Drip, drip, drop go the little April showers of quality music in this week’s epistle, although Bambi does not make an appearance. Enjoy!
Nearly Daffodils – English Teacher (2024)
Watching the seasonal yellow flowers burst into life in gardens, path edges and roadsides over the last couple of weeks , I couldn’t resist dropping this vaguely Spring-related tune from my favourite album of 2023 into this week’s blog. I know I have banging on about this band a lot recently (see WIS 13Sep24 and WIS 3 Jan25). But I really do enjoy how their kaleidoscopic musical creativity contrasts with the weariness and confusion expressed in the impressionistic lyrics of singer Lily Fontaine. I realise that the previous sentence would get me quoted in Pseuds Corner in Private Eye, but, as I near my 65th birthday, it pleases me that I can still find fascination and even excitement in new music.
Nearly Daffodils is not really a song about spring but a moody heartbreak song, mulling over the unfulfilled potential of a relationship that didn’t develop, where the daffodils remain as buds and never bloom. The music kicks along, driven by drumming with rapid fills and a rolling, insistent bass line with a great guitar figure hook in the chorus. There’s a typical prog-like break in the middle of the song where the keyboards, guitar and bass repeat an overlapping six note riff for nearly thirty seconds before the song bursts back in. It seems that Fontaine’s lyric illustrates how life can run out of control and disrupt even the most well- nurtured plans: “Sometimes it tears like a freight train through a christening/Displacing the new growth, and making everything ugly”. The song rushes ever onwards like that freight train towards a strident finish where Fontaine enigmatically claims: “You can lead water to the daffodils/But you can’t make them drink”. As a band from the North of England, heavily influenced by that region’s history and culture, I’m pretty sure there is some connection with Wordsworth in here but I’m not well read enough to see it.
Your Mind Is on Vacation – Mose Allison (1962)
Our ten year old TV stopped working a couple of weeks back after many months of threatening to do so with us consulting YouTube on how to bring it back to life through factory re-sets. So we got a new one from Currys and it came with three free months of Apple TV. This has given us access to binge- watch the two available seasons of the surreal science-fiction psychological thriller Severance. I know I reach for hyperbole far too often on this blog, but this really is an outstanding TV show which (quite literally) screws with your head. Making any sensible attempt to explain what the hell is going on is difficult but here goes: A group of office workers at Lumen Industries have all undergone a neurosurgical procedure that mentally separates their work selves (“Innies”) from their home selves (“Outies”). It is work/life balance to the power of ten, as one has no idea what the other does with its time and problems in either mode can’t bleed into the other. But cracks start to appear… It’s sinister and hugely stylish, quirky and beautifully shot, and the vibe reminds me a bit of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner. With added goats!
The theme tune is an eerie earworm written by Theodore Shapiro and he supplies much of the incidental music. Producer Ben Stiller knowingly punctuates the drama with an eclectic series of appropriate original cuts like the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s I Feel Different Today and Bobby Darin’s Work Song and it all hangs together wonderfully. I’ve playlisted jazz and blues man Mose Allison’s great Your Mind Is On Vacation which was used Season 1: “Your mind is on vacation and your mouth is working overtime” is a great chorus lyric. I first heard the song in the late 80s when it was performed by Elvis Costello during the encore of his show with his King of America band, The Confederates.
You really should blag an Apple TV password from someone and watch the show – you’ll love it.
Being Boiled – The Human League (1978)
The choice of the Kraftwerk track last week came with a reference to an earlier observation from our Adelaide correspondent that electronic music was notably light in the WIS Master Playlist. Well, I’ve got the bit between my teeth now as a chance hearing of the classic debut single by The Human League on another playlist this week allows me a paper thin excuse to include more electronica. This recording dates from back when they were an experimental Sheffield synth band, long before the splinter to Heaven 17 after which Joanne and Susanne were recruited, and the Rezillo’s Joe Callis joined the song-writing team to deliver the monster global hit that was Dare.
