Back in the old routine after our jaunt around France, here are six tunes that are helping with my fresh croissant withdrawal symptons. Enjoy!

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Until I Believe In My Soul – Dexys Midnight Runners (1982)

A common reason for inclusion on this blog is that an artist’s birthday occurs during the week so we might as well kick off this first back-to-normal edition with one of these. The enigma that is Kevin Rowland was 71 years old on Saturday and, with only one previous track on the blog from Dexys, it is long past time for a second. As I explained in a lengthy piece in WIS 21 Jul 23, I am firmly in the camp that considers Rowland a mad genius and I find his faith in the transcendent power of music irresistible. I know many people don’t share that view but that’s music for you.

I didn’t watch much of this year’s Glastonbury coverage, but I did catch the latest incarnation of Dexys performing on the Park Stage. Rowland’s output over the last few years has been patchy but he wisely kept his short set heavy on his early material, although they opened with a great cover of The Bee Gees’ To Love Somebody which they recorded in 2016. Clad in a wide-brimmed white hat and a blue and pink silk suit with very baggy trousers, Rowland was in imperious form with his voice soaring in all the right places. In his intro to Geno, he warmly credited the work of Kevin ‘Al’ Archer who he formed the original band with in 1978. Another early former member, Portsoy-born trombonist ‘Big’ Jim Paterson, also gets a shout during the intro to a terrific performance of Until I Believe In My Soul for writing the music.

Although it could be considered a ‘difficult’ track, I’ve chosen to playlist Until I Believe In My Soul which is the emotional centrepiece of the second LP Too-Rye-Ay, connecting the old horn-driven sound to the new strings-based approach. I’ve selected the ‘As It Should Have Sounded’ version from Rowland’s remix of the LP released in 2022 – to me, it sounds cleaner, particularly the bass and drum parts. Opening with Big Jim’s horn figure, the song moves into Rowland’s falsetto vocal against an organ part. We get the first chorus and then, out of nowhere, at 2:08 it drops into an inexplicable fast jazz sequence for about thirty seconds. Eh? We’re soon back to the organ but now with strings layered in and Kevin’s idiosyncratic vocal is angsting away – “And I’m trying to get the feeling/That I had in nineteen seventy-two”. The backing vocals swell and the horns return to the chorus. However, just when you get used to that, we’re off on a violin-led whistling detour as Kevin starts mumbling about the battle between the body and the soul as only he can, concluding: “I will punish my body, until I believe in my soul”. Suddenly, two bars of a shouted “Yes!” end with Kevin declaring “I believe it’s there” and a voice that can only be Big Jim says “Where?”. The chorus then fills out again leading us onwards to the finish. It’s all a long way from Come On Eileen but I absolutely love the sheer eccentricity of it all. Barking but brilliant.

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Brimful of Asha – Cornershop (1997)

Another common reason for selecting a particular tune is that the song had been released in years gone by on a date from the current week. So it seems like a good idea to proceed with one of these, just to help me get back into the groove of doing this. Brimful of Asha was released as a single by Cornershop on 18 August 1997, just in advance of their third album When I Was Born for the 7th Time. The LP’s multi-ethnic international pop sound was met with high praise from the critics but the single only reached No 60 in the UK chart despite getting good airplay. The record company approached Norman Cook to produce a remix which he did by speeding it up and modulating it to a higher key. He also inserted drum samples from the Monkees and Led Zeppelin (Micky Dolenz meets John Bonham?!) and a jazz riff from The Dave Pike Set and the re-released single duly went to No1 in the UK charts in February 1998.

Much as I admire the skills of the Fatboy Slim (who you might have spotted playing bass with his old Housemartins mucker Paul Heaton as they performed Happy Hour at Glastonbury), I’ve decided to playlist the original version of the track. I just feel it’s good sometimes to hear its laid-back, Velvet Underground three-chord groove without all the additional knobs and whistles. Written by Cornershop main man Tjinder Singh, the lyric is a tribute to the legendary Asha Bhosle, the prolific queen of the Bollywood playback singers – those who provide the vocals for the movie soundtracks for the actors to lip-synch along with. The “45” reference in the chorus shows Singh’s love for vinyl singles and he drops in references to celebrated Jamaican label Trojan Records, as well as giving a tip of the glam hat to the Bolan Boogie. But it’s the infectious jangly mantra of “Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow/Everybody needs a bosom” which really brings a smile to my face.

Top tip – in case you think the band are a one hit wonder, give their McCartney-approved Punjabi version of Norwegian Wood a spin or try out the lazy, stoner vibe of the fantastic Good To Be On The Road Back Home Again.

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Fool’s Gold – Thin Lizzy (1976)

We’re returning to the birthday angle for the next track but, as is often the case on this blog given my age and the musical period I tend to dip into most, these birthdays can often be marked posthumously. This is the case with Phil Lynott although, sadly, age was not the reason for his demise. Had he made it through his mid-thirties without succumbing to his drink and drug addictions, Lynott would have been 75 years old this week. He was born in the West Midlands but brought up by his grandparents in Dublin and always considered himself to be Irish, steeped in the folklore of the country.

