Another Friday rattles round and another failed attempt at not going down musical rabbit holes in drafting the blog. Some great tunes, though. Enjoy!

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Cloudbusting – Kate Bush (1985)

So my attempts to kickstart the summer using Ernie Isley’s guitar solo last week completely failed and the rain has continued all week. With Kate Bush having her 65th birthday last weekend, the ongoing cloudbursts that are ruining our summer could only take me to one tune. The second single from Bush’s Hounds Of Love album, this is my favourite tune of hers. Like her famous debut single, this song is based on a book but one she was unaware of until she picked it up in a library somewhere. It was Book of Dreams by Peter Reich published in 1973 and is a memoir written through the eyes of a child telling of his close relationship with his father Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian psychiatrist. In the 1930s, Reich came up with the concept of “orgone,” a physical energy contained in the atmosphere and in all living matter. The “Cloudbuster” was a device he developed to manipulate the orgone energy in the atmosphere, which would force clouds to form, bringing rain. At the climax of the memoir is Wilhelm Reich’s abrupt arrest and imprisonment for contempt of court, the pain of loss the young Peter felt, and his helplessness at being unable to protect his father. Bush found this part of the story deeply moving and built her song and the incredible video around the moment when a child first realizes that adults are fallible. The chugging cello melody provides the compulsive drive as the song twists and turns dramatically, before reaching its final euphoric vocal refrain. I love the spoken “we’re cloudbusting, Daddy” line and then the strange ending with the sound of a halting steam train. Apparently work permit issues meant Donald Sutherland did the video for nothing, so taken was he by the song and Kate Bush and Terry Gilliam’s concept for the visuals.

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Mykonos – Fleet Foxes (2010)

So I can complain all I want about the Jet Stream induced wet July, but the other end of this climate change twist in global airflows lies the extreme heat affecting many parts of the world including relatively close to home on the southern edge of Europe. The Greek island of Rhodes featured most prominently in the news stories last weekend as wildfires raged. As I watched the footage I realised that it was some 45 years since I went to Greece on holiday after I’d left school, island-hopping with my mates Mark and Norrie. It’s a real cliche to say it, but many of the islands were really unspoiled back then with the Greek government only just waking up to the potential of mass tourism which had been so lucrative for the Spanish further west in the Mediterranean. We had gone over there with nothing more booked than a return flight to Athens. There were no airports on the islands and though the ferries between the islands were busy they were small. As each ferry pulled in, there was always a group of locals on the pier offering rooms for rent which often turned out to be on the upper floor of their family homes. We drank Amstel beer and ate souvlaki and greek salads in tiny beach restaurants with plastic tablecloths and stray cats and it feels looking back now like we didn’t have a care in the world. Although we never went to Mykonos on that trip (my mates went there the following year with other friends) when I listen to this fantastic tune by American indie-folk band Fleet Foxes, I imagine blue skies, whitewashed buildings, clear water and endless days in dazzling sunshine. I’m not sure this is what the band’s delicate layered harmonies and mix of 60s baroque pop and folk was trying to achieve but it seems to be from the lyric: “And you will go to Mykonos/With a vision of gentle coast”. I love that the song appears to be in two parts each with a different time signatures and separated by the a capella section in the middle. And those glorious voices.

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Blame It On The Bassline – Norman Cook (1989)

