Escalators, roller skates, hotline bling, skinheads, microwave ovens, polaroid cameras, FM Radio, whiggers, bikinis, gramophone records, flappers,….Here’s a thread for songs about the sundry inventions, trends, fads and fashions of modern life.
Last week I was in Flemingsberg south of Stockholm, It is the location of an enormous hospital and Södertörn University. The architecture is very brutalist. Concrete blocks everywhere. Very DDR.
Anyway, to reach these one has to use an enormous escalator. To my delight, they have now added blue lights which give it a pleasantly jazzy feel. All that I lacked was some mellow background music.
And would you believe it? Respected Swedish jazzman Per “Texas” Johansson has named his latest album after that escalator: “De långa rulltrapporna I Flemingberg.” Rather good it is too.
The story behind it is that Per hung his sax up for a while and retrained as an anaesthetic nurse, I suspect he knows Flemingsberg rather well.
How many songs about escalators can you think of?
Please post them and any other songs about Techno Trousers or other invaluable additions to our modern lifestyle.
One thing is for certain: the Flemingsberg Escalator is certainly not Over the Hill.
Any excuse to post this wonderfully anachronistic Drake cover.
The jazzers among you will doubtless want to hear a track from Per’s album.
Here is the cover art and the track listing.
https://www.discogs.com/Per-Texas-Johansson-De-Långa-Rulltrapporna-I-Flemingsberg/master/937075
My daughter in law is a anaesthetic nurse….but surprisingly does not play the saxophone.
That is a fruitful line of thought. What an interesting place the Swedish healthcare sector would be if every ansesthetic nurse was also a very competent jazz musician!
Now from 1962, a sizzling classic from the Tornadoes.
One of the Sainted Margaret Thatchers desert island discs.
Scott Walker’s Big Louise comes to mind with its reference to the Fire Escape In the Sky, although I assume it isn’t actually an escalator!
Early Muse classic about the joys of AOL Instant Messenger.
Here’s the Red Guitars giving us a list of all those items of good technology … all together now:
We’ve got photographs of men on the moon
We’ve got water that is good for us
We’ve got coffee that’s instantaneous
We’ve got buildings that are very tall….
I was going to post this on an earlier thread about something or another. Wonderful choice, a brilliant record.
Praise for the man who invented Jazz
When did the term skinhead come into use?
By 1970 there were songs about it.
And one for the girls:
And a whole Jamboree (isn’t that something to do with the Scouts?)
And later, Skinheads were aligned to the Oi movement (some good, some bad, some downright questionable, and often containing whiffs of Garry Bushell).
And to prove it wasn’t purely a London-centric thing, this lot came from Malaysia
I love this track by Pugh, a love song to an excavator – and not in hokum blues style – it’s actually about an excavator.
Oh yes, Pugh! He’s one of the greats.
Anto Thistlethwaite has a love song to a Massey-Ferguson tractor on his very good album Cartwheels, the YT not available in this country.
Along with the car, the telephone I think is the technological item that has inspired the most music. Here’s one of my favourites: now does anyone know which phone. I’d like to think its an 80s BT Trimphone but that may be wish fulfilment
More vanished tech. An ode to the answering machine:
We could probably do a thread just on the answering machine. 70s one hitter Paul Evans
Two-hitter actually.
I thought we might not find a paen to the fax machine – but Rog has obliged along with such other 80s ideas as satellite links and wire services:
And the pager. Tremendous track.
Thanks Mosely! You are really on a roll today. Yes, there are certainly hundreds of songs about phone calls.
Every country has its own phone songs. Here is the Volare Hitmaker, Domenico Modugno, in a duet with the very young Francesca Guadagno.
Here are the lyrics in English. It’s tear-jerking stuff!
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/piange-il-telefono-telephones-crying.html-0
And now, here is one of the first.
It was first published in 1901 and is about an orphaned girl who thinks she can use the telephone to talk to her late mother.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_Central,_Give_Me_Heaven
The wonderful Carter Family were not afraid to sing about death and bereavement, Great for church services, but not a band to book for your party!
Ry Cooder and pals invite you to call The Lord, anytime.
