On the Beat

Back in the mid 1980s, there was a Christmas single about a woman having a nervous breakdown (or similar crisis) at Christmas. It came out around about the same times as the Waitresses' "Christmas Wrapping".

It was an excellent single, providing a little bit of balance in this irritatingly upbeat time. (Happy Credit Crunch Christmas! Hee...)

Thing is, I have no idea who it was by or what it was called. It doesn't get wheeled out on an annual basis (leaving Wham! as the most depressing Christmas song going...)

Any clues out there in internetland?

Last night, I went to see Arild Andersen, Tommy Smith and Paolo Vinaccia play at the Lot in Edinburgh. It was a very similar line up to the concert Andersen, Smith and Alyn Cosker played during the Edinburgh Jazz Festival - but something was missing, last night.

I’m not sure what to was: whether it was the weather, the venue (which normally I think is great – it is intimate, one is close the stage, and usually it works well), the audience (a largely middle aged crowd, for a change – I felt like I was the youngest there!) – or, just maybe, the musicians: perhaps they were feeling slightly jaded, since they are half way through a tour of Scotland, promoting their new CD (which has had some great reviews - and I picked up a copy last night. I have picked up a lot of music over the past couple of days!).

This was a good set, but not a great set – unlike the summer’s trio performance, or Smith and Andersen’s previous duets I saw in Edinburgh (almost exactly two years ago – memories of that evening may be influencing me) and Islay some time before that. It lacked a bit of intensity and excitement. Possibly, my own expectations were simply too high.

The music was lovely though; and the CD is pretty good, too!

So there I am, browsing in Fopp again. I have no idea how I got there.

My eye is caught by a box set. “Original recordings from the Manticore vaults.” And one of those recordings is of the second ever rock concert I went to: Emerson Lake & Palmer at Hammersmith Odeon, 27 November [erm…] 1972.
( ...If we make it we can all sit back and laugh... )

Nicked from ...

Put your media player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first is the title.

There's something I just can't describe


Run from the beast
la fin des jours d'automne est pénetrante
Happy death men stand in line
Well the dawn is howling

Franky was a mook from the block we used to live on
Times are tough for English babies
Beside yourself if radio’s gonna stay
I’m gonna make you wonder if you’re my friend

Young velvet porcelain boy
I chose my friends only far too well
Slip inside the eye of your mind
Sometimes I walk sideways to avoid you

I brought your face down on my head
If you ever get close to a human
You push me to go the extra mile
Impossible raw woman, I you know you’re all too hard to please

Well the last thing that you knew
Some things you never get used to
You came waltzing in
Come forth and speak to me

I'm not really sure that works very well for me - though it was fun playing!

Tracks in order:

Title: I Love You More - Beloved

The Beast - the Only Ones
Harmonium - Stereolab
Happy Death Men - Echo and the Bunnymen
Be My Enemy - the Waterboys
King of New York - Fun Loving Criminals
Sunday's Best - Elvis Costello & the Attraction
Radio Free Europe - REM
So Called Friend - Texas
Candy Perfume Girl - Madonna
Perfect Skin - Lloyd Cole & the Commotions
Don't Look Back In Anger - Oasis
You Trip Me Up - the Jesus & Mary Chain
Rhythm of Cruelty - Magazine
Human Behaviour - Bjork
Push - Madonna
Impossible - the Charlatans
My Way To You - Lloyd Cole
High Fidelity - Elvis Costello & the Attraction
Talk Her Down - Starsailor
Love Rescue Me - U2

Last weekend, I went to a concert by the Scottish Chamber Choir at St Gile’s Cathedral. A friend was singing in the choir.

