Blue Boy – Page 3

It was 50 years ago today…

30/08/2018 by Blue Boy 32 Comments

‘Hey Jude’ was released in the U.K on 30 August 1968. The link below the video is to a nice Guardian piece on the song pointing out that it is probably now The Beatles’ most popular song (though I’d have thought ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Let It Be’ must run it close). All McCartney songs – Lennon’s most popular is surely ‘Imagine’.

I can vouch for its enduring global appeal – at an outdoor concert I was at in Shanghai recently, featuring orchestral Beatles numbers, it was ‘Hey Jude’ and those na-an-nas that had the locals singing and swaying along. Hey Jude Hitmakers, indeed.

People tend to be a bit sniffy about ‘Hey Jude’ but I’ve never understood why – it worked when it came out and it still works now half a century later. Long may it run.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/aug/21/how-hey-jude-became-our-favourite-beatles-song

Olivia Chaney – Shelter

31/07/2018 by Blue Boy 11 Comments

What does it sound like?:

Olivia Chaney’s first album, ‘The Longest River’, released in 2015, was a work of huge promise. Since then she’s worked with The Decemberists on the Offa Rex album, and the Kronos Quartet on their Folk Songs record. Now, her second solo record, ‘Shelter’ sees her spreading her wings as a songwriter, and more than fulfilling that promise. Here is a collection of songs bound together by echoing themes and narratives, in a production by Thomas Bartlett which seems simple but in fact in its simplicity and lack of adornment is utterly compelling.

In the title track Chaney pleads plaintively for the listener to persist in giving her shelter from her demons, over a simple acoustic guitar backing. In Dragonfly, the sight of a dragonfly in New York takes her back to memories of her childhood, this time over piano and strings. The loveliness of the chorus belies the hints of darkness in a lyric thinking back to her mother ‘I look back to see that someone stole her time’. ‘A Tree in Brooklyn’ opens with the arresting matter of fact line ‘Father’s a drinker, rolls down the stairs’, and tells of a close » Continue Reading.

Ry Cooder Prodigal Son

23/05/2018 by Blue Boy 33 Comments

What does it sound like?:

The album opens with a simple strummed mandolin introduction; and then the warmest sweetest vocal Ry Cooder has given in years as he launches into the Pilgrim Travellers 1950s gospel song ‘Straight Street’. Son Joachim comes in with some gentle drums, and, glory be, there’s the great team of Bobby King and Terry Evans (who has sadly died since this recording) together with Arnold McCuller with perfectly weighted backing vocals. It’s Cooder, it’s King and Evans, it’s a revived old American classic you’ve never heard before, and all’s right with the world.

The album is full of stuff like this. Cooder established himself in the early 70s as a one man curator and rediscover of American folk, blues and country song, and here he is doing it all over again.

There are two Blind Willie Johnson songs from the 20s and 30s. ‘Everybody Ought to Treat a Stranger Right’ Has a wonderfully funky groove with superlative slide guitar, and backing vocals perfectly locked in. ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’ is funeral in pace; it’s dark and full of foreboding and fear, and as powerful a version as I’ve ever heard.

The title track and Rosetta » Continue Reading.

Kendrick Lamar wins the Pulitzer Prize

18/04/2018 by Blue Boy 20 Comments

There’s been a bit of a stir over this year’s Pulitzer Prize for music. It’s almost always awarded to a classical composition – winners have included Samuel Barber, John Adams, Steve Reich and Elliott Carter, with the occasional concession to jazz artists like Ornette Coleman.

But this year the panel gave it to Kendrick Lamar for DAMN. He’s not only the first hip-hop winner, he’s the first winner in anything that might be defined as ‘pop’. Not before time some say: a sign of the decline of western civilisation say others (particularly following Bob Dylan being given the Nobel Prize). Personally I’m just amazed that he’s the first. And looking at the winners I see a lot of music which is and probabaly always will be largely unknown and a sense that most contemporary classical music is pretty much irrelevant.

Here’s a New York Times article discussing what this all means (link is below the video).

