Six September Songs which are completely unrelated to the end of meteorological summer or, indeed, September. Enjoy!
First Word
Last month’s epistle suggested that this month’s ramblings would include something from the Public Service Broadcasting Ally Pally gig. However, the dates of Fridays in September mean that this edition will be out before the gig takes place on Sat 26th! Tune in again next month but, in the meantime, here are six more ecletic songs to ponder as the nights start to draw in…
Chosen to Deserve – Wednesday (2023)
I stumbled across this great song by the band Wednesday at the start of the month and have been playing it a lot over the last few weeks. Their 2025 single Townies was included in my very long, one-off playlist of new music last year (WIS 2025 Tracks) but I never really delved into their other music and who they were. Turns out that they are a five-piece from North Carolina who include MJ Lenderman on guitar. With engineer-pleasing symmetry, Lenderman was featured on my round up of songs of 2024 (WIS 3Jan25), where I wrote a few words on his great solo single Joker Lips.
Lenderman started dating Wednesday lead singer Karly Hartzman in 2018 and joined the band in 2020 keeping his solo career going in parallel. Their music is a weird blend of hyphenated genres: shoe-gaze, noise-rock and alt-country. The band did a covers LP in 2022 with a telling track list of tunes from artists ranging from Smashing Pumpkins to Vic Chesnutt, via Drive-By Truckers and the king of the road himself, Roger Miller. On listening to their albums, my ears heard them like a Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-period Wilco with Courtney Barnet and Kurt Vile instead of Jeff Tweedy and Nels Cline. Lenderman remains a member of the band but in 2025 he withdrew from live work to concentrate on his solo career and his many collaborations.
Chosen to Deserve dates from 2023 where it was the lead single for Wednesday’s fifth album of tunes titled Rat Saw God. In comparison to the rest of the LP, it is much less raucously dissonant in it’s musical delivery. There is some terrific pedal steel being played behind a downbeat tale of a messy adolesence spent in in some dead-end town in the south of the US – all throwing up from drinking and hallucinating from taking too much Benadryl. So far, so unpleasant, but I like the idea behind the song set out in the opening verse:
“We always started by tellin all our best stories first
So now that it’s been awhile I’ll get around to tellin you all my worst
Just so you know what you signed up for, what you’re dealin with
Just so you know what you’ve been chosen to deserve”
Well Organised (feat. Lila Iké) – Ezra Collective (2026)
Its fair to say I am one of life’s worriers – indeed, when two old friends of mine got married a little while back, they asked me to help them out on the organisation so they could sub-contract the worrying to me! With no work to worry about in retirement, I find myself worrying about all sorts of personal things – from big stuff like the health and well-being of my family and friends to the wee stuff like how much that rumbling noise in the front suspension of the campervan is going to cost me to get fixed. In the past, I’ve been able block off the wider existential threats but this is more difficult in these dark days – the steady breakdown of the global rules-based order and the rise of the populist right combined with the uncontolled development of AI and accelerating climate change impact seems to enveloping us.
Although hope alone is not enough to turn things around, if ever we needed some it was now and September saw the release of Here Because of Hope, the third album by Ezra Collective. I hadn’t picked up that it was on its way but learned of it through drummer and band leader Femi Koeloso guest editing the Culture section of the Guardian Saturday magazine. In his engaging personal introduction, Koeloso builds a case for a more positive outlook on things, stating his view that “hope captures the belief that on the other side of pain there can be renewal.” The record itself is split into three parts, journeying through geography and time from Africa to the Caribbean and Latin America and then on to London, highlighting the musical roots that have shaped the band. Each part has a beautiful spoken word introduction by award winning actress Letitia Wright and, as you listen, you can feel the music shape-shift through energetic Afro-jazz, smokey reggae and rhythmic steel pan to land in that euphoric jazz dance fusion that Ezra Collective have made their own. It probably goes without saying that the musicians are playing out their skins on all three phases of the record – as Wright says in the Part 3 Intro, “It’s a feeling/A power/It’s in the sound”.
The band are supported by a small selection of collaborators and it is to these that I have turned for my pick. I was so close to choosing the beautiful All I Need from Part 3 which features the graceful Leona Lewis. But in the end I couldn’t see past Lila Iké’s silky contribution to Well Organised on Part 2. Opening with a nod to Max Romeo & the Upsetter’s 1976 single Chase the Devil, the steel pans and the brass lead the melody into a song of hope and healing:
“It’s been hard to feel anything these days
But I’m finding hope within the treble and the bass
More melody no pain, as the rhythm find its way
The bassline knows just what to say
The beat of the drum rock us all a way
In harmony we sway, in this moment I’m okay
I know that I’ll be safe, when the trumpet blows us all away
This is healing, healing
Love the way this music got me feeling”
Hit & Miss – The John Barry Seven Plus Four (1960)
I’m returning to my obituary theme from last month. The Guardian is my principal source of obits but I particularly enjoy their section called ‘Other Lives’, where friends and relatives of unsung people can submit obituaries for publication. I love the way these can reveal incredible stories about fascinating people you’ve never heard of. On Saturday 5 September, the paper published the obituary of Cyril Shack, an ebullient East End Cockney entrepreneur. He had recently died at the age of 99 and the captivating tale of his rise and fall can be enjoyed here. Having spotted the increasing popularity of the 45rpm single in the 50s, he set up a business to lease jukeboxes to cafes and pubs. His big coup was to provide the machine which featured on the Saturday evening BBC TV panel show Juke Box Jury, introduced by David Jacobs. Shack even used his natural charm to wangle his way on to the show as a panel member!
