened, and why I thought it would be a good idea, especially since I can’t really sing. At all (despite what I said yesterday about Zadok) . Listening back to it now, I can detect a certain amount of affection, a misguided attempting at professionalism which just sounds a bit wrong. But it is what it is even if it just sits there.

I remember dropping it onto a mix cd for someone (hello Kat) and them saying something nice. There it sits on my hard disk – and now on this blog, because it does appear to sum up what the song means to me and even if it isn’t perfect, and includes a couple of moments when I start thinking I'm Louis, it seems only fair that after criticising other people’s voices and music I should offer some of my own.

What A Wonderful World. Acapella (sorry). (2.3 mb .mp3 download)

Mystery Music March in April

Zadok The Priest -- George Frideric Handel

Only the best classical pieces can drag themselves unscathed from being eviscerated and used in a hundred finance commercials and being selected as one of Tara Palmer Tompkinson’s top five classical pieces but Zadok has that ability. Composed in 1727 for the coronation of George II of Great Britain its been a repeat fixture in every subsequent ceremony including the one attended by our current monarch. As with a certain percentage of choral music, it’s not lyrically complex, with Handel paraphrasing 1 Kings 1:38–40, no doubt because it includes a line which could be belt out to venerate the new king:

“Zadok, the Priest and Nathan, the Prophet anointed Solomon King.
And all the people rejoic'd, and said:
'God save The King, long live The King, may The King live for ever!
Amen Hallelujah!"

I know what that sounds like because I’ve actually sang it for the Queen on the occasion of her fortieth year as monarch It was my next to final year of secondary school and someone decided it would be good idea to fill the Anglican Cathedral with school kids and have them sing Handel very loudly, whilst oddly other kids offered a martial arts demonstration. We practiced solidly for two weeks, frequently after school and on the day the big church looked a treat, and even though we had all rehearsed separately, the collective sound was suitably epic. Even the anti-royalists amongst us were excited about meeting her majesty. But she was clearly having a very busy day and didn’t have time to stop and listen, passing by on her way to the altar.

It is a great piece to sing. As well as the slightly bonkers out of context second line ‘Nathan, the Prophet anointed Solomon King’ (which makes him sound like a sidekick) it's replete with lengthy vowel sounds and even for us basses a chance to project, not simply provide background for the vocal stylings of the sopranos. Co-incidentally, the best recording I have is from ten years later when a special Prom was held at Buckingham Palace in which the crowd cheer with the onset of the opening few bars played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra (conducted by Sir Andrew Davis), the vocals provided by the BBC Symphony Chorus. My memory of our attempt is faulty but my fantasy is that despite our schoolchild voices it was good as this and greeted by the same sea of applause at the conclusion.

Mystery Music March in April

Video Killed The Radio Star – Buggles

The thesis of Trevor Horn’s song (from the album The Age of Plastic) is that radio stars have become irrelevant in the world of video. With the growth of file sharing and youtube that message should be intensified but actually radio would appear to be as relevant today as ever, especially since the advent of podcasts. I recently attended a focus group for the local radio station and the opinions were a reminder that more than ever people want their lives lived to a background of music and chatter and that they hardly ever want to stop to watch that same song with pictures. Trevor Horn is wrong. There, I’ve said it.

In fact it’s very rare now for a song to become a hit on the back of a video alone – the promo’s become part of a general marketing campaign which can include talent show appearances, magazine and newspaper interviews, live appearances on radio and television, paparazzi baiting and radio air-play. And the DJ’s still king. On the asteroid I’m presently living on unfettered by popular music in which I’ve not heard of half the people in the Gallup Top 40 (or whatever it’s called these days) let alone listened to any of it, but even I’ve heard of Chris Moyles not that I could actually tell you about any of the songs he’s playing. Except Leona Lewis, because there was something about her on the news.

