may 16th extract-the everly brothers

The Everly Brothers-Lightning Express-Songs Our Daddy Taught Us

The saddest record ever made. The grimmest record ever made. This album takes on the darkest, deepest records made by Sunn 0))),Swans or whoever is dealing with despair and makes them pale in comparison.  Anyone else is just playing for effect. “Songs Our Daddy Taught Us” is so hardcore that it defies belief. As an indication here is the track listing;

1. Roving Gambler

2. Down In The Willow Garden

3. Long Time Gone

4. Lightning Express

5. That Silver Haired Daddy Of Mine

6. Who’s Going To Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet

7.Barbara Allen

8.Oh So Many Years

9. I’m Here To Get My Baby Out Of Jail

10.Rockin’Alone (In An Old Rockin’Chair)

11.Kentucky

12. Put My Little Shoes Away

(Maybe this doesn’t give too much of a clue away. Yet.)

I’d heard about this record for a long time before I eventually got hold of it. To me The Everly Brothers were purveyors of schmaltzy harmonising; good tunes and all the rest but didn’t have that edge that their contemporaries such as Gene Vincent or Eddie Cochran possessed. I suppose that the only songs I’d really heard by them were the big hits ,”Cathy’s Clown”, “All I Have To Do Is Dream”, “Bye Bye Love”  etc but that’s not unusual.  I wouldn’t have necessarily gone digging around for much more. As with more than a fair few of the artists or records that I’ve belatedly discovered I can put it down to hearing John Peel sing their praises. It must have been a radio interview when he was asked which records affected him the most on an emotional level, that as well as mentioning his well-known favourite-The Undertones, “Teenage Kicks”- he referred to this album by The Everly Brothers as well. (I also discovered Shep & The Limelites, “Daddy’s Home” through this same route. Another great tearjerker.) As I recall, Peel said something about not being able to play the Everly Brothers album without ending up in floods of tears. That was it for me-I just knew that I’d have to get hold of it.

I was staggered when I first heard it. Every song is unremittingly dark and despairing. Far beyond the normal cliché of country songs, the narrative of each track is that don’t expect things to get any better because they will only get worse. When matters are at a low point, don’t anticipate that there’s an upturn around the corner; it’s only going to spiral in one direction-downwards. There are songs of death, betrayal, loss and destruction. Heartbreak and immense regret. Sadness and of pitiful history repeating itself over and over again, for generation after generation. The songs that I used to sing to my children (badly, I must add, and not with vocal dexterity of Phil and Don) comprised of such happy ditties as “The Wheels on The Bus” and “Two little Fishes Swam Over The Dam”. It is no wonder that Phil and Don had such a fractious relationship if their Daddy sat them down to learn such tunes as “The Lightning Express”. This is a tale that’ll have anyone with a soul blubbling within thirty seconds. (I’m not allowed to play it within earshot of Amy as it’s “too sad”). It’s the story of a little boy who’s about to be thrown off a train as he can’t pay the fare, but he pleads with the stern yet kindly conductor to be allowed to stay for the journey. The child has to reach his mother that night as she is dying and may not last much longer. He begs the conductor to ride the train as “the best friend I have the world is waiting for me in pain…expecting to die any moment…and may not live through the day…I want to reach home and kiss mother goodbye before God takes her away…” . There’s a whip-round on the train by the other passengers so his fare can be paid but you never get to know what happens next except that the little boy’s words keep echoing through the conductor’s head. This is the general tone of the rest of the album. Although it’s such a good record it certainly isn’t one to be listening to if you feel a bit down in the dumps. 

(I don't usually post clips of the tracks but this is so exceptional...)

      

laura cantrell-what a voice!

laura cantrell...words can't describe how good that voice is...

Totally Shuffled-This Mortal Coil

extracted from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod"



This Mortal Coil-Song To The Siren-4AD single 

If, from the perspective of 2012, and if you believe everything in the mass-media, then the 1980’s were shit. There’s a plethora of cheaply commissioned television programmes, usually shown when there’s something much better on one of the other channels, about how naff the whole decade was. They’ll all have, ironic this, non-entity talking heads who were non-entities in the 80s and who have only been dragged in front of the camera to resurrect their long-flagging careers. There’ll be mocking references to shell-suits, chicken kievs, TV programmes like Blind Date, Royal Weddings, the birth of Breakfast television in the U.K., mullets, bad fashion and bad music. The list is endless. There may be slight references to the miners’ strike, Thatcher, Greenham Common and wider political issues.However, these will only be slight and probably only in the context of the birth of alternative comedy. Whereupon they’ll wheel out some addled coke-head who had a bit-part in The Young Ones and once shared a dressing room at The Comedy Store with someone who is now vastly more famous they are now, to laugh about the “scruffy lesbians at Greenham”. The general tenor is one of, at best, how much more naive everyone was back then, and at worst, how naff it all was and how much more sophisticated we are all now. Alongside all this, there’s a revisionist tendency at the moment to re-write history and to burnish the 1970’s with the same patina of cool that’s been laid  on top of the 1960’s. Well, maybe time is a great healer, but the 1970’s were shit.