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/arts/music/kendrick-lamar-music-pulitzer-prize-damn.html

Tickets for Courtney Marie Andrews

12/04/2018 by Blue Boy Leave a Comment

22/04/2018

I have two tickets for Courtney Marie Andrews at Gorilla Manchester on 22 April which I can’t use now (am going to the Liverpool gig instead). Anyone like them? They’re £14.70 each but happy to accept, say, £15 for the two, so they get used. PM me if interested

Saturday night and I just got paid

17/03/2018 by Blue Boy 48 Comments

So it’s Saturday night, Spurs are in the FA Cup semis, Ireland have won the triple crown, there’s a paella cooking up nicelly on the stove, bottle of French red opened and all is well with the world. The soundtrack tonight – Vans really very good last album of new songs Keep Me Singing.

You?

Ho Ho Ho

15/12/2017 by Blue Boy 32 Comments

When it comes to Bob Dylan, I’m a completist. I’ve got all the official albums, and whenever he releases a new one, however awful it is, I know I’ll be parting with my money. Same with Van Morrison. I’ve been invested in his records for so long it’s too late to stop now.

Of course compared to many here I’m a complete lightweight. I’ve never bothered with bootlegs, and even with the Official Bootleg series I’ve restricted myself to the 2CD sets rather than the big shiny box sets. But still, that collection from ‘Bob Dylan’ to ‘Trouble No More’continues to give me a lot of pleasure.

Except there’s been a big Christmas shaped hole in the middle of it. For some reason I’ve never been able to bring myself to buy ‘Christmas in the Heart’. Until today. I finally cracked in HMV today – at £3.99 it would have been rude not to. I listened on the drive home from work. And what a gloriously funny, barmy, joyous record it is. When I wasn’t singing along at the top of my voice (even less tunefully than Bob it has to be said) I was grinning from ear to ear. » Continue Reading.

The Booker Prize – what do we think?

17/10/2017 by Blue Boy 18 Comments

Anyone read the winner or any of the rest of the shortlist? Anyone care?

I used to religiously read the shortlist and discovered many fantastic writers and novels (and some duds) as a result. But the balance of good v bad seemed to shift in more recent years and I lost interest. Picked up the thread again last year and read five of the six, but ye gods….

This year’s list hasn’t interested me in the least to date, with the one exception, as it happens, of the winner, Lincoln in the Bardo which I read a review of when it first came out and thought it sounded interesting. Will give that a go at some point but not sure about the rest of them. And meantime I cannot imagine that any of them are better than Sebastian Barry’s unbelievably great ‘Days Without End’ which unaccountably didn’t even make the list.

Thoughts from the Afterword’s literary critics?

The Neil Finn thread

14/10/2017 by Blue Boy 57 Comments

It’s early days but I’m really enjoying Neil Finn’s new record Out of Silence, as I did his last, very different, album Dizzy Heights. It was recorded in various sessions put out live on Facebook (the films are all online) but the record stands up on its own beyond the notion of that particular experiment . It’s darker and more sombre than much of his best known output, both in lyrics and in the largely piano and orchestral arrangements. Maybe that’s a function of age – he’s 60 next year – maybe just the subject matter he has taken on, including the Bataclan murders in Terrorise Me. But it’s beautiful in a largely minor key, understated way.

I’ve dipped in and out of Crowded House and Finn brothers’ solo material. But the more I listen the more I think that there are very few songwriters since the 60s who can match his unerring ear and ability to write wonderful melodies. The comparison with Paul McCartney has been made so many times it’s become a cliche, but you can see why. He shares with McCartney and a few others like Brian Wilson, Burt Bacharach, Carole King, an apparently effortless ability to » Continue Reading.