My suspicion is that the other reason that video hasn’t killed the radio star is because of the quality of recent work. Flicking through the freeview channels at umpteen time of the evening and stopping on The Hits, I’m yet to be impressed by what I see. Presumably because production costs have sky-rocketed, pop promos just seem so dull and samey, featuring large men shouting at each other in night clubs, women writhing up against each other in libraries or both being attacked by a giant CGI effect. If Beavis and Butthead were still around they’d have nothing to talk about. Except perhaps for the boobies. H-huh-huh. H-huh-huh.

Before you interrupt, I know I’m wrong and there is some very interesting work being done in pop videos, but since none of it is connected with music these kinds of channel generally show, we’re stuck with what looks like an inherent lack of innovation. The last really exciting video I saw was for Snow Patrol, the one with the POV from a car bonnet rushing through the streets of Paris, and that’s only because they’d appropriated the second half of Claude Lelouch’s short film C'était un rendez-vous (and makes better sense in its original form). The Culture Show recently featured an interview with Garth Jennings, the man who ruined the film of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and he seemed to be doing some interesting things with giant prop legs and Supergrass but really I miss the days when you could turn on the television and be sure to find Peter Gabriel turning into plasticsene or Madonna doing naughty things to Jesus.

But the song is about more than that. Horn was apparently inspired by a JG Ballard short story, The Sound-Sheep in which a deaf boy searched the world for stray music and stumbled upon a outcast opera singer hiding in a sewer. It’s about how new generations hardly ever appreciate the technology of the past, unable to comprehend that at one point, radio was the primary source of entertainment. Which is why, despite the record being available on cd and download, my only copy of Video Killed The Radiostar is a crackly but still playable original vinyl pressing. I know those clicks so well that a clean digital copy would just sound weird.

Mystery Music March in April

Plays The Music of Oasis – The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

I bloody love The Puppini Sisters. And The Pavão Quartet. Frankly I love genre busting cover versions and the groups who sing or play them and could have filled every day of this month (or so) spanning musical 'celebration' with examples. It’s the change in idiom, the ramming of one set of musical intentions into another and witnessing the fallout. This threesome and foursome do exactly that, turning Blondie’s Heart of Glass into a 40s wartime dance number or making Singin' in the Rain sound like a swinging Mozart string quartet.

The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Plays The Music of Oasis is the apogee of this decent into madness, a full orchestra trying to get its thematic rocks around rock music and only partially succeeding, but glorious in the attempt. It’s certain that when Noel and Liam recorded the opening guitar riff on Roll With It that the last thing they expected was that it would be at some point rendered by the string section of the RPO or that their mid-song wall of sound could inspire a dramatic saxophone solo which in the end has nothing to do with the work its trying to mimic.

Orchestral covers are nothing new of course. I’ve a cassette somewhere of Rock Legends, a chivalric knight on the cover hiding disappointing versions of You Can Call Me Al, Bat Out Of Hell and The Final Countdown. But what makes Plays The Music of Oasis so special is the obvious commitment of the players, finally allowed to lay to rest the demons of the past and youth which would have been misspent had their parents not pushed them into joining the school orchestra – or as the sleep notes explains:

‘Now the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra may prefer a dress code that’s closer to a penguin colony than the streets of Manchester, but beneath those starched shirts and evening gowns lie primeval passions shaken, but not always stirred, by their customary classical repertoire.’

Who writes this stuff? Oh Christopher Valentine, London 1997.

It’s not entirely successful or as brave as it could have been. On some tracks, including Rock n Roll Superstar and Wonderwall, electric and acoustic guitars herald the start of the song which seems like a failure of imagination. But that’s more than made up for by the orchestration on She’s Electric which sounds like it was inspired by Pentangle and The Monkees and has a rather wonderful Vivaldi-esque solo in the middle as surprising and unexpected as the jazz mess during Less Than Jake's cover of I Think I Love You (which turned up on the soundtrack to the film Scream 2).

You do wonder who all this is aimed at. Listening to Radio 3, I get the impression that a large percentage of classical music fans are anti-rock, judging by the hate mail they receive whenever they experiment and slot in even the most acoustic of tracks to fill the gap before the news on the hour, so they’re hardly going to pick this up. Oasis fans might give it a look, particularly if they’re completists, but would probably be wholly dissatisfied by the lack of their idol’s vocals, substituted in places by a French Horn (which does sound surprisingly Mancunian). The target audience then are those of us attracted by unusual juxtapositions and think that Shakermaker pretending to be a John Barry theme is a very good thing indeed.