For anyone who wasn’t young or around in the 1980’s then it was infinitely better than 1970’s and a thousand times better than a bunch of knobheads on Channel 4 lead you to think. The end of punk had opened a whole new vista of possibilities-not just in music but in film, art, politics, design. Here are some of the better things about the 1980’s that you never really hear about –The The’s “Soul Mining”, Prefab Sprout, the films “Paris, Texas”, “Heathers” and “Sans Soleil”, New Order and Peter Saville’s artwork, John Peel interviewing The Fall on the Tube, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the realisation of the majority of the country that Thatcher was beyond evil and because of that we never had to suffer the Tories again for nearly 20 years, the birth of hip-hop, Spike Lee, Cheers, The  Justified Ancients Of Mu-Mu, Detroit and House Music, ZTT, “Frankie Says..”, despite a general air of cynicism even now (especially now) Live Aid and the fact that ordinary people in the West actually did give a fuck as opposed the politicians who clearly didn’t, Harry Cross, the imminent release of Nelson Mandela, the ability to wear cardigans and still be cool, The End fanzine, Hill Street Blues.

And this song, the b-side of a 4 AD single, featuring the voice of Liz Fraser from The Cocteau Twins. It’s probably been played to death in the intervening quarter of a century and appropriated for awful TV ads by the very people above who slag off the 1980’s.Never mind all that, it’s still a thing of immense beauty. Even if the whole of the decade was rubbish, then these few minutes of shimmering splendour make up for it all.

get/see/read "Totally Shuffled" here!           

Kindle      http://www.amazon.co.uk/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Music-Broken-ebook/dp/B00CJYZ3CA

Paperback http://www.amazon.co.uk/Totally-Shuffled-Listening-Broken-iPod-The/dp/149495687X

may 4th extract-link davis

Link Davis-Trucker from Tennessee-Starday single   

I know nothing about Link Davis except for this rockabilly single issued on the Starday label in 1956. I do know that this song is all about Elvis when he worked as a truck driver for the Crown Electric Company and therefore gets me a route into writing about an artist who I haven’t got on the iPod but really should.

I may have tangentially touched upon Elvis somewhere along the line a bit earlier but I can’t honestly write for a year about popular music without having a bit of Elvis in here. There’s some great artists and some hugely influential artists and astoundingly innovative artists but how many are true giants, towering over the past half century and more? He touched so many lives, both ordinary individuals   and fellow artists and even now, his shadow hangs over popular culture in so many ways.

I’ve had a bit of a chequered history regarding Elvis and it’s only been in the past 15 years or so that I’ve gradually come to realise not only how important he was, and is, but really how good he was. Being so much into music for so long it was if Elvis was always there but I was sort of dismissive-there seemed to be no relevance to me. I would have no sooner bought an Elvis record in the 70’s and 80’s, when I was heavily into punk and post-punk than I would have voted for the Tories or taken up hangliding. It just didn’t seem to be anywhere on the radar. The well known songs were so well-known that it was as if they’d always been there. I didn’t not like them, it was just ambivalence. They were as (un)important to me as, say, a James Last box set advertised in the back pages of a Sunday paper. So what, it’s just Elvis. On top of that the only other exposure to Elvis was re-runs of his cheesy films from the 60’s that would be shown on daytime TV-I guess simply to use up a bit of time. I recall watching his 1968 effort, “Speedway”, about NASCAR and co-starring Bill Bixby one Wednesday afternoon when I had time on my hands. Bill Bixby and NASCAR. Nothing more needs to be said. I also had a perception-now totally wrong-of an inherent naffness of the “Fat Elvis” Vegas years.

There were, thankfully, a number of gradual turning points which have brought me to the point where I am today in understanding the greatness of the man. I think that they all happened at roughly the same time and although there may have been other influences coming to bear on me these are the main three. 

