In the week of Google Bard being launched, I can confirm there is no AI involved in writing this blog. Arguably there is no intelligence involved at all. Enjoy!

A reminder to new readers that Spotify plays from this box in the annoying ‘Preview’ mode with short excerpts of each track. Please click the icon in top right corner to open the full playlist in a separate Spotify window.

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The Lunatics (Have Taken Over The Asylum) – The Specials (2019)

Terry Hall would have been 64 this week and when he died at the end of last year, the outpouring of love for his life and work was remarkable. His early career with The Specials and Fun Boy Three was cited as his main legacy and it was with the first of these bands that I began enjoying his work. I first caught sight of him in July 1978 when The Specials had just evolved from the Coventry Automatics. They were one of two acts supporting The Clash at their infamous ‘Rude Boy’ Glasgow Apollo gig, the other being legendary New York avante-garde synth-punk band Suicide. In November 1979 I was at Tiffany’s on Sauchiehall St when the 2-Tone Tour rolled into town with The Specials, Madness and The Selector for what was a very sweaty night of skanking. I never saw him with Fun Boy 3 but they were a killer early 80s singles band. This track was their debut 45 although the version I have included here is the excellent re-recording by the reformed Specials in 2019. It has more of a Latino vibe with a fine piano intro and outro. Originally written about Reagan and Thatcher, Terry Hall noted in an interview that the re-recording was because the song was “just as apt in the era of Trump and May”. And that was before Johnson and Truss rocked up! I also enjoyed Terry bringing his writing and unique vocal to several singles by The Colourfield in the mid 80s. I only recently discovered their excellent cover of Hammond Song, a tune originally written and recorded in 1979 by folk-pop trio The Roches, three sisters from New Jersey. Well worth a listen too.

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Do The Strand – Roxy Music (1973)

The Radcliffe and Maconie weekend breakfast radio show on 6Music is a great favourite of mine. Two seasoned broadcasters with a pithy sense of humour and an excellent taste in music. Sunday’s show (listened to on catch up on BBC Sounds due to late night wine drinking!) opened with this track which neatly covered off two anniversaries in one belting tune. Firstly, the game that Monopoly was derived from was 120 years old this week – it was called The Landlord’s Game and apparently was intended as an educational tool, to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies. Something seems to have gone wrong with that plan. Secondly, it was 50 years this week since the release of Roxy Music’s second album For Your Pleasure which opens with this track. The last LP to feature Brian Eno as a band member, this song was written by Brian Ferry and performed on the Old Grey Whistle Test in April 1973 – worth a look for Eno’s glittery jacket alone. It wasn’t released as a single in the UK until 1978 when it was used to promote their first ‘Greatest Hits’ collection. A huge fan favourite to this day, the track has incredible drive right from the off, with the thumping piano and Andy McKay’s wailing sax. Ostensibly about some new dance craze sensation that was a figment of Ferry’s vivid imagination, the lyrics suggest if you are tired of the Tango and fed up with the Fandango, you should get up on the table and do the Strand. Or, if you are the namechecked Nijinski, the Strandski. Cold War sensibilities were fully in place in 1973.

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Somebody Else’s Guy – Jocelyn Brown (1984)

This is the fourth edition of the blog and this must be the most tenuous link to a song that I have posted yet. The ‘event’ this week which put this track in my head was quite simply that it started playing on the radio at the exact point when the alarm went off on Wednesday morning. However, in my defence, I would argue that gaining consciousness during the brilliant 50 second vocal intro on this song constitutes an event in itself. And then the rhythm section kicks with that fantastic slap bass bouncing all over the shop. Jocelyn Brown’s voice is a powerful thing but this track is the only UK hit single she had under her own name in a career which spanned over thirty years, mostly as a sought-after session singer. She co-wrote and co-produced this song which probably explains the long intro highlighting her voice. The following year she released Love’s Gonna Get You which failed to chart but her line “I’ve got the power” was sampled by German dance group Snap! for their massive global hit The Power. Hopefully she took a percentage fee! I am much more tuned in to the more traditional ‘disco’ sound of Somebody Else’s Guy which is probably my favourite dance track. It’s a killer groove that this old DJ used to refer to as …erm… a “floor-filler”. Move over Smashey & Nicey. Not arf!