Mystery Music March in April

The JCB Song – Nizpoli

The half hour I take to write the following will probably be a bit difficult. Regular readers of the blog will be aware (and possibly have commented) on the fact I’m a bit of a softy. Given the right conditions I’ll cry like a baby. Usually the reaction’s provoked by a film – end of Titanic, end of The Lord of the Rings, end of Love Story, even the end of bloody ET. But there are also certain songs or pieces of music which can act like a trigger. I’m looking for some catharsis (after this probably) and so here then is one of the songs guaranteed to make me sniffle.

Thanks to the magic of blogging I actually know when I first saw the video for The JCB Song and laughed through all of the pop culture references, hearing about Zoids what have you for the first time in however many years. I sensed it might be autobiographical and indeed it is based on lead singer Luke’s childhood experiences, of dyslexia, and bullying and imaginary characters. But despite some of the very personal references it has a universal appeal, and feels like something we (well those of us of a certain age) have collectively written in our memory.

I’m just going to play the song and in a couple of minutes I’ll tell you exactly when I blubbed then write the first thing that comes into my head. Apologies if it’s a bit rough. It might help if I sing along …

A few minutes later ...

‘My dad's probably had a bloody hard day / But he's been good fun and bubblin' and jokin' away’

That’s a guilt complex isn’t it? The idea of my Dad and Mum disappearing off to work every day, not really knowing what they’d actually be doing, having them home in the evening and expecting them to be happy to play which they were almost every night and then when you’re a teenager you can treat them like horribly despite all of the sacrifices they’ve made to get you into double figures safely.

Once I started work I realised that actually working can be a bit shit and that some nights all you really want to do is nothing and how stinky my attitude might have been. More than likely it's hard wired into our brains that they don’t understand why we don’t understand and that’s how they break from nurturing and we break from wanting to be nurtured.

That ... helped ...

Mystery Music March in April

Supermarioland -- Ambassadors Of Funk Featuring M.C. Mario

Produced by Simon Harris (who has worked with everyone from Norman Cook to Simon Cowell via Boys II Men), Supermarioland features one of my favourite rap lyrics, simply because if ever there was a set of words filling a gap in the middle of a record, it's these. Whereas everything else is about Mario’s adventure …

“Well I'm back off my Lisa Stansfield trip
And I'm rejuvinated and I'm remixed
I took planes, trains, and automobiles
And for real got ill in Brasil (c'mon! c'mon!)
I'm the Wizard of Oz when on tour
And got poor in Singapore
And I've eaten sushi in Japan
But there ain't no place like Super Mario Land.”

Lord knows what they made of that in Japan were the record was re-exported. Clearly some of the composer’s youth was spent reruns of Ted Roger’s gameshow 3-2-1 on Challenge TV. I wonder what he'd make of it?

“Now then lets see what you’ve won. A Lisa Stansfield trip – well Lisa Stansfield sang All Around The World which would suggest a round the world trip, but it says you’ve already been on one of those and that you’re rejuvenated and remixed – a health spa or a hi-fi? “I took planes, trains, and automobiles” could suggest that you’ve won a car but again there are locations and bad things happening, losing your money, the leftovers from the sushi meal, being ill in Brazil. That’s right, sorry folks, it’s Dusty Bin….”

The rest of the record is as you’d expect, Kōji Kondō’s music for the Gameboy version of Mario underscored by a rather familiar sounding drum beat with a range samples which have since become cliché and these rap asides probably designed to break up the potential monotony. Everything else is on message, attacks by killer bees, becoming lost in dark passages and collecting coins – which are still weird subjects for a rap and dance record, but multi-media marketing always takes existing genres to strange places.

