WIS frequent flyer Fraser Maxwell has prepared yet another fine guest blog full of fabulous songs to bring your February to a fitting close. Enjoy!
First Word
Thanks again to Alan for calling me off the subs bench again for another Week in Sound contribution – a privilege to be trusted to contribute to the hallowed blog and master playlist. And I hope that folks like the tunes as much as I enjoyed those from Marion, Dave, Stuart, and Michael – my favourites each week being Bobby Womack, SAULT, Talk Talk, and Angus & Julia Stone respectively – but loved it all.
Anyhow, on to this week’s tunes while Alan gets back to normal from his travels, trying to be as concise and non-waffly as possible! No real theme, just songs that came to mind for various reasons and, with one exception, trying to add new artists to the master playlist.
Do You Realize? – The Flaming Lips (2002)
Alan is an influencer! I have a 16-year-old daughter and she’s very much into her music. Each time I have previously contributed to the blog she has asked to listen to my six songs and asked about why I chose them. Anyway, she’s now half-pinched Alan’s idea and created a playlist (Georgia’s Weekly Faves) to which she adds her five most played songs of the week, using the Airbuds app to keep track. There’s lots on there that fans of WIS would love – Lana Del Rey, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Blondie, Bowie, The Cure, Pixies etc. Alan will be delighted to know that Wilco have started to feature too – You and I, Heavy Metal Drummer and I’m The Man Who Loves You. She’s got cracking taste in music!
Anyway, to the tune. The first song she ever added to the playlist was this, from 2002’s classic album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. A psychedelic album of playful and profound songs and a mix of ambient electronics and digital beats that Uncut magazine described as ‘astonishing…music abnormally alive with possibilities’.
I think that this is a song that will always polarise folk – I’ve seen it described as a ‘timeless stargazing anthem’ and as an ‘unsubtle onslaught of church bells, woozy background harmonies and strings that ascends into supreme levels of cheese’. Life would be boring if we all agreed. I’m firmly in the ‘love it’ camp.
They are phenomenal live, despite Wayne Coyne’s less than stellar singing. I was lucky enough to see them at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall in 2003 and until recently it was probably my favourite ever gig. I also saw them headline at T In The Park in the same year, when the White Stripes had to call off at the last minute as Jack White had broken his finger in a car accident. They dressed in red and white like the White Stripes and covered Seven Nation Army accompanied by the crowd members up on stage dressed in animal and inflatable costumes, a regular party piece of theirs. As for the song – love it? Or hate it?
Woman – Barry Can’t Swim [feat. Lapsely] (2023)
My 88-year-old mam (when you’re from Sunderland it’s mam, not mum!) used the term ‘earworm’ recently when I was talking to her about music. I thought it was quite a ‘youth’ and recent term, but she told me she’d heard it many years ago. It turns out that it’s over 100 years old, of German origin (ohrworm) and used to describe the experience of a song struck in the brain. Anyway, this song was my earworm of 2024.
A friend and colleague, Pete Gabriel, occasionally passes me song suggestions. He joined my team during the first Covid lockdown, and as with everyone else we were all going stir crazy and missing the connection to each other. I introduced a Friday afternoon music sharing activity, where at about 3pm-ish, a theme would be chosen and we’d each have to share a song linked to the week’s theme (first record bought, favoured karaoke tune etc) and we’d each share YouTube or Spotify links into our team Teams chat. Pete even collated these all on a playlist for a while. Productivity went down on a Friday afternoon, but the fun factor and morale went up. Some of music choices were questionable from some members of the team (One Direction, S Club 7 etc), but Pete always had a taste that matched my own. He passed me a link to this song last year, and I loved it immediately and it has been on heavy rotation since.
Barry Can’t Swim (real name Joshua Mainnie) is a Scottish electronic music producer and DJ from Edinburgh. His debut album When Will We Land? was released in 2023 and was shortlisted for the 2024 Mercury Prize.
Not sure if there’s anything on the master playlist that would be categorised as ‘dance’ so apologies if it’s not what you’re accustomed to. The layered beats, catchy piano, and emphatic vocals of Låpsley in the chorus really remind me of Play-era Moby, especially the earworm hook of “When the people got the power/You see human, I see God”.
Lean On Me – Beth Orton (1997)
Dave Heatley introduced Terry Callier to the blog on WIS 7Feb25, so he doesn’t need an introduction, and this is a beautiful duet that he did with Beth Orton on her Best Bit EP. Orton’s early work was badged as “folktronica” and she was initially recognised for her collaborations with William Orbit, Andrew Weatherall and the Chemical Brothers in the mid-1990s. I got into her music at the time of her first solo album, Trailer Park, which received much critical acclaim in 1996.
The Best Bit EP was released before her commercially successful second album Central Reservation which appeared in 1999. The EP moves away from the electronic textures of her previous work to be more folk, dance-pop, and jazz. The record’s second half features a pair of breathtaking duets with Callier: the first, a cover of Fred Neil’s Dolphins, is a beautiful folk-jazz fusion track. But my favourite is the closing Lean on Me, a Callier original featuring Orton’s really impassioned vocal matching perfectly with Callier’s warm, soulful croon.
The lyrics are beautiful “And the love I bring/Will grow into a lasting thing/Put your heart on wings/That set you free/And as you rise/Up into the clearing skies/Maybe you will realise/You can lean on me”.