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Cardigan – Taylor Swift (2020)

Regular readers will recall I was banging on last week about the cost of tickets to see live music. On Sunday, as we walked back to my son’s flat in Edinburgh from an excellent Mother’s Day lunch, he was telling his sister about Taylor Swift’s opening show on her 52 date US tour. Demand for tickets for this tour in January had caused TicketBastard’s software to fall over. Apparently, she had performed a career-spanning 44 songs over three hours 15 minutes with 12 costume changes. My daughter noted in contrast that The Lathums had managed 14 songs in a recent gig at the O2 Academy in Glasgow and the general conclusion was that Taylor could charge what the hell she liked for a show like hers. I’m not going to get into a ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’ discussion here as I’ve always admired Taylor Swift as an artist. From her country roots to her work ethic, from her championing of women’s empowerment to her advocacy for artist’s rights, she also knows her way around a good tune. If we are going to have global pop music mega-stars (and we very much are) then Taylor should be the example for all. This track from the 44 song list comes from her ‘lockdown indie-folk phase’ where she wrote and recorded two records with The National’s Aaron Dessner – Folklore and Evermore. Stripped back from the pop gloss, this single has a slow burning moody and almost empty feel to it and was lauded by the critics on release. She performed it last weekend using her moss-covered country shack set first seen at the 2021 Grammy Awards. It’s all a far cry from Shake It Off…

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I Saw Her Standing There – The Beatles (1962)

Writing anything about the Fab Four is a challenge as there have been billions of words written about them in the past and there will be billions written in the future. My infinitesimal contribution is prompted by the release of their debut LP Please Please Me by Parlophone Records on 23 March 1962 when I was not quite two years old. Preceded by the singles Love Me Do and Please Please Me in late 1961, the album has 12 other tracks, evenly split between cover versions and originals. Recorded by George Martin in Abbey Road in three 3 hour sessions over just one day in February, the band got paid Musician’ s Union rates of £7 10s each for each session. Lennon turned up with a heavy cold and the one-take recording of Twist and Shout with his incredible throat-shredding vocal was kept until the end of the evening session at 10pm to delay damaging his voice. While I love that song, I have chosen the electrifying opening track (originally titled Seventeen) which McCartney considers as “among his best work over the years” in his 2021 book The Lyrics. Written on their guitars, sat face to face in the parlour of McCartney’s dad’s house, it was Lennon that removed a reference to a beauty queen in the opening lines, altering the rhyme to be the much more suggestive for the time: “Well she was just seventeen, you know what I mean”. At one point, George Martin had toyed with recording the album live in the Cavern Club and this probably explains him leaving McCartney’s 1-2-3-4 ‘count-in’ on the track. After that, everything that defines this period of their work explodes in your ears – blues progression, those raw, tight harmonies, the falsetto ‘woohs’ and the scream as George Harrison gets his first solo on a Beatles recording. Once they heard “Well my heart went boom as I crossed that room” teenagers would never be the same again. Thrilling stuff in 1962.

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Exit Music (For A Film) – Radiohead (1997)

A while ago, I decided I would read the Rebus novels in order from the start. Although I admired Ian Rankin, it was more for his taste in music and his all round good blokeness than it was for his crime novelist day job. Born two days after me about 60 miles apart – him in Cardenden and me in Paisley – we appeared to have a number of musical touchstones, not least a fondness for the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. And like me, later in life than others do, he sung in a band with his mates – I wonder if they covered I Saw Her Standing There as well? Reading the books it is apparent that he writes his main character with a taste for music and he is also fond of choosing book titles with a musical reference. Let It Bleed , The Hanging Garden and Dead Souls lift from The Rolling Stones, The Cure and Joy Division. And so it is with the 17th book which I started this week where Inspector John Rebus is on the verge of retirement. Exit Music takes its title from this track by Radiohead from their 1997 masterpiece OK Computer. Their first record to involve Nigel Godrich as co-producer – he’s done every one since – it marked their move away from predominantly guitar based music to more experimental soundscapes. The track slowly adds light electronic overlays to Thom Yorke’s plaintive vocal and acoustic guitar until the drums and fuzz bass finally arrive at nearly 3 minutes in to drive the song to its cinematic climax and then the slow cut to fade on that faltering voice. With the lyric “Now we are one in everlasting peace”, it was written for Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film of Romeo & Juliet and, like its title suggests, it plays over the end credits.

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Last Word

A quick hello and welcome to the new subscribers who joined this week – those reading who are not signed up yet can subscribe below to be notified of new posts as they are published. Thanks also to Fraser M and Angus McC for their comments last week – be great to see more, if only to point out where I have things wrong!

Fraser made an offline suggestion that I should collate the tunes in the weekly six-song playlists into a Master Playlist which seemed like a good idea. The link below will take you to this where the newest six will be added every week. The weekly six song playlist box at the top of the blog will remain.

WeekInSoundMaster

AR