None stranger than the version orchestrated and recorded by the John Williams & Boston Pops with its Blue Danube mid-section. But that’s another story …

Mystery Music March in April

Imperial Bedroom -- Elvis Costello and The Attractions

Suggested by Ian Jones of The Digi-Cream Times.

For a long time, for all of my life in fact, I was convinced there was no such thing as a perfect album. One that had no weak links on it whatsoever. One that, if a song were selected at random, or if you played it using the shuffle facility on a CD player, you wouldn't mind what track you heard.

Surely such an album couldn't existed. Surely, on even the so-called
masterpieces of popular music (Revolver, Pet Sounds, Dark Side Of The Moon, What's Going On, OK Computer), there's always one duff moment, one track to be tolerated rather than treasured?

I say I felt that way for all of my life. I should qualify that. What I mean is for all of my life up to about three weeks ago. Because I think I've just found such an album. In fact I know I have. I've owned it for around 10 years, but for some reason only recently realised that, yeah, it doesn't matter where I join it, it's exceptional. It's faultless. All the waythrough. From start to finish.

It is Imperial Bedroom, by Elvis Costello and The Attractions, which is weird because it's not my favourite Costello album (which is Punch The Clock) nor his most consistent (which is Get Happy). Nonetheless it doesn't contain one song that is anything less than stunning and which, in and of themselves, are mini-masterpieces.

I think its secret is its musicality. Costello has always, was always from the beginning, feted for his lyrical dexterity and linguistic acrobatics. Such qualities are in glorious evidence here, all over the place, albeit leavened with a sharpened sense of realism, or scepticism, or perhaps just pessimism:

"Charged with insults and flattery, her body moves with malice;
Do you have to be so cruel to be callous?"
(Beyond Belief)

"Love is always scarpering or cowering or fawning;
You drink yourself insensitive and hate yourself in the morning"
(Man Out Of Time)

"So what if this is a man's world?
I want to be a kid again about it
Give me back my sadness
I couldn't hide it, even if I tried"
(Kid About It)

And especially...

"I'm the town cryer
And everybody knows
I'm a little down
With a lifetime to go"
(Town Cryer)

Never mind even more dizzying rhyme schemes, fit for A Level inspection:

"Little things just seem to undermine her confidence in him;
He was late this time last week.
Who can she turn to when the chance of coincidence is slim?
Because the baby isn't old enough to speak"
(The Long Honeymoon)

All this wordplay and syntactical derring-do, while perhaps looking rather arch and contrived written down, totally comes alive when wedded to the most spirited, imaginative and inspiring of music. There's so much melody and tonality poured into this album. Each track is a case study in how to produce - in all senses, creatively and technically - the perfect pop song. Not a note is superfluous. Words and music work in tandem throughout.

Part of this is due to the Attractions, Costello's band for much of his career, never sounding more resonant and dimensional than on this album. Dashes of instrumental brilliance are flecked all over the record like dabs of gold on a painting. A cheeky drum fill here; a magical bass riff there; keyboard ornamentation nigh-on everywhere - but never to the detriment of the greater whole.

The producer, Geoff Emerick, also had a big role. He was the bloke who engineered all the Beatles records from Revolver onwards, helping to create musical soundscapes - to use a cliché - in which everyday songs of universal sentiments somehow became statements of genius.

Such is the magic wrought here. Beyond Belief, a lament about, or possibly for, the state of the world in 1982, passes through Emerick's hands and ends up a juggernaut of tension and awe. The Long Honeymoon is the sonic equivalent of a film noir. Man Out Of Time is a rainbow of melodic colour and invention. And In Every Home ropes in an entire orchestra. And so on.

You could say it's indulgence. I'll admit the album took some time to
wheedle its way into my affections. What seals it, however, is the fact that on top of everything else, it's just a bloody great record to sing along to. And here's where all that scope and ambition pulls off its greatest coup, by virtue of giving you simply so much to choose from: you can attempt Elvis's main melody, or harmonise, or sing bits of the accompaniment, or mime bits of the arrangements... Anything goes.

Anyway, the fact this album has been sitting variously four inches, two metres and a corridor away from my nose for the last decade and not revealed itself in such a fashion to me until just the other week is a little disarming.