Everyone’s favourite DJ Norman Cook hit 60 this week and I felt a track on the playlist to mark this would be appropriate. The man better known across the world as Fatboy Slim had rather unlikely beginnings in the music business as the London-born bass player in Hull-based guitar pop group The Housemartins. Cook had met Paul Heaton in London in the late 70s where they briefly formed a punk band before Heaton headed back north and Cook headed for Brighton to study English and develop his skills on the wheels of steel in the thriving club scene. When Heaton formed The Housemartins in 1985, their bassist left on the eve of their first national tour and Cook packed his 12 inch singles away and moved to Hull to join them. After three years, two albums and eight wonderful hit singles (including a ‘week before Christmas’ No 1 with their a capella version of Caravan Of Love), the band split in 1988. Heaton went on to more success with The Beautiful South while Cook moved back to Brighton and dug out his record decks again. He would eventually adopt his Fatboy Slim persona in 1996 and have huge hit records with his highly inventive mixing and sampling on the likes of Praise You and Right Here, Right Now. His 2006 Why Try Harder greatest hits compilation (which also includes his famous remixes of Cornershop’s Brimful of Asha and Groove Armada’s I See You Baby) is an amazing party-central reminder of his influence on dance music over that 10 years. But I’ve decided to dip into his often overlooked early years in the dance genre for a playlist track. In the late 1980s Cook brought together a loose collective of like-minded singers, rappers and DJs to form Beats International. Before their breakthrough No 1 mega-hit Dub Be Good To Me (which took the SOS Band’s 70s hit Love Be Good To Me and mixed it with Paul Simonon’s incredible bassline from The Clash’s Guns of Brixton), he released a couple of great singles under his own name in 1989, both of which I bought. One of these was For Spacious Lies which sounds oddly like a Beautiful South song with a dance beat and contains the glorious lines: “Democracy is just a word/That’s often used and seldom heard/And Freedom’s just a song by Wham/But we pretend”. The other single has gone on the playlist. Blame It On The Bassline is a dazzling, sample-stuffed de-construction of the The Jackson’s Blame It On The Boogie. It maybe doesn’t have the synthesiser heft of his later work but you can definitely hear the fat boy warming up! [Footnote: The “come on now” line is sampled from the Isley Brothers’ 1970 track Get Into Something and Caravan of Love was co-written by Marvin and Ernie Isley, getting his second mention in this week’s blog – it’s not just thrown together this, you know…]

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Round Here – Counting Crows (1993)

Adam Duritz is the principal songwriter and lead singer of award winning American rock band Counting Crows and he was 59 this week. While maybe not a household name, he was responsible for writing the band’s best known track Accidentally In Love at the request of DreamWorks Animation who were looking for a song to feature in the opening scenes of the 2004 film Shrek 2. The Shrek movies were huge in our house as our kids were six and eight when the first (and best) of the series came out. Indeed, the soundtracks to these two films were probably responsible for my son’s eclectic taste in music as, in addition to Counting Crows, they featured Eels, Rufus Wainwright, Tom Waits and even Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. In a kid’s movie! Duritz initially struggled with the ‘write to order’ approach needed by DreamWorks but they encouraged him to write about something personal that supported the events on the screen rather than about the events themselves. By this point, the band were four albums into a career that began with a bidding war to sign them in 1992. Geffen Records won that battle and released their brilliant debut record August And Everything After a year later. Produced by T Bone Burnett and well received by the critics, it started to sell on the back of heavy play for upbeat first single Mr Jones on MTV. However, the track on the playlist is the Grammy nominated second single, Round Here. It’s a slow building folk rock arrangement with a lovely guitar figure but it’s Duritz’s voice that makes it fly. I can’t really fathom out the meaning of the lyric but I love the way the imagery in the words work together with the emotions in his voice to give a real soulful weight to the song. “And she walks along the edge/ Of where the ocean meets the land/Just like she’s walking on a wire in the circus” is a great line. And in the final chorus when Duritz’s voice builds to the “Round here we stay up/Very very very very late!” and soars into the final “Catch me if I’m falling” refrain, you know you’ve got a damn fine song on your hands.