The Chicken Skin Revue is probably the greatest band every to have walked the earth.
If not necessarily just the phone, here’s AW poster boy RT with a paean to its inventer https://youtu.be/wxfZgU5cZ9U
The Sweet recognise the same bloke
(not one of their rockiest moments, but still heavier than Poppa Joe)
Of course, not all telephone songs were serious discursions on modern communications….
The first paperbacks appeared in the 1930s. But it was 30 years before their writers were immortalised in song by the Fabs.
Now Alicia Keys sings about her typewriter.
Elvis mentions his electric typewriter in this fine song.
Remarkable video!
You’ll be thinking of Penguin, but actually paperbacks appeared long before that. Routledge’s Railway Library of paperbacks started in 1848 and ran until 1899.
Tauchnitz, a German firm, started their Collection of British and American Authors, also paperbacks, in 1841. The British Library has a collection of 6700 Tauchnitzes. I have one: Journey’s End by R C Sherriff from 1930, no. 4931 in the series.
Thankyou for correct me @mikethe p. You are quite right. I was thinking of Penguin and got my facts seriously wrong.
But this new information confuses me. Paperbacks had been going in some form for the best part of 100 years before anyone had thought if mentioning them in a song.
Unlike a constipated mathematician, you no longer had to work it out with a pencil
And Kraftwerk also predicted Internet Dating
“Secretaries turn off typewriters….”
I had a couple of years of ‘freelancing’ at the beginning of the 90s. When I left the first job I had a secretary with a typewriter, when I started the next I had an assistant with a computer.
Rebellious jukebox yeah!
I like tall speakers, I like small speakers
C30 C60 C90 go!
Red Frame White Light – OMD
It’s about the telephone boxes that used to be everywhere.
Time to get clean!
There may be other songs about visiting a car wash, but Rose Royce’s is the sovereign of the suds.
I suspect there are several songs about washing machines. In the hands of Kate Bush, doing the laundry becomes a mysterious, sensual, tactile, erotic experience.
Buffy Saint Marie needs a sewing machine! What a remarkable voice she has! Thus song is a killer.
“I gotta get me a sewing machine
Sew you a shirt of black
”Do not love” across the front
And all across the back!
To remind me, yea,
That you’re not the lovin’ kind.
To remind me, yea-yea-yeaa!
That you’re not the lovin’ kind!”
Going…down?
Nice one Neela!
Not totally unconnected, here are ABC singing the praises of that most practical of inventions, the zip.
We could do a whole thread of songs about the radio. Here is a beau=ut from Hal David and Burt Bacharach.
Here is a more skanky radio hit from The Selector.
Or a more political slant . An old favourite from Latin Quarter.
More radio related musical shenanigans – this time with a South American reference
“Put the blame on VTR”
More escalator based shenanigans from Middleton’s finest, the Chameleons.
According to Wiki, the first roller skates appeared in 1743 in a London theatrical production.
Amusing to read that in WW2, the US Army were thing of issuing all GIs with a pair of skates.
A few years later De La Soul penned this splendid anthem to the joy of a skating Saturday.
The answering machine was invented as early as the 1930s. I love this song. It’s possible it’s not about an answering machine though.
Never heard that, Neela, and it really is a grower.
On the subject of answering services, here are Sparks singing about a scenario we have all endured.
Time for short wave radio and a rather remarkable album: I trawl the megaherz by Paddy McAloon.
In 1999 the Cars and Girls Hitmaker almost became blind due to detached retinas. During his period of ill health, Padd took great comfort from listening to all kinds of short wave radio,
He pieced together fragments from his listening and created this very idiosyncratic album of rather surreal orchestral pop. Very different from yer Sprout but I like it.
Here’s a fairly recent interview with Paddy
I live and work in Baku which has escalators (and the odd travellator) all over the place. Generally outdoors as well which means they get wet and jammed up with leaves and gunk during the autumn and winter. It’s odd as I’ve never really considered escalators as anything but indoor “things” and they always look weirdly out of place in the outdoors
There’s plenty of interesting remnants of the Soviet times over here
Baku? Interesting. Not too many AWers in Azerbajan, as far as I know.