Now it has done, I'm worried about over-analysing it to the point where it ceases to be enjoyable. So I'll shut up and urge you to listen to Imperial Bedroom and let its complex, poignant, stoical but above all very human sentiments worm their way into your heart.

About Because I've just realised that you can, I've created a last.fm group for you. What are you listening to?

Mystery Music March in April

Qui-Gon's Noble End – John Williams

This was unforgivable.

It’s 1999 and a new Star Wars film is about to be released. The hype machine is cranked up and fully in motion, everyone’s excited (well everyone I know anyway) and you can’t go anywhere without seeing the familiar logo and a shot of Darth Maul, baby Anakin or Natalie Portman in unusual make-up. I’ve a video tape from the time, which records much of the pre-television publicity, from the special Omnibus documentary with Ewan McGregger watching and commenting on A New Hope to the news reports of how popular the trailer had been on the internet.

That’s all fine, very exciting and more importantly didn’t tell you too much about the plot.

And then the record company handling John Williams’s score on cd dropped this clanger in the track listing, with a music cue named after a major plot point, ruining some of the experience for any weary fan glancing at the soundtrack in HMV. We didn’t know too much about Liam Neeson’s character Qui-Gon other than he was Obi-Won’s mentor and judging by the trailer that he would sniff out that Anakin was special. But now we also knew that he died and fairly late in the film if the position of track, fifteen, was anything to go by.

Imagine if the soundtrack to Empire Strikes Back had included a track called ‘Vader is Luke’s Father’. Brrrr…. I was in the pub a few nights later and someone shouted at me ‘Do not look at the back of The Phantom Menace box!’ and when I told him I already had we looked at each other blackly. Now we’d be spending most of the film waiting for him to die, the expiration no longer a surprise. We might as well have read the novelisation which also, bizarrely, was published a month in advance of the release date, should there be any fans who couldn’t wait another few weeks to find out what happened.

Film soundtracks are unique in this respect, especially if they feature score rather than songs. After the fact it’s possible to read these track listings and find a pretty accurate synopsis of the story and they do have their uses particularly in remembering exactly what was happening during the film as those trumpets clash in, along with the drums. More often than not they’re fairly careful not to give too much away.

But every now and then, someone does think through exactly who the cd is aimed at and that in fact they’re often put out a few weeks ahead as part of the marketing. Another classic example is The Sixth Sense whose final track (see here if you've see the film) destroyed the one moment of excitement for those of us who didn’t work out what the twist going to be from the bloody trailer. Which I did.

I actually quite liked The Phantom Menace first time around, watching on a tiny screen on the release day at the local multiplex. It was easy to put your fears that it might not be as good as it could been down to the soundtrack spoiler playing on your mind throughout. Being a boy, I still love the lightsaber fight at the end with the Orffian chorus ranking up the tension and being not a typical boy I’m still impressed by the costumes, Padme in particular.

This track is typical of the score, opening with mass trumpets then plenty of bass percussion before breaking into strings when the fateful moment comes. Once Master Qui-Gon’s shuffled off (and not disappeared – still controversial that) we’re back in brass as Obi-Wan gives what for to Darth Maul (denoted by drums). It doesn’t work as a cohesive piece of music (these things rarely do) but it’s still stirring stuff and works well within the body of the whole album.

But I still have to air on the side of comic shop worker Tim from the sitcom Spaced: “You are so blind! You so do not understand! You weren't there at the beginning. You don't know how good it was! How important! This is it for you! This jumped-up firework display of a toy advert! People like you make me sick! What's wrong with you?“

Mystery Music March in April

Losing My Religion – Tori Amos

Tori Amos gave the best interview I ever saw anyone give on any television channel related to sell their new product.

When Richard & Judy were still presenting This Morning from The Albert Dock in Liverpool, Tori’s agent thought it was the perfect place to publicise her new album, the not at all mainstream (at least in those days) Boys For Pele. I’d been waiting for the whole of what’d been a pretty dull show for her appearance and she’d been dropped in with ten minutes to go. Don’t forget this was in the days when R&J were still the housewives choice, despite the odd foray into goolly fondling. Possibly.

