Back on board with tunes which are tenuously linked to events of the week. Enjoy!

A reminder 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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Poupee De Cire, Poupee De Son – France Gall (1965)

So apparently there was some sort of song competition held in Liverpool last week but I never heard much about it and it slipped by unnoticed. If only. Even more hyped up than their coverage of the coronation, the BBC completely lost the plot this time and Eurovision managed to infiltrate every damned crevice of their output. We had updates on the “Eurovision celebrations” in every news bulletin, though what precisely were we meant to be celebrating was never clear to me. The schedules were full of retrospectives with celebrity talking heads and vox-pops droning on and on about how wonderful it all was and how it was part of their childhood. Strange that statistically half of those people voted to cut all ties with Europe in a referendum a few years back. And yes, I know I am coming across as curmudgeonly old git who does a ‘serious’ music blog. And yes, I also know that this year it was about showing solidarity with the people of Ukraine in their terrible circumstances. And yes, I absolutely know people are perfectly entitled to have some fun and I should lighten up! But does the music have to be so shit? I see Loreen from Sweden won this year with some over-wrought, shouty piece which took seven people to write and with a performance where it looked like she was under a car trying to remove the engine sump with elongated talons for nails. Huh?? So, the track that opens this week’s playlist takes us back to 1965, when Eurovision was not the overblown monster it is now. France Gall was French but sung for Belgium, winning at a canter with a tidy little number written by Serge Gainsbourg of Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus infamy. It translates as “Wax Doll, Rag Doll” and is supposed to be about the 17 year old France being a singing puppet, slightly creepily controlled by the much older Gainsbourg. Guitars twang, strings glissando and horns honk in a very sixties style and France gets her melodic vocal done and dusted to a neat crescendo in two and half minutes. A winner! Unlike the UK entry this year which came second last, as normal.

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Life During Wartime – Talking Heads (1979)

Musician and author David Byrne was 71 on Sunday and it’s hard to think of someone at the cutting edge of the New York music and art scene as a Son of Dumbarton – Scottish football fans will see what I have done there. Born on the banks of the River Clyde, he headed west to Canada at only 2 years old and then on to the USA at the age of 8. So to claim him as a Scottish musician is a stretch, even for the most fervent Caledonian. Byrne was a founder member of Talking Heads who developed in the same New York club scene that spawned the Ramones. Their first gig was supporting the Ramones at CBGBs and they also became stablemates at Seymour Stein’s Sire Records. Thereafter the comparisons end as Talking Heads quickly moved into a more avant garde space, hiring Brian Eno to produce their second, third and fourth records. This track was the lead single from the third LP Fear Of Music where they began to take their love of disco, funk and African rhythms into their post punk rock sound. This song has my favourite Byrne lyric which describes a dystopian future of urban guerilla warfare seen through the slightly paranoid eyes of an insurgent who is realising the seriousness of the situation: “This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco/This ain’t no fooling around/This ain’t no Mudd Club, or CBGBs/I ain’t got time for that now”. The song is driven by a wonderful throbbing bass line from Tina Weymouth on top of her partner Chris Frantz’s solid drumming. And while the guitars chop and the synths squeal courtesy of former Modern Lover Jerry Harrison, Byrne’s vocal weaves its way through the centre of the mix spraying out these evocative images: “You oughta know not to stand by the window/Somebody see you up there”. A live favourite, there are many recordings of it in circulation but the most energetic performance was undoubtedly in the brilliant Stop Making Sense movie where Byrne’s choreography has him running laps around the drum podium at the end. No wonder he was so thin and that suit didn’t fit him…

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Flaws and All – Beyonce (2003)