I agree with you about escalators being basicallly an indoor thing but it seems that there are some outdoor ones in Las Vegas. The stuff we learn here, eh?
http://www.urban-hub.com/smart_mobility/10-escalators-that-ensure-easy-people-flow/
Great outdoor escalators I have known: there’s a whopper just outside Stratford International Station to get you to the top floor of Westfield in one go. Doesn’t seem to be working half the time though.
I’m sure I’ve encountered a couple of outdoor ones in the London area too, though I can’t remember where or when. I do remember that neither of them were working at the time.
A lot of the Paris metro and RER escalators come out onto the street so are essentially outdoor. Any cold or rain is to be greeted with the requisite amount of shrugging.
Unless it’s Spiral, in which case bof, putain, merde.
Nobody in Spiral would use the RER, because you might get out on to the street and find there is fresh air and trees. Quelle horreur!
Outside in Las Vegas eh? They’d probably get some dust/sand issues there I guess (I’m not an expert).
Like a lot of stuff here, they just don’t get maintained properly. When you use them to get up and down pedestrian underpasses they can make a horrible nails-on-blackboard type screeching noise.
Aaaaaayy! That sounds excruciating.
Here is a photo of the great Blue Escalator of Flemingsberg.
In our Swedish climate, with snow imminent every winter, outdoor escalators are not on the agenda.
We’ve all heard of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. But the Screeching Escalators of Bakus are a modern wonder which are not so well known!
Did you know that the first escalator built in Sweden was the one between the ground floor and the basement at NK on Hamngatan?
Interesting. I had no idea. A
nd a now a wonderful Spanish song about a crystal lift by Esclarecidos (The Enlightened)
Making a welcome return to the Afterword, here are those masters of mirth and melody, The Wurzels, singing the praises of the latest development in agricultural technology.
If the lads had been from Nashville or the Mid-West they would be singing about a certain green vehicle. In Europe, lovelorn farmers get a Dear John. Stateside, they buy a John Deere.
https://www.onecountry.com/country-music/9-best-country-music-songs-about-john-deere/
https://www.onecountry.com/country-music/9-best-country-music-songs-about-john-deere/
The rocket started out as a clever invention for people who wanted to kill someone/an entire population, but not wanting to be in the same city/country/part of the world. It then became the means of transportation when going to the moon and beyond (you just wait).
And this is a great song.
Time for a journey in a thoroughly modern bus. But which company shall we choose?
National Express?
Or maybe Greyhound?
Or perhaps London Transport?
Or Magic Bus, Inc?
The wheels of the bus are falling off, falling off, falling off… and everything is fine.
Boris has got such a shifty look on hs face. It is as though he is expecting the Bill to come in and nab him fr something he has done. That poor rabbit looked very uncomfortable too,
Rabbit fondlers! Hanging’s too good for ’em!
Damn right! The school visit was supposed to be Bunny Ha Ha but turned out as Bunny Perculiar.
I always thought there was something Bunny about Boris. Not just his Hare.
How many other songs can you think of that mention ..
a slide rule?
a microscope?
a test tube
and last but least, a bunsen burner?
What a gem that is! Otway rules!
If you’re talking They Might Be Giants, Birdhouse in Your Soul is about a tungsten lightbulb. No songs I can think of since are about Compact Fluorescent tubes or white LEDs.
Nice suggestion, Steve. The subject of modern lighting brings us back to Kraftwerk.
Lovely song. It’s almost commercial.
Mr Thompson and a Bunsen Burner no slide rule but at least Fleming’s Left Hand Rule.
That’s a side of Mr Thompson that I’ve not seen before and I like it a lot. And he wears it well and is obviously having great fun.
@kaisfatdad
Test tube?
Bunsen burners and suchlike make me want to indulge in a few minutes of nostalgia.
Dolby is a talented bloke. The Flat Earth was a very fine album.
When I was at school we used to stand Bunsen burners on asbestos heat mats. In the interests of health and safety.
Can we rename this thread Over the Hill People Discuss Elevators?
Escalators, surely.
Parrrrrrrp!
Yus…I’m over the hill.
What about Neil Young’s A Man Needs A Teasmade?