An honest life

15/08/2017 by Blue Boy 17 Comments

This month I have a significant birthday. Over the last few weeks I have been creating a playlist of 60 tracks for my 60 years – songs which in one way or another have been important for me. Some have particular memories; some are simply tracks I love. I’d got to 60 although it’s a work in progress – there are plenty on there I’m not sure about and many I am sure I have missed. But last night I added this as a 61st. Marie Courtney Andrews’ ‘Honest Life’ is the most recent record I’ve bought and I’ve been playing it a lot these last few weeks. She’s 26, my daughters’ generation. It must be hard to be original at that age, certainly if you’re ploughing a country singer-songwriter furrow. Listening to the album I can hear echoes of plenty of older artists who are either on my playlist or could be – Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne, Nanci Griffith. So there’s nothing especially new here.

Except that nobody has written these exact words before, and set them to this particular melody, and sung them in this particular way, and set them to these particular » Continue Reading.

Randy Newman on the Beeb

09/07/2017 by Blue Boy 20 Comments

For anyone interested in Randy Newman I heartily recommend the first part of a two part interview on Radio 2; part two still to come. I could listen to him talk and play his songs at the piano all day. And, oh my, what songs. More than any other songwriter I can think of I find his songs sound better and better the older I get. The new album sounds promising too.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08wdh4s

Guitar based rock music is dead

27/06/2017 by Blue Boy 61 Comments

Discuss. We often have here. Personally I think its demise is exaggerated. But guitar makers and sellers aren’t so sanguine…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/lifestyle/the-slow-secret-death-of-the-electric-guitar/?utm_term=.31ad0be6a164

The worst album from a major rock band

25/05/2017 by Blue Boy 184 Comments

Mardi Gras was Creedence Clearwater Revival’s final album. After 4 years of magnificent music making across six albums, the band was falling apart. Creedence had always been one brilliant control freak with an average, workmanlike three man rhythm section. John Fogerty was songwriter, lead singer, lead guitarist, provider of keyboards saxophone or any other additional instrument, producer and arranger. The others had a fraction of his talent, and none of the say. By 1972 they’d had enough. Brother Tom Fogerty had left. And Doug Clifford and Stu Cook wanted more input. So in an action of artistic suicide Fogerty gave it to them. They wrote and sang three songs each. Clifford’s were bearable but completely undistinguished. Cook’s were just awful. And Fogerty was clearly exhausted, pissed off, and, for the first time, simply didn’t care. The one positive note is that the album has one genuine Fogerty classic, the last song on their last album, Someday Never Comes.

In his corroscating Rolling Stone review Jon Landau described it as ‘relative to a group’s established level of performance, the worst album I have ever heard from a major rock band’. He may well have been right. But this was 45 years » Continue Reading.

Greatest all-round musical figure of the 20th century

07/05/2017 by Blue Boy 25 Comments

I was looking up Duke Ellington on The Allmusic site this evening and noticed that they baldly and unequivocally describe him as set out in the heading to this post.

Are they right? The word ‘all-round’ is important here I guess in that I’m not sure exactly what it means but it feels like a qualification and a caveat. I think it means that he was able to work in the genre of jazz but take it across into classical, film music and widespread acceptance- thus he had an ‘all-round’ impact second to none. But I’m not sure. Take it out and leave just ‘greatest musical figure of the 20th century’ and he may still be a contender, I suppose. But I’d plump for Shostakovich, for my money the greatest and most fascinating ‘classical’ composer of the century. Paul McCartney is also a clear candidate. Any others?

Sturgeon – masterstroke or big mistake?

13/03/2017 by Blue Boy 97 Comments

I don’t know enough about public opinion in Scotland to know if Nicola Sturgeon’s commitment to a second independence referendum is a brilliant political move or a major error. People could very easily turn against her call, seeing it (as May has tried to present it) as putting political opportunism above the national interest. But if the majority of Scots are pro EU they may well see it as a smart move to apply more pressure on the government to step back from a hard Brexit and to win concessions for Scotland.

One thing has become clear in the last week – the interventions most likely to cause real problems for the government in the next couple of years are going to come from the SNP, or the Tory’s own ranks but not from Her Majesty’s official Opposition.