So how has it come to this, I wonder to myself? Hot on the heels of ‘Eras’, the Taylor Swift mega-tour with its long, career-spanning sets, enormo-dome staging and a production with multiple costume changes comes the Beyoncé ‘Renaissance’ mega tour. After six years without touring solo, it looks like Queen Bey is trying to outdo Taylor on all fronts in terms of live performance. Now, I know popular music exists in the business we call ‘show’, but her fifty seven stadium date tour across the world which began this week in Stockholm will feature three hour sets performed in front of a 50m wide HD screen and is expected to gross nearly £2bn. Two billion quid! For those who want it (and are willing to pay upwards of £140 for a ticket), she is providing a monster blockbuster live show experience which the Guardian described this week as “dripping with sci-fi disco decadence, sex, body positivity and feminine Black pride”. OK… but going back to my original question, I’ve talked before about the growth of the live show as these replace record sales for artist income. Mega tours have obviously happened in the past – Led Zeppelin famously became the first act to charter the Starship Boeing 720 aircraft (complete with their band logo) for their 1973 North American tour. But the days of hiring a coach and a couple of HGVs to go up and down the M1 with some gear and play in the local halls of the UK seem a long way from where we are now. I was interested to see that in a 36 song setlist full of…erm… bangers, Beyonce chose to open her show with two of her more soulful songs, performed in a more restrained way. She began with the title track to her debut solo LP Dangerously In Love and then sung this track only released on the expanded edition of her second album B’Day. Maybe she was keen to display her undoubted vocal abilities before the massed dancers and digital special effects kicked in for the rest of the show. I love the self-aware opening lines: “I’m a train wreck in the morning/I’m a bitch in the afternoon” and she sings with great vulnerability over a simple off-the-beat drum pattern with a gentle piano/guitar figure which builds into a more layered synth finish. Among all the glitz and the glamour of her public personality, there is no doubt that the girl sure can sing…

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Joan of Arc (Maid Of Orleans) – Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark (1981)

On the 16 May 1920, some 489 years after being burned at the stake as a heretic, French heroine Joan of Arc was canonized as a saint by Pope Benedict XV in the Church of St Peter’s in Rome. She was only 17 when she claimed divine guidance and became a military leader at the siege of Orleans in 1429. Having fallen from royal grace, she was put to death at 19 but twenty five years later her trial was reviewed in 1456 and the verdict overturned, which would have been little consolation to Joan, I suppose. Her sainthood followed half a millennium of being seen as a martyr and a French hero who merged qualities such as grace and strength associated with both genders. With a global legacy, she has inspired numerous artistic and cultural works over the centuries, even in the field of music we call ‘pop’. Artists as diverse as Leonard Cohen, Madonna, Arcade Fire, Little Mix and Ward Thomas have named songs after her. And Morrissey famously quipped “Now I know how Joan of Arc felt/As the flames rose to her Roman nose/And her Walkman started to melt” in The Smiths’ 1986 single Bigmouth Strikes Again. However, Merseyside electronic pioneers Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark really went for it, naming two tracks on their third album Architecture & Morality after the patron saint of France. The two tracks appeared one after the other on side 2 of the LP, with the second song differentiated by adding “Maid of Orleans” in brackets. The tracks were released as consecutive singles in the UK reaching the top five but the second release was re-titled Maid of Orleans (The Waltz of Joan of Arc) in an attempt to help confused record collectors like me. The soaring pop melody of the first single was everywhere in late 1981 but I’ve chosen the moodier second track for the playlist which was released in Feb 82. Announcing it’s arrival with a great sustained atonal synth section (which was mostly edited out of radio plays), the song soon drops into a reverbed rolling drum pattern in an unusual 6/8 time signature. The atmospheric ‘string’ theme that dominates the track is played on a Mellotron, the 1960s analogue tape-driven keyboard used extensively by the Beatles on tracks like Strawberry Fields Forever. Andy McCluskey keeps the lyric short and simple: “She cared so much/She offered up/Her body to the grave.” It would have sounded good on Joan’s Walkman…

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Roadrunner (Once) – Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers (1977)

