I know you will have been looking forward to this all week but the waiting is over. Part 2 of the spoken intros theme is finally here. Enjoy!

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Let’s Go Crazy – Prince and the Revolution (1984)

Taken from his astounding Purple Rain global breakthrough album, Prince’s 19th (yes nineteenth!) single Let’s Go Crazy commences with a wheezy church organ playing and the wee fella giving an echo drenched sermon on “this thing called life” and how we should enjoy it knowing that we can look forward to a world of never-ending happiness when we die. The spoken word intro was truncated on the radio edit but I’ve playlisted the album version which has the full spoken section, underlain part way through with the Linn drum thumping until the synth riffs come rampaging in and the song really takes off. The song lyric continues the Christian overtones of the intro with the battle between good and evil laid out and the exhortation to not let the “de-elevator” (Devil?) break us down and instead go crazy and punch to a higher floor (God?). Not too sure about that but the general tenet that “You’d better live now before the Grim Reaper comes knocking on your door” seems a good one to live by. One of three UK top ten singles from the album, this one really belts along and was a regular on his setlist for live performances. Watch and amazing live performance of it here. There are two signature guitar solos on the track and the build towards the crescendo ending with the guitar wailing to that last screamed “Take me away” just could not be anyone else, could it? It will not suprise you to hear Lynn and I had a playlist tape at our wedding back in 1993 and this track filled the floor!

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New England – Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers (1976)

So not only does this song have a spoken intro delivered in Jonathan Richman’s wonderful, drawling ‘Bwawstin’ accent but it sounds like the words he is saying might actually be the first verse. He then asks the band for an E (twice!) to get his note before singing the second verse acapella. I’m already hooked by this point and can’t really understand it if you aren’t. Eventually The Modern Lovers kick in with the instrumentation for the third verse after 40 seconds even though there are only about 100 seconds of the song left. But don’t let that worry you – just flick it back to the start and listen to this glorious paen to his home states again! Taken from the self-titled 1976 LP with Richman named as frontman, it was their first release as a single with the brilliant Roadrunner released as the follow-up – see my piece on that tune in WIS 19 May. Many people find Richman’s music annoying and twee, but I love it’s simple honesty and emotion and his cute way with a rhyme: “I’ve been out west to Californ’/But I miss the land were I was born”. I have only visited New England once nearly thirty years ago but, as I drove around Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont taking in their scenic beauty, this song played in my head throughout.

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Loving Arms – Lack of Afro (2023)

In a vain attempt to drag this theme up to date, this song was completely new to me until a couple of weeks ago when Stuart Maconie played it on the excellent 6Music weekend breakfast show he does with Mark Radcliffe. Although this record sounds like its come out of Philadelphia in the 1970s, the curiously named Lack Of Afro turns out to be a multi-instrumentalist writer and producer from Exeter who now lives in Barnstaple called Adam Gibbons. He is seventeen years into his career making music and got his nickname while a student at university where as a DJ he was known for playing funk records at gigs. Loving Arms was recorded with UK session singer Greg Blackman providing the fantastic vocal performance and is a single taken from Lack Of Afro’s eighth studio album released this month called Square One. Its a celebratory record with Gibbons having battled addiction and come out the other side, very much going back to square one in his career. I have been unable to source the sample used as the spoken word intro but it seems to be an artist describing a music producer who knows what he wants and “has the last say and is usually right”. Maybe its about Gibbons himself – who knows – but what an absolutley joy this record is to listen to.

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The Golden Age Of Rock’nRoll – Mott The Hoople (1973)

To find myself eight months into a weekly music blog and only now getting round to including a Mott The Hoople track is a bit of a surprise to me. After a period in early 1973 where Wizzard were my favourite band, I turned thirteen in April and decided that Mott The Hoople were going up on my bedroom wall. I had resally liked their Bowie-gifted hit All the Young Dudes in the summer of 1972 – the video link is a brilliant record company promo full of ealry 70s images which I’ve never seen before. But it was the release of the singles from their July 1973 Mott LP that got them on Top Of The Pops which hooked me. They were great tunes but it was the impossibly cool hair and shades combo sported by singer Ian Hunter as he belted out Honaloochie Boogie and All The Way From Memphis that was the deal sealer. This spoken intro track comes from 1974 after founding member Mick Ralphs quit to form Bad Company and comes from what turned out to be Mott The Hoople’s last LP before they finally split. It’s another classic Hunter song about being in a band with a nice nod to their benefactor in the lyric: “Jeans for the genies/Dresses for the dreamies/Fighting for a place in the front row”. The spoken intro is slightly delayed by a sequence of piano chords which I recall working out on my Gran’s piano at the time – it remains the only thing I can play on the piano. But when the song kicks in, the horns blare and the drums stomp through a belter of a tune which was one of six tracks I was lucky enough to sing with my mates in the band we formed for my 50th birthday some years back. “You gotta stay young, you can never be old” seemed good advice that night. See it performed by the original band on TOTP with their flash suits and platform boots here.

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Everest – Public Service Broadcasting (2013)

It might seem a bit of a cheat to choose an artist like Public Service Broadcasting for a spoken intros themed playlist as pretty much all of their music is based on using samples of spoken word. But let’s just go with the flow and enjoy this early track from the inestimable J Wilgoose Esq and his mate Wrigglesworth. It appeared on their first album titled Inform-Educate-Entertain, the original directive of the BBC developed by John Reith when it was set up in 1922. Like many of the tracks, it makes use of film dialogue accessed through the British Film Institute. In this case, the song is based around The Conquest of Everest, a 1953 film charting Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s first successful ascent of the mountain. Nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature it was considered by critics to be skillfully edited and intensely moving in places. PSB capture the emotion of the moment beautifully. I love the way the bass and drums rumble in after the word Everest in the intro before the guitar part is overlaid. The song then builds with a keyboard motif repeating around the dramatic story unfolding until we get to the fantastic line “Two very small men cutting steps in the roof of the world”. From that point, the music … erm.. climbs using a brilliant horn motif giving a real sense of elevation and then elation as the peak is finally conquered ‘”because it is there”. Great stuff.

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B-Movie – Gil Scott Heron (1975)

This one lost out in a photo finish for the best spoken intro of all time to John Cooper Clarke’s track from from last week’s blog. Although this dates from 1975, I discovered Gil Scott Heron through the 1980s NME tapes compiled by the great Roy Carr as previously referenced on this blog. NME002 was called Jive Wire and it had 21 tracks on it from people like Scritti Politti, Kraftwerk and Glasgow’s very own Altered Images. The last track on side 1 opened with this amazing deep-voiced Afro-American guy saying “Well the first thing I want to say is: Mandate my ass”. This was Gil Scott Heron’s magnum opus, B-Movie – a 12 minute epic which beautifully fuses his vocally dextrous street poetry with an unremitting backing track of rolling bluesy funk. It gives a seething critique of American politics in general and the then President Ronald Reagan in particular. The poem is full of brilliant imagery and I’ve listened to it so many times it’s burned into my brain. Like an American newsreader closing out their bulletin with the financial figures, the poem section finishes with “As Wall Street goes, so goes the nation/And here’s a look at the closing numbers/Racism is up, human rights are down/Peace is shaky, war items are hot/Jobs are down, money is scarce/And common sense is at an all-time low with heavy trading.” Sounds familiar…

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Last Word

So I know there are other spoken intro tracks not featured on the last two weeks’ playlists but these will have to wait until another day as the blog is returning to covering weekly events until the guest bloggers take over with their personal selections for most of November.

The master playlist link continues to collect tunes and finds itself two tracks short of 200 fine songs today.

WeekInSoundMaster

AR