Being Boiled was released on the ultra-hip Edinburgh-based label Fast Product, run by Bob Last. The label’s total output comprised nine singles and three EPs but, as well as the League’s debut, they also released the first recordings by Gang of Four, The Mekons and The Scars. The music for Being Boiled was heavily influenced by the aforementioned Kraftwerk and was written by Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh when they were known as The Future. They were scouting around for a singer and asked their cool-dressing school pal Phil Oakey to listen to their demos. He turned up two days later having written the bizarre lyric for Being Boiled and got the job. A change of name to the sci-fi board game-inspired Human League followed and they recorded this track in mono on a domestic tape recorder in an abandoned factory. Fast released it in June 1978 to limited interest but the rest, as they say….
My finger-on-the-pulse pal Ken Macdonald was out the blocks first and had it in his collection. We were in thrall to that great opening sequence with Phil intoning over the blurps and hisses: “OK. Ready. Let’s do it”. The primitive drum synth kicks in, quickly followed by that pulsating bass synth. In 1978, it was just otherworldly to our young ears. To be honest, I think the b-side Circus of Death is even better and I would have playlisted it, but sadly, the Fast version is not available on Spotify. The band re-recorded a version for their 1979 LP Reproduction but it just doesn’t capture the rawness of the original. Thankfully, YouTube comes into its own and you can hear it here. Listen out for the unlicensed sample from the 1974 John Carpenter movie Dark Star, right at the end…
Yesterday Once More – Redd Kross (1994)
We were traveling with friends recently and for some reason the conversation turned to The Carpenters. What was that really weird track they did about spaceships, someone asked. Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft said I, and we all agreed that this song seemed out of character for the brother and sister MOR soft rock act. Turns out the song was a cover and had been originally recorded by a band called Klaatu. They were appropriately named after the alien ambassador (played by the great Michael Rennie) who visits Earth in the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, which was one of my Dad’s favourite movies.
I’m not going to playlist Klaatu nor am I going to delve into the dark history of Karen and Richard Carpenter – maybe another day. What I am going to do is to turn to a great Carpenters covers album which featured a version of Calling Occupants performed by Minneapolis female rock band Babes in Toyland. I found the album, cleverly titled If I Were A Carpenter, in the Dalgety Bay Library in 1994 where someone in Fife Council was clearly fond of filling the lending racks with interesting stuff. It was a tribute album, the brainchild of producer Matt Wallace, and the artists featured tended towards the American ‘alternative rock’ outfits active at the time. So, as well as Babes in Toyland, you get Sonic Youth doing Superstar, American Music Club performing Goodbye to Love and Grant Lee Buffalo on We’ve Only Just Begun. But there’s also more mainstream acts like Sheryl Crow (Solitaire) and The Cranberries (Close to You). The quality of the songwriting is respected throughout and each act brings their own style to what were ‘easy-listening’ tunes in what one critic called “an affectionate, almost reverential tribute”.
To demonstrate this I’m playlisting a great punk pop version of Yesterday Once More by Californian band Redd Kross. Despite it’s syrupy lyric, it is probably my favourite Carpenters song with a great melody. The cover opens with the same rolling piano as the original, but the fuzz guitars soon kick in. In the chorus, Richard and Karen’s harmony vocal is brilliantly replicated and the distorted wah-wah lead guitar replacing the original’s strings is very 1994! I’m sucker for a key change and the genius of this cover is that they lift the key of the chorus prior to the coda – get ready for it when you’re singing along as, trust me, you will be!
Maggie’s Farm – Bob Dylan (1965)
On Thursday night, we finally made it along to see Timothée Chalamet’s star-turn as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown which you can still catch occasionally being shown in cinemas before it disappears off to streaming services. I thought it was a terrific watch, although Dylan-ophiles consider director James Mangold plays fast and loose with the facts and the timings of the four year period between Zimmerman’s arrival in New York and the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. I knew the story in principle but to complain that the detailed truth was bent to make a two hour movie as entertaining as this is a little churlish. Particularly when Chalamet puts in such a brilliant performance as the mumbling, scowling, unwilling leader of his generation. But I can understand those who feel moving the “Judas!” cry back in time to Newport from Manchester’ Free Trade Hall in 1966 is a bit much for some.