Laura Marling Semper Femina

13/03/2017 by Blue Boy 17 Comments

What does it sound like?:

Laura Marling’s sixth album has women at its centre. The word ‘he’ doesn’t appear at all; almost every song features a woman as its subject. The ‘she’ of these songs could be lovers, friends, rivals, mothers, women seen from afar, the singer herself. The songs constantly move between first and third person, and they may be the same person, or they may not.

The title Semper Femina is Latin for ‘always a woman’. She is at different times strong, vulnerable, suffering a broken love affair, feeling the rejection of a friend, taking inspiration from another woman, worrying about the planet, worrying that she is doomed to repeat the same mistakes throughout her life. She is ‘fickle and changeable’, but Marling takes that phrase from the classical Roman poet Virgil and defiantly co-opts it as a slogan for life:

You’ll be anything you choose/ Fickle and changeable are you/ And long may that continue.

Time and again Marling shows the ability of a short story writer to create a whole character, or situation in one or two lines

I know she stayed in town last night/ Didn’t get in touch

You want to get high?/ » Continue Reading.

Your best live albums

20/02/2017 by Blue Boy 143 Comments

I know we’ve done live albums on more than one occasion before, but still, it’s a rich vein.

I was listening to Van Morrison’s It’s Too Late To Stop Now, Vols II, III and IV yesterday and marvelling at what a remarkable record it is. And the arrangements really make it. There are eleven people onstage including Morrison, and every part has its own lines, distinctive and clear. Strings are invariably used on rock records to provide a gloopy background, but here the quartet has a real role to play with lead lines and melodies enhancing the songs throughout. Ditto the two brass instruments which are never just reinforcing noise. Jeff Labes’ keyboard and John Platania’s guitar weave in and out with the texture of a jazz ensemble.

The playing is fantastic, and, above it all, Van’s vocals magnificent as he goes from bullhorn to whisper and back again in a stroke. What you hear is the essence of all great live albums – musicians feeding off each other, off the audience, and off the moment in a way that can never be created in the studio.

Many of my favourite live albums do this – Allman Brothers at Fillmore » Continue Reading.

Yes – The Yes Album

09/01/2017 by Blue Boy 77 Comments

What does it sound like?:

I was thirteen when The Yes Album came out, but I only really became aware of it, and the band, a year or two later when all of my mates suddenly seemed to be listening to Yes, ELP, Genesis et al. I remember being dragged along to see them around the time of Tales of Topographic Oceans. However I don’t think I have ever knowingly heard a Yes record all the way through. As far as I was concerned in the 70s Yes were the acme of pompous prog rock with its classical pretensions and sub Tolkein and Lewis Carroll lyrics. Needless to say, the fact that I had never listened to them properly was no impediment to my trenchantly holding this view.

Anyway in recent years I have occasionally scoured the Spotify vaults to catch up with ‘classic’ albums and artists which have somehow eluded me thus far. Tonight it has been the Yes Album. And bugger me if it isn’t a much much more enjoyable listen than I expected.

There are only six tracks, but there is far less endless keyboard nonsense than I expected (maybe that came later with Rick Wakeman?). » Continue Reading.

Your best reissues, live albums, other stuff not allowed in the new release poll…

15/12/2016 by Blue Boy 138 Comments

Loving the Controversy! Thread. Only on the Afterword, etc etc.

I’m with Tiggs – keep the main poll to newly released material only. So let’s start a poll on other stuff – ‘historic’ re-releases, live albums, archive material etc etc. No idea about the points scoring system and obviously Bob or Kate will win, but go for it….

American Tune

10/11/2016 by Blue Boy 9 Comments

Saw Paul Simon in Manchester tonight, and he was magnificent. Fantastic band, and an unbelievable set of songs from every stage of his career. But it was the final number which will stay with me for a long time. Seems he’s been finishing the set most nights with Sound of Silence, but tonight he stood alone at the mic with his acoustic guitar and played ‘American Tune’. He didn’t say anything about it, and he didn’t mention Trump all evening, but this was as eloquent an expression of the times his country is going through as I’ve heard these last 48 hours. You could have heard a pin drop.

