It’s hard to imagine that the nights are drawing out in the first days of January but here are six tunes to help you through the cold. Enjoy!
First Word
So it’s the first full blog of the new year and a chance to implement my resolution of keeping things less wordy, if at all possible. With last week’s 2024 retrospective, WIS was unable to specifically mark the arrival of the new year and so I am seizing the chance to do this belatedly now with a couple of tunes. And given the very cold weather in the UK over the last seven days, I’ve added four of my favourite winter tunes to this week’s mix, just to reflect the season. It leaves the blog with a distinctly folky feel this week.
In The Year 2525 – Zager & Evans (1969)
As 2025 approached I found it difficult to get this old song from 1969 by the Nebraska folk-rock duo of Denny Zager and Rick Evans out of my head. I appreciate it is 500 years too early but somehow this seemed like the only time this century to playlist this tune. And, when I heard Mickey Bradley open his splendid radio show last Friday night with this song for the same reasons, I ignored his choice of the cover by former Stone Rose Ian Brown and decided to stick the original version into this week’s playlist.
It was a classic one-hit wonder record, No 1 on both sides of the Atlantic and then….nada! Even as a youngster, I remember hearing its quirky (if a little daft) dystopian lyric about the future of the human race on the radio in the summer of 1969 just as the world was getting serious moon fever – the song was released in the run-up to the Apollo 11 moon-shot mission. It was No1 in the US when Neil Armstrong took that famous step for mankind and I doubt anyone was thinking about the carbon footprint of the Saturn 5 rocket that got him up there. However, by the time Zager and Evans reached 9595 in their millennium-jumping lyric, they were questioning mankind’s longevity given “He’s taken everything this old earth can give/And he ain’t put back nothing”. Food for thought with the added bonus of a great wee Latin American trumpet part in the background.
Tar Barrel In Dale (RadMac Session Version) – The Unthanks (2012)
The other belated new year offering seems particularly appropriate given the snow storms that have been blowing through the hills and dales of the North of England in the first week of 2025. To the uninitiated, The Unthanks are a folk group from South Tyneside known for their unusual style which combines traditional Northumbrian folk music with other musical genres. The group is led by sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank who are the daughters of George Unthank, who sang and wrote with Northumberland folk group The Keelers. Rachel’s now former husband Adrian McNally is The Unthanks’ keyboard player, as well as being their manager, musical arranger and producer. With the beautiful blend of the sisters’ voices, the band has ridden the wave of popularity for folk music over the last 20 years or so, with Mercury Prize nominations, folk music industry awards and critical praise being heaped on their work from the broadsheets.
The a capella track playlisted is a song written by their father George about the Tar Barl Festival, a New Year tradition in Allendale, Northumberland, where locals in fancy dress parade the streets with burning barrels on their heads. Just before midnight, they gather in the town square and throw the tar and sawdust-filled flaming barrels onto a bonfire. The sisters performed the hugely atmospheric song for the Radcliffe and McConie radio show, then on BBCR2 and the harmonies are just amazing – listen out for the jaw-dropping note they hit on the word “snow” in the chorus: “Tar barrel in Dale/Fire in snow/Toast the new year/Bid farewell to the old”.
Winter – Love and Money (1991)
As I write this, I am looking at the frame on the wall to the side of my desk which contains James Grant’s hand-written lyrics to his song Halleluiah Man, a Christmas gift from my son’s partner Karina. It was one of a series of really great singles that he wrote for Love and Money in the late 80s and early 90s. I have the 12″ single on my shelf and a copy of the Winter CD single is up there too. Sadly, neither of my purchases took these singles, or any of the others, into the UK top 40 – they made No63 and No52 respectively. The closest Grant’s band came to breaking that ceiling was the title track to their 1989 LP Strange Kind Of Love which peaked at No45. Since those days, I have seen Grant perform his brilliant songs acoustically as a solo artist on numerous occasions – he played our late-lamented local venue the Woodside Hotel so many times that the performance room was named after him. And yet, somehow, his only appearance on the blog was on WIS 18Aug23 with his first band Friends Again after I saw James and former member Chris Thomson perform State Of Art in the Woodside for my pal and hotel owner John McTaggart’s 60th birthday.
So, playlisting the beautiful Winter now is righting a WIS wrong. It was taken from the band’s third album Dogs In The Traffic which had a more stripped-back, rootsier sound than the slick production used on Strange Kind Of Love, even on the rockier tracks. This approach allowed the strength of Grant’s songwriting to shine and it is no surprise that his current acoustic set will include a number of the tracks from this record as highlights, including Winter. If you get a chance, go and see him play live – he is a great guitarist, a terrific singer and, what’s more, he has some of the funniest stage chat you will hear.