Lynott is of course best known for forming and leading Thin Lizzy through their fourteen year recording career in the 70s and 80s and writing most of the band’s material. The first black Irish rockstar, he was a memorable figure on stage, standing central between the twin guitarists with his black Fender Precision Bass worn high and reflecting its mirrored pick guard into the lights. At their peak in the latter half of the 70s they were a hugely popular band whose ‘hard rock’ sound was heavily influenced by blues, soul, and Celtic folk music. Their sixth album Jailbreak was released in March 1976 and was their breakthrough record, going top twenty on both sides of the Atlantic. Their trademark twin guitar sound was fully established by then, with the ‘classic’ pairing of flamboyant American Scott Gorham and hard-drinking Scotsman Brian Robertson trading licks from either side of the stage. The LP gave them the global hit The Boys Are Back In Town which was played in every school common room in the land at least once a day in the lead -up to that summer. I still smile when I hear it now as its adoption by Pixar for the trailer of Toy Story 2 when my kids were young was a stroke of marketing genius.

For my playlisted track I’m moving on to the second LP the band released in 1976. Johnny The Fox was the rapid follow-up album to Jailbreak and was the last to feature Robertson on guitar as he and Lynott had a troubled relationship. Lynnot had been struck down by hepatitis which caused the cancellation of a US tour and allowed him time to write songs on an acoustic guitar while in hospital. Although still choc full of riffs and (twin) guitar solos, being written this way made the songs slightly mellower in tone and wider in musical style. The big single was Don’t Believe A Word but I’ve always loved the Side 1 closer Fool’s Gold. To me, it illustrates Lynott’s love of Irish history/mythology/blarney, exemplified by his wonderful spoken introduction. The first two verses paint a picture of those who went off the rails while trying to escape the famine in the New World but it’s Lynott’s fantastic allegorical lyric after the solo in the last verse that really makes the song stand out for me. The imagery of the circus, the vulture, and “the beautiful dancing tightrope ballerina” all delivered in that fantastic voice make it come alive in your head, complete with the optimistic romanticism of the “In steps the fox to thunderous applause” pay-off. A hidden gem.

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I Feel the Earth Move – Carole King (1971)

I’m currently midway through David Hepworth’s excellent book 1971 – Never A Dull Moment so it was maybe inevitable that something from that year popped up on the playlist before long. Hepworth is one of those old school music journalists who cut his teeth on the NME and Sounds before moving on to launch and edit magazines like Smash Hits, Q, Mojo and latterly The Word with his old mucker Mark Ellen. He appeared on TV as host of the Old Grey Whistle Test and famously was part of the small BBC team covering Live Aid. So he knows his stuff.

Born in 1950, he ‘came of age’ in 1971 and the thesis of his book is that ‘rock music’ came of age then too. He argues that 1971 saw the release of more significant albums than any year since and established a pantheon of stars who went on to dominate the genre over the next 40 years. Whether you agree or not, it’s a hugely enjoyable read. I was really stuck by the piece he wrote on Carole King where he postulated that her album Tapestry re-calibrated the record business. My poor summary of his point is that up until 1971, long-playing records were made mostly by men and bought almost exclusively by men in a market that was still comparatively small. Tapestry changed all that. The record was still selling around 150,000 copies a week in the US at the end of 1971 and this after it had been a summer No 1 album for an incredible 15 weeks. However, for the first time, many of the purchasers were women.

By the time she recorded the LP in just three five-hour sessions in January 1971, King was an established songwriter having been part of the famous 60s Brill Building team, often writing in partnership with her first husband Gerry Goffin. The Loco-motion by Little Eva, Up On the Roof by The Drifters, and Pleasant Valley Sunday for The Monkees were among her string of hit tunes. She then split from Goffin, moved to Laurel Canyon and hung out with James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. In its unassuming cover, with King sat on her windowsill in jeans and old jumper next to her cat, the songs on Tapestry were sung in a voice that every woman thought she could sing along to and she looked like the older sister they might have had. Hepworth argues that this was incredibly powerful in an age where baby boomers were leaving college and setting up home in flats with their friends. He pictures that many of these apartments would have had a cheap, Japanese-made ‘music centre’ and, lying on top of the smoked plastic cover on the record deck, would have been a copy of Tapestry. Taylor Swift was more than three decades away but seismic social change was underway and “I feel the earth move under my feet” seems like a good lyric to be playlisting to mark it.

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Save It For Later – The Beat (1982)

This selection is a bit of a throwback to coincidental events of the last few weeks. Firstly, somewhere in the south west of France, my weekly Spotify playlist threw me the song which was recorded by The Beat and released as a single on their Go-Feet records in 1982. It would go on to be included in their third and final album Special Beat Service later that year but it only made No47 in the UK singles chart. By then, their popularity was on the wane from their 1980 high when all the singles from their debut record I Just Can’t Stop It entered the top ten.