Firstly, as a birthday present for me when she was about 4 years old, Amy, my daughter, saved up her pocket money and bought me an Elvis compilation. “The 50 Greatest Hits”.  Now, by any standards, this is a brilliant collection which starts with “That’s All Right “ and “Mystery Train”  and has 48 other fantastic songs.  However, because it was a present and because the way it was bought I would have loved it anyway (unless she’d got me a Sisters of Mercy album-that would have been inexcusable). About two weeks after she got it for me, she accidently broke the jewel case and unbeknown to me, sat and made her own cover to rectify it, thinking that a new sleeve would make it better. This is my favourite piece of art ever-it beats anything done by DaVinci, Warhol, Picasso, you name it. I decided at the start of writing this year not to have any pictures or photos in this but I’ll make an exception…

(Elvis by Amy)

The second factor was a random sort of purchase of the second volume of the classic biography of Elvis by Peter Guralnick, “Careless Love”. I’d read his 1971 book about the blues and knew he was a brilliant writer. I read excellent reviews of the first volume anyway and thought that if he’d spent so much effort writing about Elvis then there must be something there. Not only that, but it was a hardcover edition in a remaindered bookshop for only a fiver-a bargain.

The final significant piece in the jigsaw was an increasing obsession on my part with the music and life of Bob Dylan. In every book I read about Dylan there seemed to be a reference to Elvis along the way-maybe not to a massive extent but he was still there, somewhere always in the background.

With these three things falling together then I came to understand something that had eluded me for so long. There’s not much point in explaining it anymore; the how’s and why’s-it can simply be put into four words.

Elvis is The King.       .         

       

update-more positive writing soon..

It was mentioned to me today that some of my recent postings have been what may be termed as a bit negative.


Looking back I think that's fair criticism.

The next post will be about the majestic Nico of the Northlands, the reclusive Kristina Bruuk.

Unless it's about Muse and then all bets will be off.  

april 29th extract-The Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones-Sympathy For The Devil-Rolled Gold

I’ve only ever had two Rolling Stones albums-this compilation of their Decca material from 1963 -1969 and “Exile on Main St ”. I wouldn’t want anymore, these two are enough. I never really liked The Rolling Stones; either their music or the band themselves. They always seemed to be distinctly unoriginal, largely ripping off blues in the 60’s and 70’s and if they ever tried to do anything different or move out of their comfort zone, it was either miles behind the curve and/or flopped terribly. They also seem like a bunch of knobs as well.   

The Beatles vs. The Rolling Stones. A perennial question. Let me put it like this; creativity and innovation vs. the blindingly obvious. It may, at times, be thought that The Stones were the better, more radical and threatening, cutting-edge band compared to The Beatles. What a load of rubbish. There wouldn’t have been any Rolling Stones without The Beatles but The Beatles didn’t need the Stones to exist. If any of the albums that The Beatles made are compared to what The Rolling Stones did at roughly the same time then it’s crystal clear that the Beatles were streets ahead of them. Aftermath, Between the Buttons, Their Satanic Majesties Request, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed. Or-Rubber Soul, Revolver, The White Album, Abbey Road. Even Let it Be. The Beatles always constantly moved on and constantly tried something different, and every time it worked brilliantly. The Rolling Stones, on the other hand, were, ironically in their own words, out of time and always have been. Ringo Starr was no oil painting but at least he wasn’t sacked from the band and left to play the drums only in the studio because he didn’t fit the good-looking image of the rest of the band, like the Stones did with keyboard player Ian Stewart.  Starr was recruited for the Beatles and Pete Best was sacked because Starr was a better drummer, pure and simple. Furthermore, despite much wailing and gnashing of teeth, the Beatles called it a day at just the right time. The Rolling Stones have dragged their decomposing corpse of rock around the world for what is a ridiculously extended amount of time. It’s far far beyond any use by date.  Every time they release a new record or embark upon a yet another money- grabbing overblown world tour, then there’s all this guff in the press about them being “grizzled survivors”. Survivors of what exactly? Their own musical self-indulgence and laziness and millions of dollars sloshing through their bank accounts for the last fifty years?  

Keith Richards staggers around with his silly skull jewellery and daft bandanas alluding to stories of living on the edge and drug abuse for the past half-decade as if it’s all ok and he’s still a rebel giving it to The Man. He’s a 68 year old multi-millionaire for goodness sake-why should anybody be impressed? Mick Jagger is so far removed from any sort of normality that words fail me and I can’t be bothered about the rest of them.

The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World? I’d rather listen to Take That.