White Winter Hymnal – Fleet Foxes (2008)
Fleet Foxes make their second appearance on WIS, following the beautiful, summery Mykonos taken from their Sun Giant EP which was included on WIS 4Aug23. This time it is something decidedly more… erm… chilled. The astonishing White Winter Hymnal was the first single taken from the band’s acclaimed self-titled debut LP, considered by many critics to be the best album of 2008. Slightly oddly given its title and general vibe, the single was released in the UK at the height of summer in July. It came out on the Bella Union label whose owner former Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde was apparently on the verge of closing it down due to financial troubles. However, when he heard the demo version of this song, he was so impressed he soldiered on.
Written by band leader Robin Pecknold who has said that he intended the song to be “something to hum to while you do the dishes”, although I’m not sure there are many households who have a washer and a dryer that can hum together in this sort of harmony! The lyrics are quite repetitive and seem to simply recall a walk in the snow with friends: “I was following the pack all swallowed in their coats/With scarves of red tied ’round their throats”. However, there is possibly a sense of forgotten separation in the next line “And I turned ’round and there you’d go” – like someone you knew but who got left behind as life moved on? Maybe, but for me, it’s all about the blissful melody and lush harmonies creating that lovely warmth protecting you from the winter chill. Throw another log on the fire.
Winter – The Rolling Stones (1973)
Although I lived through their late 60s and early 70s creative peak (Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street), my contemporaneous knowledge of the work of The Rolling Stones was pretty much limited to the singles I heard on the radio. More interested in glam-rock, the only Stones LP any of my pals had was the Made In The Shade 71-74 tax-exile compilation – and it was pretty much all singles. The only Stones record I bought as it was released was the 1973 UK top 5 single Angie, which the romantic buried in the 13-year-old me absolutely loved. I had no idea it came from their Goats Head Soup LP of the same year and that the album was greeted with some disappointment on its release – but I suppose the run of those four albums noted above had to falter at some point.
Goats Head Soup is looked at slightly more favourably from the distance of fifty years and some of that is down to the strength of the ballad writing – Angie, Can You Hear The Music and Winter. I only really discovered the latter track in the last 10 years or so and I rate it very highly indeed. Although the credits read Jagger/Richards it was actually written by Jagger and guitarist Mick Taylor. Keef doesn’t feature on the recording at all. Ironically, although written and recorded over the winter months of November and December 1972, the band were holed up in the sunshine of Kingston, Jamaica, avoiding Her Majesty’s Revenue. Taylor’s playing, on both slide and lead guitar, is terrific throughout and is complimented by Nicky Hopkins’ thoughtful piano and Nicky Harrison’s marvellous string arrangements. And Jagger is just Jagger – as the song plays out, listen to the way he bends his mouth around the line: “Sometimes I wanna wrap my coat around you”.
Winter Song – Sam Fender (2020)
We finish on a winter tune released in this decade but written away back in 1970 which provides the much-loved young North Shields rocker Sam Fender with his first song on the blog. He’s popular round our way – my son is a big fan and has seen him several times and Lynn’s friend Cath has a family connection to Dean Thompson, Fender’s fellow guitar player in his band. I first heard of Fender during a 2020 Christmas work quiz that I had organised during the Covid lockdown which was somewhat chaotically done via a large MS Teams video call. Colleagues from our four offices in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Belfast were on the screen. During the chat, a music fan of a similar age to me from Newcastle mentioned that he had recently seen Fender perform at the Sage in Gateshead and that he had played Lindisfarne’s Winter Song. Sean was old enough to have also seen the song played by Lindisfarne back in the 70s.
Winter Song was written by the late Alan Hull and appeared on Lindisfarne’s debut LP in 1970. Fender’s version was released as a single fifty years later between his debut success with the Hypersonic Missiles LP and his mainstream breakthrough with Seventeen Going Under. Given Hull’s plaintive lyric touches on homelessness, Fender directed the proceeds from his sales to The Big Issue. His tenor voice suits the song to perfection and the musical arrangement behind his piano is hugely emotive – Hull would have been proud of it.
When I wrote about Lindisfarne’s Lady Eleanor in WIS 26Apr24, I commented on the 2021 BBC documentary about the life of Hull which was presented very personally by Fender. As can be seen in this short trailer, it’s a touching appraisal of his musical heritage and although now not available on iPlayer, you can find the full thing on YouTube here. In a link to this week’s blog, one of the people talking about Hull’s importance as a songwriter is Rachel Unthank. It’s not just thrown together this, you know…
Last Word
Reviewing this week’s witterings before I press the publish button, I can see that there has been some progress in my aim to make things slightly less wordy. The three blogs published in December averaged about 3,500 words each, which I felt was just getting too long for everybody. Given the average length of a novel is 90,000 words, the blog could produce two books a year at that pace! However, that would require a plot and the ability to write. This week’s epistle clocks in at just over 2000 words, a much more manageable level for all of us, I feel. I’ve just got to keep it that way…
After last week’s bumper edition, we’re back to only six songs being added to the Master Playlist this week. I am sure you will cope.
AR
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