The next plank in the story comes through the medium of the trainspotter @nme1980s X account which publishes scans of old pages from the NME from that decade. One evening sat outside the van, I stumbled across a post containing a review of that debut LP written by the legendary Charles Shaar Murray titled “Are You Ready For Post-2-Tonism”. (Yes, I am well aware I have too much time on my hands.) Anyway, in his piece from 14 June 1980, Murray was at pains to point out what he saw as the differences between The Beat and the other ska revivalists around at that time, primarily due to their musical complexity. In coining the title of his review, CSM was predicting they would go on to make music that would push beyond the potentially restrictive boundaries of the rhythm and form of ska. With 1982’s Save It For Later in my head when I read this, I had to conclude that the old bugger was right.

And, as if to prove this point, a really good recent cover version of the song by Eddie Vedder then popped up on Lynn’s weekly Spotify playlist on our last week in France. It seems that Pearl Jam used to cover the tune when playing live. The coincidences continued as Vedder’s version then appeared on the second episode of Season 3 of The Bear as we were binge-watching it when we got home last weekend. And when The Beat’s original played on episode 7, it was a stick-on that the track would make this week’s playlist.

Pearl Jam were not the only rock bands in awe of the tune. Songwriter Dave Wakeling tells the story that he took a call one day from Pete Townsend of The Who. Townsend had got his number via the record company as he and Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd were sitting in his studio trying to work out the chords to Save It For Later. Townsend asked about the guitar tuning which he and Gilmour assumed was DADGAD, a popular folk tuning. A slightly embarrassed Wakeling then had to admit that when he wrote the tune he had been trying to tune his guitar to DADGAD. However, he’d made a mistake and tuned it to DADAAD, but had liked the hypnotic drone it gave him and left it that way. Thank God for that replied Townsend – we’ve been breaking our fingers trying to get our hands around these chords!

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Eat My Words – Divorce (2023)

I had to smile this week when I heard the ‘news’ item that Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck were getting divorced after being married for two years. I have no interest whatsoever in her music or his acting career, though I did enjoy Argo back in 2012. And the world’s obsession with the lives of ‘celebs’ leaves me stone cold. What made me smile was recalling one of my favourite lines in the first Shrek movie when the dragon eats the villainous Lord Farquaad after he forces Princess Fiona to marry him and Donkey exclaims “Huh, celebrity marriages. They never last, do they?”. I was also smiling at the timing of Lopez filing the papers, and choosing the date of their second anniversary. Classy!

Those thinking that this is the precursor to me playlisting On The Floor by Jennifer Lopez are obviously reading the wrong blog. In the obtuse world of WIS, this story allows me the opportunity to return to a band that I saw earlier in the summer at Black Deer Festival and wrote about in WIS 21 Jun 24. Divorce were one of my discoveries of the weekend and I’m playlisting Eat My Words which is taken from their wittily-named 2023 EP Heady Metal. It was a stand-out song in their live set when we saw them and deserves a place in your hearts. To my ears, the protagonist seems to be in a wobbling relationship where their untimely actions are getting noticed and causing some strain – the “I’m sorry for getting too drunk and killing your vibe with the headline band” is half-shouted. And this then leads into the chorus: “Look at me and nod your head/I laugh until the room goes dead/That’s bad, gets worse/Watch me eat my words”. I really enjoy the way the double vocal is slightly out in timing and you can hear the two voice types play off against each other. And there is some lovely slide guitar going on in the background.

French footnote. On the day we visited Giverney to see Claude Monet’s house (that’s Monet with an ‘o’), I saw a poster in a shop window advertising a festival in nearby Vernon which had Divorce on the bill. Hope it was a good one guys!

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Last Word

I want to start with a thanks for the kind feedback on last week’s blog, received both on here and through other channels. It’s pleasing to know people are enjoying the music but I remain frustrated by the comments functionality in the WordPress software which is supposed to allow anyone to comment. To assist you, I think this is how it should work:

For those with a WordPress account, you are required to be logged on to comment. If you are logged on when you read the blog you should be able to comment without being asked for any action. If you are not logged on, you are asked to log on after you have typed a comment. The way to do this is to simply click on the small “W” (for WordPress) icon in the area that asks you to log on – it’s next to the “F” for Facebook icon. Do not enter your email address in the box as that will take you into the log-on loop of death!!

For those without a WordPress account, I understand you can comment but are required to enter your email address in the box and also add your name to the other box for it to be attributed to the comment. Please note the email address will not appear with the comment, just whatever you put in the ‘name’ box.

Hope this helps as it’s great to get comments and share thoughts. Be assured, I’m looking for your stories on the tunes and a debate on their merits – I’m not fishing for compliments. Please give your view of why I’m wrong about a song – constructively, of course! Go on, give it a try!

And in the background, the Master Playlist acts like the universe and expands exponentially…

WeekInSoundMaster

AR