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Living For The City – Stevie Wonder (1973)

Fifty years ago this week on 3 August 1973, Stevie Wonder released Innervisions which, incredibly, at the age of 23, was his sixteenth album. Part of his ‘classic period’ from 1972-1976 where he moved from the child prodigy ‘Little Stevie’ of the 60s into the pioneering musician who would influence the sound and direction of soul and R&B music. Having recorded with Tamla Motown from the start, he renegotiated his contract in 1972 and gained full artistic control of his output, allowing him to craft his records into cohesive collections and include socially conscious compositions. Critically hailed as the best record of his career, Innervisions won the Grammy Album of the Year as did follow up Fulfillingness’ First Finale and then Songs In The Key Of Life, making him the only artist ever to have won the award with three consecutive records. As well as writing, composing and producing these records himself, he also played virtually all of the instruments during the recordings. For someone who was blind since shortly after birth, he really embodied that much misused phrase musical genius. His extensive use of new types of synthesiser on Innervisions set the tone for music, and particularly black music, in the 70s. Having used a clavinet to produce the memorable funky riff on Superstition (from 1972’s Talking Book album), he used the same instrument processed through a synth to provide a similar rolling funk sound on Higher Ground, the first single from Innervisions. But it is the album’s second single that I have playlisted this week. Living For The City is one of Wonder’s great social commentary songs, telling the story of a young kid from Mississippi who moves to New York City. In Mississippi, he dealt with many hardships, but was surrounded by caring people. In New York, he is quickly taken advantage of and, caught with drugs, he is sentenced to 10 years in jail. For radio airplay purposes, the single edit stops at 3:50 or so and just has the Mississippi side of the story. The full seven minute album version is much darker, taking you into New York with the bridge featuring a spoken word narrative set against the noises of buses, traffic and sirens. I should warn you it contains a racial epithet which I personally feel is in keeping with the story Wonder is trying to tell. The final verse is set after the boy’s time in jail, living on the streets of New York with a rougher voice making the plea: “I hope you hear inside my voice of sorrow/And it motivates you to make a better tomorrow”. Powerful stuff.

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Wilco – Handshake Drugs [Live] (2005)

I read a interesting article in the Guardian at the start of the month, where the writer was taking stock ten years after the Netflix series House of Cards ushered in the streaming TV revolution, apparently ending ‘appointment viewing’ and advert breaks. The writer proposed that streaming was now malfunctioning for viewers by becoming bloated, expensive and confusing. Multiple platforms now require viewers to fork out significant cash it they want to keep up with “the continual churn of buzzy, often over-hyped shows”. In the most interesting observation, it was suggested that while there were still exemplary shows being made, the number of these seems barely higher than 10 years ago despite the huge increase in the number of shows being made. So what’s all this got to do with Wilco, I hear you asking yourself. Well, one of the exemplary shows suggested in the article was The Bear which is set in Chicago and comes with an absolutely killer soundtrack. If you haven’t got Disney+ then I recommend that you blag someone else’s log-on to see it – that’s what we’ve been doing! The elevator pitch is a young chef, Carmy, leaves behind his role in a Michelin star restaurant and comes home to Chicago to run his family’s Italian beef sandwich shop, after the suicide of his older brother. Sounds deeply uninspiring but, trust me, it is absolutely brilliant and lives up to the thirteen Emmy hype. Season 2 has just been released and once again the music has been chosen by creator Christopher Storer and exec producer Josh Senior. Their cuts range from The Duritti Column to Mavis Staples via Radiohead and Van Morrison. The compilers are obviously Wilco fans as several tracks appear including Handshake Drugs in S2 Ep 1 playing in the background as renovations to the restaurant begin and Sydney puts her arm through a hole in the wall covered by a baseball poster. Although the studio recording of the track is from the 2004 A Ghost Is Born LP, the version used on the show comes from their fantastic Live in Chicago 2005 collection Kicking Television. Recorded at the height of the band’s soundscape experimentalism, the wall of guitar noise that builds over the last two minutes of the track reflects the rising tension in the storyline as the enormity of the refurbishment starts to dawn on everyone. As the final piercing note fades, Carmy turns to Sugar and says what they all know: “There’s not enough money”. “Never is” she responds.

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Last Word

Rabbit holes notwithstanding (and there were many) another blog goes to press. Thanks for the feedback last week – keep ’em coming!

The master playlist is now staggering under the weight of over 130 great tunes that can brighten up any summer road trip in the rain. Get it at the link below and link it to your Spotify profile.

WeekInSoundMaster

AR