The show, which sought the views of a panel of celebrity jurors on whether a new single was going to be a “hit” or a “miss”, began in 1959 and by 1962 was getting 12 million viewers a week. And this at a time when not everyone had a TV! The song chosen as its theme came from the pen of future James Bond film theme composer John Barry. Hit and Miss was written when the young trumpet player had decided to abandon working as an arranger for big band orchestras and form his own band. The John Barry Seven included musicians he worked with during his National Service and recorded Hit & Miss for Columbia in the UK. The label suggests the Seven were supplemented by another Four musicians on the recording, who presumably are the string section whose pizzicato motif runs throughout, while the brilliantly named Vic Flick twangs his Gibson ES-355.
You can watch the JB7 perform this live on the London Palladium stage here. But the photo collage video embedded below is much more fun as Cyril Shack’s rented jukebox features right up front alongside some fanstastic images of the various panels. The Beatles’ December 1963 panel appearance features along with the Stones’ slot five months later. But my favourite still is a heavily-lashed Diana Dors trying to see what comedian Charlie Drake was writing on his notepad.
The joy of the internet allows me to tells you that the image of Dors and Drake was from June 1964 and Little Richard’s Bama Lama Bama Loo on London Records was voted a Hit that evening – it got to No 20. Meanwhile, Liza Jane by 17-year-old Davie Jones and the King Bees on the Decca label was voted a Miss. And, despite being the first recording released by the man who would go on to sell the world under a new surname, it did indeed fail to chart and got the Bowie’s first band band dropped from the label. The JB7’s Hit & Miss got to No 10, by the way.
Ballroom Blitz – The Sweet (1973)
There is a great temptation for someone like me who writes a long form music blog like this to blur history and make myself seem impeccably cool in retrospect. I have written numerous pieces on brilliant songs by acclaimed artists from the sixties and early seventies, many of which I only discovered in retrospect. I’d love to claim that I was tuned in to the Velvet Underground when I was seven or Nick Drake when I was eleven, through some kindly relation who guided me in their direction. But I wasn’t. I was like every other kid back then – I took my diet of popular music from listening to Radio 1 and watching Top of the Pops. And at the age of ten in January 1971, I heard my first Chinnichap song – the bubblegum sound of Funny, Funny by a band called The Sweet. This would be the first of twelve singles that Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman would write for the band between 1971 and 1974, all of which were top forty hits. (In truth, the last one, Turn It Down, only got to No 41, but it’s near enough.) I recall asking my parents for the second single, the equally bubblegummy Caribbean-influenced Co-Co, for my eleventh birthday, complete with it’s steel pan solo!
I remained a fan during 1972’s run of singles – Alexander Graham Bell, Poppa Joe, Little Willy and Wig Wam Bam. Despite these records getting steadily less twee (Wig Wam Bam‘s tale of Hiawatha is positively rocky – listen to that guitar opening!), I received a fair bit of ridicule from my Primary 7 classmates who had big brothers at home listening to The Who Live at Leeds and Led Zeppelin IV. In my defence, I suspect I had a slightly confused boy-crush on the incredibly enigmatic singer Brian Connolly even though the rest of the group looked like plumbers from Basildon. However, when they performed Wig Wam Bam on TOTP in September 1972, they had all morphed into full glam-rock mode – silver suits, platform boots and glitter under their made-up eyes.
By the time we got to secondary school, the sirens of the January 1973 No 1 hit Blockbuster! came to save my rock’n’roll soul – at least by then the playground arguments were about how much of the song they had nicked from Bowie’s Jean Genie. [Fact – both of them stole the riff from Muddy Waters!] Bass-player Steve Priest’s make-up seen during his featured camp backing vocal (“We just haven’t got a clue what to do!”) had fathers all over the country shaking a fist at the telly on a Thursday night.
Although with my feet held to the coals I would say that 1974’s Teenage Rampage was their best single (“We Want Sweet, We Want Sweet!”), the band’s crowning moment came with the release of the epic Ballroom Blitz in September 1973, a whopping 53 years ago this month! I know you think you know it, but listen to it again now – that drum beat, the band introduction by Connolly (“Are you ready, Steve?”) and then the build through Priest’s vocal into Connolly’s screams and then into the chorus – it is just brilliant pop music. A wedding DJ staple. No wonder The Rezillos adopted a manic version of it in their live sets just four short years later.