And I don’t know a soulwho’s not been battered/ I don’t have a friend who feels at ease/ I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered/ Or driven to its knees./ But it’s alright, It’s alright,/ We’ve lived along so well/ Still when I think of the road we’re travelling on/ I wonder what went wrong/ I can’t help it, I wonder what went wrong

Eric Clapton – I Still Do

29/09/2016 by Blue Boy 7 Comments

What does it sound like?:

This record pretty much follows the template of Eric’s solo records on the 70s;

A few old blues standards by the likes of Robert Johnson and Skip James – check

A handful of pleasant but insipid self penned tunes – check

A JJ Cale song or two – check

A song or two by esteemed peers (Paul Brady and Bob Dylan here) – check

There are also a couple of songs from the thirties which frankly the album would be better without.

Listen, there isn’t anything earth shattering here, and if you don’t own any Clapton records there really wouldn’t be much point buying this over, say, 461 Ocean Boulevard or There’s One in Every Crowd. But, do you know, I’m really enjoying it. At least Clapton sounds as if he’s really made an effect here. His voice and playing are in good shape, he has Glyn Johns behind the desk, the artwork is pretty handsome and includes a portrait of EC by Peter Blake, and the band is terrific. He has brought in the likes of Henry Spinetti, Paul Carrack, Chris Stainton, and Andy Fairweather-Low. Were Carlsberg to do a ‘We don’t do » Continue Reading.

Randy Newman covers

18/08/2016 by Blue Boy 33 Comments

My Discover Spotify playlist threw this one up this week. Its rather lovely. Generally though I prefer Randy Newman’s great, great songs sung by the master himself, because only he can fully bring out the pathos, the wierdness, the irony or the satire in his lyrics.

I reckon he’s done alright from the royalties from covers of his songs though. Which are the best of them? Post away….

Inappropriate co option of music by politicians

02/08/2016 by Blue Boy 13 Comments

This may seem somewhat trivial compared to his other crimes against decency and respect for others, but, bloody hell, seeing Donald Trump use Free’s ‘Alright Now’ and The Stones ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ (though perhaps there’s a message there?) as he bounds up to the podium on his election rallies is thoroughly nausea-inducing. Other past or present examples?

The love of a godparent

19/06/2016 by Blue Boy 2 Comments

I heard today that my Uncle Jack has died. He was 87. I had a letter from his widow to tell me that he simply went to bed one night and didn’t wake up. It was a perfect way to go, and typical of the man to pass away quietly, without any fuss or drama.

I say it was typical but in truth I didn’t know him at all well. He wasn’t even my uncle. He was a distant cousin of my Dad and they went to University together. A few years later when I came along Mum and Dad asked him to be one of my godparents. After that I would guess I only met him maybe half a dozen times. The most recent was at the funeral of a (real) uncle around three years ago. Before that may have been as long ago as our wedding thirty years ago when he and his wife travelled to join us.

But though I hardly met him, every year, right through my life, I heard from him twice, at Christmas and on my birthday, when I received a card from him. It was always accompanied by a short handwritten letter, asking » Continue Reading.

Bruce Springsteen

29/05/2016 by Blue Boy 31 Comments

Venue:

Etihad Stadium, Manchester

Date: 25/05/2016

Manchester was gridlocked. We abandoned the car 2 and a half miles from the stadium and pegged it through the rain, getting there just as he was taking the stage. We took our seats, a mile from the stage. The sound swirled around the arena. The atmosphere was that of a ring road industrial estate. But if anyone can overcome these limitations it is Bruce Springsteen. He did it when I first saw him at Wembley on the Born in the USA tour (though it wasn’t raining then) and over 30 years later he can still do it. How? Well, here’s a few reasons

The songs

He really does have an extraordinary back catalogue. On the European leg of this tour he has abandoned the idea of performing the whole of The River, and the result is that a whole lot of other great material is getting a look in. Of course the trouble with such a rich back catalogue of material is that no one is going to get the set list of their dreams. This concert almost entirely focussed on that extraordinary run between Born to Run and Born in the » Continue Reading.

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