I am not a huge fan of choral music, but I also like doing things that I wouldn’t normally do; and I wanted to see the cathedral as a functioning building rather than with the eyes of a tourist. I am also always telling myself that I should go to more classical concerts, because I always seem to enjoy them more than I expect. (Plus, I like listening to music I don’t know.)
( Read more... )

andrewducker linked to an article on the BBC website about Ray Morrissey, who, according to the article, has been to over 5,000 gig in 35 years. (Actually, that works out at just over one a month, so they may have got their numbers wrong, but let's skip over that.) Ray kept notes of each gig he went to; and he has put them all online in an accessible, searchable form.

This is a goldmine. He started going to gigs in 1973 (so I beat him by a year! Ha!), and he went to lots of the same gigs I went to. And lots I wish I had gone to!

Magic!

I'm going to be lost there for ages!

Those of you who pay attention may be aware that I quite like Duke Ellington; indeed, he is one of my heroes, and I think the guy was a genius. He made some of the most powerful, life-affirming music of the twentieth century.

Today, I have done something I don’t remember doing before: I let my iPod shuffle through a single artist – Ellington. I currently have 105 Ellington tracks on my iPod (I took most of the 24-CD centennial edition off my iPod because when I shuffle randomly, his music came up disproportionately; so I cut back to just specific LPs – Such Sweet Thunder, the Far East Suite, Black, Brown and Beige, Newport 1956, the Queen’s Suite and so on).

I started at about 10.15am – I decided I didn’t want to listen to the remembrance service, and I couldn’t decide what Ellington I wanted to listen too. So I let the iPod decide.

Five hours later (OK, I did have a break for lunch whilst I listened to the World This Weekend…), I am a little over half way through.

It has been invigorating: such variety, such beautiful and exciting music.

Wonderful.

I must do this more often!

I found Jesus last night. I was looking through a book of photographs of London, compiled by Time Out and the Getty Hulton picture library that the daughter of the friends I was staying with in London had.

I saw the picture of Jesus there: at the Hyde Park free festival of 1971.

This link will take you to the photograph - since it is copyright of Hulton, I thought it would be a bit cheeky to post the picture itself.

Jesus was the name of this hippy - the focus of the photograph - who used to go to lots of gigs in London; I think he may have got in free. Everyone - everyone - called him Jesus. He was always at Sunday night gigs at the Roundhouse, dancing down at the front - idiot dancing.

He was kind of a mascot to the audience - a familiar fixture at every rock concert I went to in the early 1970s. I don't know what became of him after punk came along: perhaps he cut all his hair off and became a punk, or maybe he didn't like the music and stopped going to the concerts.

* * *

Co-incidentally, I spent yesterday in the bowels of the Roundhouse: not in the auditorium, but a meeting room below, a large circular brick space with corridors running of it like spokes of a wheel. Presumably it housed the machinery for turning the engines in the space above (once more a venue).

I was pleased to see, standing on a corner of the new cafe at the Roundhouse, one of Gormley's figures from Event Horizon; it was good to see it had found a new home.

I'll write about what I was doing at the Roundhouse some other time, when I have thought about it a bit more.

For many, many years, I have played drums; and I often recognise pieces music by their rhythms.

I was sitting watching Strictly Come Dancing this evening. The last couple were Jodie Kidd and Ian Waite. They were dancing a paso doble.

The music started, with just a drum beat; and I thought, that's sounds like Blur's Song 2. Which was absurd, this being a ballroom dancing programme and that being a raucous rock song.

But I was wrong, and right: it was Song 2, played (in the same rhythm!) by the BBC dance band.

Kidd was excellent, by the way - the dance worked really well with the song.

But it was a little surreal. And I was shocked to recognise the music from the first few beats.

I have an admission to make. The very first single that I bought wasn’t an uber-cool record – say, the Velvet Underground or the Rolling Stones or the MC5 or something like that. It was Rolf Harris’ “Two Little Boys”.

I was nine at the time, and I asked my mother to buy it for me.

I only point this out because I have just learnt from the radio that Harris’ has rerecorded it for Armistice Day.

It still makes me sad!

(My first LP wasn’t very cool, either: ELP’s “Trilogy”, in 1973.)