The original is beautiful and you can find it on Callier’s 1972 album Occasional Rain here, but there’s something even more magical in Callier’s and Orton’s voices together. “I’ll be your sunrise if you’ll lean on me”
Hold Me Now – The Polyphonic Spree (2004)
I had two prompts to include a Polyphonic Spree track. Alan playlisted Annie Clark under her alter-ego St Vincent in WIS 5Apr24, referencing that she was a previous member of the band. And a couple of months ago I watched the trailer for Everything Everywhere All At Once, the 2023 Oscar winning film, and recognised this tune immediately. I’d recommend the film too.
The Polyphonic Spree is an American choral rock band from Texas, formed in 2000 by singer/songwriter Tim DeLaughter. I first came across them in 2003 when I saw footage of them on the Glastonbury highlights on the BBC. About 20 of the band on stage, full of energy, and all in red/orange robes making them look like some sort of crazed American cult…but in a good way! Pitchfork describes them as the direct offspring of the Jesus Christ Superstar movie cast.
This track is from their second album, Together We’re Heavy, and was released as the first single. Its pounded piano, brassy peak and booming chorus add up to a sunshiney summer party feel, and there’s definitely a similarity to some Flaming Lips tunes here.
One review I read described the Together We’re Heavy LP as ‘the real f*cking deal, an enormous, symphonic, sprawling, highly ambitious, far-reaching work of wonder that positions the Spree as the far-out dream band of our generation’. They’re certainly a little ‘Marmite’ and my guess is that if you’re a fan of Do You Realize? then you might think that this is great…and vice versa!
After The Rain – Shirley Bassey (2009)
This song was part of a music highlight from 2024. Standing At The Sky’s Edge has been hailed as ‘the best British musical in decades’ and is a kaleidoscopic portrait of life on the ever-changing Park Hill estate in Sheffield. Set to the songs of Richard Hawley (I playlisted his Tonight The Streets Are Ours in WIS 28Jun24), and based on the beautiful and gut-wrenching book by Chris Bush, it reveals the history of modern Britain, exploring the power of community and what it is we all call home. I saw it last February, and it was incredibly powerful and, when combined with Hawley’s heartfelt music, it was a really moving experience.
It included this song from Bassey, which confused me at first, but it turns out that Hawley had written the song for her album The Performance in 2009. Songs on the record were written specifically for Bassey, and other writers included Rufus Wainwright, Pet Shop Boys and the Manic Street Preachers. Alan picked The Manics’ The Girl From Tiger Bay from the same album in the second edition of this blog, nearly two years ago on WIS 3Mar23.
There’s a great clip of Hawley describing how he wrote this ‘folk song’ for Bassey, her struggling to get to grips with it, and a great live version. Bassey commented that the songs were very different from anything she had recorded before, with After The Rain being in a much lower-key than she would normally use.
Hawley describes the song as a ‘little sliver of humanity’ and I think that summarises both the song and Standing At The Sky’s Edge. Beautiful.
T.B. Sheets – Van Morrison (1967)
I came across a playlist last year from Far Out Magazine, claiming to be Nick Cave’s top ten favourite songs, and it’s a great list. I then saw a separate quote where Cave described them as his ‘hiding songs’ that serve as a form of refuge for him. “They are songs that I can pull over myself like a child might pull the bed covers over their head when the blaze of the world becomes too intense. I can literally hide inside them. They are the essential pillars that hold up the structure of my artistic world”. Interestingly, none coincided with the songs chosen for his recent appearance on Desert Island Discs.
I hadn’t heard this song before listening to the playlist, and it really struck me. And seeing as Alan included just cover versions in the Astral Weeks special (WIS 29Nov24), and so we’ve had no Van Morrison himself on WIS, I thought I’d include it here. It’s intense, his harmonica cuts to the bone, there’s a skittering Hammond organ and a superb bassline that holds the whole thing together.
There seem to be various stories or myths about the song itself and the recording process. The story as told in the song takes place in a room where a woman lies dying of tuberculosis and is visited by the story-teller, her partner. The overwhelming pain and guilt he feels leads to a desperate feeling of wanting to escape from the enclosed room that is smelling of death and disease. Legend has it that when Van Morrison finished this song, he had to stop recording for the day because he broke down crying as it details a real event. However, there’s no record of Morrison ever attesting to this, nor has anyone been able to find evidence of the Julie character. Written when he was just 21 years old, and not long after that, he wrote Astral Weeks – remarkable.
The slowly-suffocating bleakness is captured so well – a stunning track.
Last Word
I hope that’s a suitably varied mix of tunes for you good folks out there. And I’m sure we’re all keen to hear how Alan’s Mexico trip has inspired the next six tunes when he gets back on the decks next Friday.
Thanks for listening and reading, folks – over and out.
FM
So, that was Fraser’s choice cuts to round off the guest blog series perfectly – next week sees a return to “auld claes and purridge” as my Gran used to say when a holiday was over. Don’t forget all the tunes from the last two years are on the Master Blog at the link below.
AR
If you enjoyed this, there is plenty more where that came from. Subscribers receive a link in their inbox every Friday evening at 5pm UK time. You can’t start the weekend without it.
Week In Sound 
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