The other musical birthday to catch my eye this week was the inestimable Jonathan Richman who was 72 on 16 May. I spotted this on Twitter where the equally inestimable @Birmingham81 (Andy Chislehurst) had curated a wonderful thread of songs and stories about this gloriously eccentric Boston artist. I am unashamedly going to borrow a couple of things from Andy’s thread for this post but will hopefully weave them into my own thoughts and references in case he reads this and contacts his lawyers. I first discovered the joy of Jonathan Richman via my mate Ken who was the proud owner of the eponymous debut LP by The Modern Lovers on the amazing Beserkley ‘Home of the Hits’ label. The record company issued the album in 1976 by collecting together a series of demos going back as far as 1972. Some of these were made with John Cale of the Velvet Underground – Richman was a huge fan and you can here their influence in these recordings. Richman’s ode to Massachusetts Route 128, Roadrunner opened the LP with its famous 1-2-3-4-5-6 count in. But its not the version on the playlist this week – that’s the thing with this amazing song, it’s been recorded several times and all slightly different. The LP version is what came to be known as Roadrunner (Twice) and sounds very like the Velvets with keyboards by Jerry Harrison (see Talking Heads above!). I have a preference for the (Once) version on the playlist which is slightly slower and less punky, with that drop in the middle to just the rhythm and some words only this version has: “Can you feel it out in Needham now/out on Route 128 by the power lines”. This version was the a-side of the UK single which incredibly reached No 11 in the charts in July 1977. And of course, the b-side was the (Twice) version! And it won’t surprise you to know there is there is a (Thrice) version – an extended live recording which was on the b-side of the band’s third UK top 30 single Morning Of Our Lives in January 1978. Every version sings of listening to the radio travelling along the Route 128 which is seen as the demarcation between the urban inner suburbs of Boston with the less dense outer suburbs. The song celebrates the unconventional beauty in things like radio towers, factories and power plants seen through the trees from the highway. Its simple two chord riff and quirky lyrics (I walked past the Stop’n’Shop/And then I drove past the Stop’n’Shop/I liked that much better than walking past the Stop’n’Shop/Cos I had the radio on!) were irresistible to me as a teenager and it is song I never tire of hearing. Someone else fascinated by the unlikely romance and thrill of the setting of this song was journalist Laura Barton who wrote this brilliant article about her own rock’n’roll pilgrimage to Route 128. After all this, if you have the will for more versions, @Birminhgam81 has collated Once, Twice and Thrice here – and added four more to the pot. And did I mention Once has the best song ending ever in popular music? Here we go! That’s right! Again! Bye-bye!

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Get Over You – The Undertones (1979)

I’ve been aware that former Undertones singer and lifelong fly fisherman Feargal Sharkey was an environmental activist through some articles I had read. But it was only recently that I picked up that he had become one of the figureheads for the campaign to prevent English private sector water companies dumping untreated sewage into waterways and on coastlines. Following Thursday’s ‘apology announcement’ from the industry body UK Water, I switched on my radio to hear his very distinctive voice on the R4 Today programme. He was clearly furious but was railing in a calm but very passionate way about the companies proposing they be paid a second time for a service that wasn’t delivered under existing payment structures. Hear him at about 1:19 here. I was (and remain) a huge fan of the Undertones music and everything that was great about Derry’s finest can be heard on their fantastic second single which is this week’s final track. Written by John O’Neil, I particularly like Billy Doherty’s drums on the chorus and how guitarist Dee O’Neil and bass player Mickey Bradley’s backing vocals supplement Feargal’s unique voice. They are the only band who I have been backstage with – at the Glasgow Apollo on a Friday night in May 1980. An old school friend of mine Jim had a mate called Eamon who was a close friend of Dee O’Neil’s. Backstage passes were obtained and we saw the soundcheck then hung out with the band in the grotty dressing room, drinking beer and larking about. When we went out front to watch their set, we asked for a dedication when they played Get Over You. So at that point in the set, Dee steps up to the mic saying “This next one is for Eamon, Big Jim and …and…. and the other fella!” I was gutted and he was hugely apologetic afterwards for forgetting my then youthful nickname, Richie. But the story doesn’t end there. I had tickets to see them again up at St Andrews Uni on the Monday night and travelled up with some friends from Paisley to stay with my mate Ken who lived up there at the time. When we came into the hall, the support band (The Moondogs) was playing and Dee was at the mixing desk at the back. He saw me and called us over for a chat, promising to make amends for Friday. So when the band reached Get Over You in the setlist, this time it was dedicated to “Richie and all the boys from Paisley”. Sorted!

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Last Word

This blog wings its way out into the world via subscriber emails and posts on Twitter and Facebook. I am hugely grateful for the comments I get back on these platforms and more informally through direct messages and texts. But it would be great if the ‘like’ and ‘comment’ functions on the blog itself got a bit more activity. I thought the ‘like’ button would be an easy quick click to get feedback but I am disappointed to see that WordPress requires you to set up an account to do this. And even then, for those that go to the bother, it seems there is an issue with login registration emails not being sent out! I suppose that’s the challenge with freeware. Thanks to those that have persevered with this – I am trying to find out more about this at my end to see if it can be fixed.

On the upside, the Master Playlist continues to grow into a monster feast of top tunes – save it to your Spotify library now!

WeekInSoundMaster

AR