In the five minutes she has before playing her new single through the credits which would scroll all too quickly across the bottom of the screen, she eloquently talked about how she seemed to have found personal harmony and a new inner strength within herself, and how her music has reached an equilibrium she is pleased with and how she’d ridden a horse for the first time a few days before and how great it had made her feel. Except Judy had only asked her one question: ‘How are you?’ As you can imagine they were both a bit stunned by the reply. Tori just bats her eyelids as though to say ‘What, you guys had questions?’

I’ve always been impressed with singers who make it their policy to do the unexpected which is probably why I was so disappointed when Nelly Furtado produced the oh-so mainstream Loose or Alanis Morissette marked the tenth anniversary of her rock debut by turning out an acoustic version for sale in Starbucks. Tori Amos has never been like that and although I haven’t been a huge fan of her most recent work (which has perhaps been a ‘concept’ too far, for me at least) the publicity interviews are always fun. Journalists hardly ever know what to make of her, especially when does things like calling her songs her children.

The most unruly of said children are the cover versions. Right from the beginning, rather than simply stocking up the b-sides to her singles with other album tracks or for that matter failed album tracks, in what amounts to musical auterism, Tori would record cover versions of well known tracks and not so well known tracks in her own style, more often than not one girl and her piano, Nirvana, Hendrix, Springsteen even Chas and Dave all torchsonged. It’s a tradition she’s continued to this day and legends speak of even more eclectic juxtapositions live, with a haunting bootleg of Kylie’s Can’t Get You Out Of My Head still doing the rounds.

Losing My Religion is a prime example. Recorded for the film soundtrack to the little known (but worth seeing) Higher Learning, Tori tosses out everything but the lyrics, reducing the pace, with to be honest only her vocal suggesting the originally melody. Like the covers only album Strange Little Girls, the song gains a completely different resonance from the female voice; the words are about obsession and being at the end of your tether and whereas Michael Stipes vocal suggests that he’s about the blow his top, Amos is far more reflective, as though she’s looking back at the dark moment. Tori essentially makes it her own and like the best cover versions proves that a great song, is indeed a great song, no matter who’s singing it.

Mystery Music March in April

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised – Gil Scott-Heron

Really Gil? Watching the US presidential race from across the pond, well away from your stomping ground, it certainly looks like the revolution’s being televised and that the White House may have its first black resident. In addition, with twenty-four hour block news coverage, we’re seeing revolutions throughout the world going through the motions. Interestingly though I have detected an inherent bias in some of the coverage of the Democratic Primaries. Hilary Clinton is forever losing elections, but Barack Obama is hardly ever listed as thrashing the opposition. But the fact that two of the historically most oppressed peoples in society are fighting each other to become leader of the free world is surely progress, even if they then have to beat a dandy and a clown.

Gil Scott-Heron’s polemic is best enjoyed in its stripped down ‘Early Version’ as it appears on the album Ghetto Stylee. Here he introduces himself and the band and the bands they’re from before rhythmically launching into the words (‘We’d like to do a poem for you called ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ primarily because it won’t be), his only accompaniment some bongo drums. He largely shouts the lines, it’s not quite rapping and it’s certainly not singing, but it is really, really exciting. Here are those lyrics so you can shout them yourself (tapping on a table should do the trick), and a handy primer.

Scott-Heron is writing about contemporary pop culture and specifically television’s white bias and how it would probably miss the increase in prominence of black people and the culture of black people. Its imports apparently non-threatening marketing slogans and product names and turns them into rather sinister symbols of how white culture has subjugated all else. But it’s a work filled with hope that things can change.

It is just a pity that it hasn't really and we’re still addicted to the same stupid shit now as we were then. Much as I love Baz Luhrman’s The Sunscreen Song, which sounds very much like a late 90s equivalent, it doesn’t make me want to go out and do something in the same way. Other than go back to university again. Or find a girl. Perhaps take in a concert. And wear sunscreen.