I Hear You Paint Houses – Robbie Robertson (2019)
Another link to last month’s edition of WIS is the re-appearance of the DIY theme which spurred me to playlist A Song From Under The Floorboards last time out. For some time, we’ve been planning to paint the front of the house along with the walls around our driveway but the need to patch the render at a (sizeable) old kitchen vent and clean the paving slabs has allowed me to prevaricate endlessly. But I finally got my shit together and got these things out the way allowing the project to start with the essential preparation of wire brushing, cleaning, filling, sanding, masking etc etc – the stuff Lynn hates. After a week of her asking if she can start painting, it was finally ready and off she set with the roller. Which is just as well really as by the time I got to this stage, I had totally buggered my back. Never again!
It’s all done now and looks good and it allows me to pull this curiousty of a track into the WIS universe. It comes from Robbie Robertson’s sixth and final solo album Sinematic released in 2019, a few decades after he had some solo commercial success with the hit single Somewhere Down The Crazy River from his eponymous debut LP. And even more decades since he and The Band backed Dylan, before breaking out on their own for a critically acclaimed career which ended with The Last Waltz. (See WIS 18Aug23 for a piece on this marking Roberston’s passing.) Robertson wrote the songs for the aptly-named Sinematic as he was writing the soundtrack to the movie The Irishman with regular collaborator Martin Scorsese. They are all story songs, some more personal than others. The moving Once Were Brothers is full of nostalgic references to his famously fractious old band, bringing the curtain down after Levon Helm’s death in 2012 by rasping “There’ll be no revival/there’ll be no encore”. I Hear You Paint Houses takes its title from the memoir about hitman Frank Sheeran which the screenplay for The Irishman is based on. ‘Painting houses’ is apparently a mob code for carrying out contract killings and Robertson invited his old Irish friend Van Morrison to share the vocal duties with him, over a series of classic Robertson guitar licks. Gun for hire? Not with this back…
Borderline – Madonna (1984)
We spent the third weekend of September doing a short van trip across the width of the South of Scotland, from Annan on the Solway Firth in the west via Melrose and ending up in Berwick on the North Sea coast. Choosing our last stop required us crossing into England – but only just. Back in 1482, a victory by Richard III’s army over the Scots meant the border as it approached the coast was moved from the centre of the River Tweed to a line about two and a half miles north of Berwick. And the previously much fought-over town has been part of England for the last 544 years, even though the town’s football and rugby team play in the Scottish leagues. (Explains why you never hear the question, could Arsenal do it in Berwick on a cold Wednesday night in February?)
Lynn knew I was looking for a final track for the blog and very sensibly suggested that our journey should allow Madonna to make an overdue first appearance in WIS with Borderline. Lifted as the third single from her 1983 eponymous debut LP in February 1984, it followed Holiday and Lucky Star into the US top twenty. However, although these two singles also went top twenty in the UK, Borderline was to stall at No 56 – clearly these sceptered isles were more sceptical about the sound of La Ciccone. This was all to change dramatically when her second LP and title track single Like A Virgin exploded into the pop world later in 1984, putting her on every front page and screen where she was to remain for some considerable time. (As Madge-mania grew, Borderline was re-released in the UK and Europe in 1986 and went to No 2!)
Written and produced by Reggie Lucas, it has to be said that its bubbling synth bass and drum machine haven’t aged particularly well. However, it is a defining early recording with a complex and classy souful melody, and there is no doubt you can hear her pop appeal bursting out the speakers. A live favourite for many years, Madonna revamped the song with a rock take on it during her 2008 tour, complete with her Madgesty playing a purple Gibson SG and sadly singing somewhat flat! Other ‘rock bands’ have taken Borderline on – Manic Street Preachers, Counting Crows and Flaming Lips and I’m unconvinced by all of them. However, I am very taken by the de-constructed version recorded in 2018 by Australian ‘finger-style’ guitarist Tommy Emmanuel which has singer-songwriter Amanada Shires on lead vocal and violin. Yes, violin. It is well worth a listen.
Last Word
I’ve previously mentioned the (lack of) functionality of the WordPress software in relation to reader feedback and the need to have a WordPress account and be signed in to do this. Over the life of WIS, I’ve heard several tales of endless log-in loops for those who have bothered to create an account and share everyone’s frustrations.
Some recent research suggests that the simple ‘Like’ function still requires you to be logged in with an account to use, which seems crazy. However, you can apparently use the comment box at the very bottom of the page without an account. When you try to input, the software will open a window stating “Log in OR provide your name and email to leave a comment”. I can understand this second option is a hassle and there is a natural reticence to give your email, but they do state the address will never be made public. Anyway, it would be great to get some more feedback (thanks Malky!), even if it is pointing out the many factual errors I make when writing this nonsense.
This month’s tunes will eventually also appear on the unwieldly Master at the link below. Give it a shuffle.
AR
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