It’s not often I can say this, but I am much too young to have heard all this very familiar music develop in real time. So the film allows me to locate the songs in context with the social, political and musical upheaval of the first half of the 1960s – when I was a toddler! Watching Chalamet/Dylan invent his early ‘carnival-inspired’ musical persona and then, as the years pass, see the insolence develop and the sunglasses arrive is a hypnotic experience. By the time the inevitable dark curtain falls on his folk career at Newport, it is quite literally electrifying!
His Bobness has been relatively poorly served by WIS in the past with only one track playlisted under his own name back in WIS 24May24, the non-album single Things Have Changed from 2000. However, a year earlier, WIS 12May23 was a Dylan theme week where six covers of his songs were presented and discussed along with his originals – only one of these came from the period of the movie. So it gives me the chance to double Zimmy’s WIS appearance numbers and jump firmly into the electric heat of his mid-sixties period. I’m playlisting Maggie’s Farm from his 1965 LP Bringing It All Back Home, a song which is thought to represent Dylan’s unhappiness with his record company and his growing audience seeing his art as a commodity: “I try my best/To be just like I am/But everybody wants you/To be just like them”. His lyric is wrapped in a straightforward electric blues set to a loping beat. However, when he opened his short set with this song at Newport, clasping that infamous plugged-in Stratocaster and shouting “Let’s go!”, he and the band sped the song up. The movie illustrates their aggressive performance and Mike Bloomfield’s blistering lead guitar riffs shocking some of the folk audience. Festival organiser Alan Lomax’s tape was obviously running as the live performance of the song appeared on The Bootleg Series Vol 7, released on the back of the Scorsese 2005 documentary No Direction Home. A little piece of history.
TSOP – MFSB (1973)
This week’s playlist felt quite intense so I felt it needed something light and uplifting to finish with and set everyone off for the weekend with a …erm… spring in their step. That was when I noticed that it was 53 years ago this week when a record was released in the UK which unusually had a four letter acronym for both the title of the tune and the name of the artist. So into the playlist went The Sound of Philadelphia by Mother Father Sister Brother.
MFSB was the collective name for a large group of studio musicians based at the legendary Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia. They were the house band for Philadelphia International Records, a label formed by the equally legendary songwriting and production team of Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff. In the early 70s, the musicians in MFSB originated what was known as the “Philly sound”, providing backing for great soul artists like The O’Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes and Teddy Prendergrass. But in 1973, the collective stepped out of the shadows releasing a self-titled instrumental album and a successful follow up called Love Is The Message which reached the US top ten.
The album included the track TSOP which Gamble and Huff had written as the theme tune to the American TV show Soul Train. I recall Top Of The Pops in the 70s showing clips from Soul Train when the African-American artists on it had a hit in the UK. For some reason to do with the frequency of American TV screens, the footage always looked slightly fuzzy – or maybe that was just caused by the outfits on display? TSOP was released as a single and became the first TV theme to reach the US No 1 slot – it made No 22 in the UK. The instrumental practiced what it preached, its blend of lush strings and punching horns giving it that Philly sound. But just as important was the ‘waka waka’ part on the guitar and the hi-hat dominated drumming, two techniques that would form the bedrock of disco in the years ahead. Although an instrumental, the track features vocal group The Three Degrees who can be heard towards the end singing the “Let’s get it on. It’s time to get down” refrain over a wonderful repeating rising series of “doo doo doo” lines. It all screams out early 70s and, try as you might, you cannot avoid being dragged into that groove, man.
Last Word
So that’s another one in the can but without much of a dent on the verbosity – as Edwyn Collins cleverly put it: “Just like The Four Tops, I can’t help myself”.
Having forgotten to add last week’s tracks, those and this week’s tunes are now firmly inserted into the unmanageable beast we call the Master Playlist. Save it to your profile now and you’ll never run out of quality songs.
AR
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