Musings on the byways of popular culture
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I’ve just uploaded my CD of Donovan’s ‘A Gift From A Flower To A Garden’ to my Roon library and I noticed in the write-up (presumably from All Music Guide) that this was the first LP box set of the rock era. I know Donovan is supposed to have invented music and all that but is that actually true?
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I know that some people are not keen on compilations (that is, of various artists) in the same way that they are not keen on playlists, but a well constructed compilation is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Among my favourites are:
Big Noise : A Mambo Inn Compilation. Originating from the long lost Brixton club, this set neatly segued African and Asian tracks by the likes of Kanda Bongo Man and Ustad Nasret Fateh Ali Khan with latin and jazz funk from Ramsey Lewis, Airto etc. All topped off with a sensational gospel track by Luther Barnes and The Red Budd Gospel Choir.
From Route 66 to The Flamingo. A great mix of Sue soul plus Jimmy McGriff, King Curtis and a live version of ‘Sticks’ by Cannonball Adderley. A pretty good representation of the 60s mod club scene. The CD version adds another 8 tracks but I prefer the more focused vinyl version.
Choctaw Ridge : New Fables Of The American South (1968-1973). Pretty much any Bob Stanley compilation set is worthwhile but this one which documents the new country scene that developed outside Nashville in the late 60s is particularly worthwhile.
OK. Over to you. » Continue Reading.
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Does anyone have any experience of the Brennan B2 CD Ripper? It claims to hold 5,000 CDs in lossless format. My problem: Since the first lockdown I have been bringing in armfuls of CDs from my garage and uploading to my Plex server, from which I am able to play music on my Sonos system. The NAS on which my Plex server is installed is getting rather full and I still have a significant number of CDs to upload. I wondered whether the Brennan would be a useful add-on to may system. An interim approach I’ve taken is, rather than rip every single CD, to prioritise the ones that are special to me and that are no longer easy to find. For the remainder of the CDs I stream them from Spotify where my Album Library is effectively my CD collection. I’m quite comfortable with the non-lossless sound quality for these non-special CDs and I’ve chosen a streaming service that, hopefully, is unlikely to go belly up. However, I’m still interested in whether the Brennan is an avenue worth exploring.
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Thanks to Lockdown II, I have wasted many an hour putting together a playlist from the comprehensive set of club playlists at the back of Bill Brewster’s and Frank Broughton’s book – ‘Last Night A DJ Saved My Life’. This covers the original New York clubs, The Loft and The Gallery, plus Warehouse, Paradise Garage, Music Box, The Roxy, Hacienda, Shoom, Sound Factory and Stealth. There were 81 songs I couldn’t find on Spotify so I went to You Tube Music (a great resource for obscurities) and found a further 70. The link to the YTM playlist of ‘extras’ is here :
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqZkyIWScpGPK2od7QjPo–dv7qoe3l9s
More than 50 hours of great music (mostly) so go ahead and fill yer boots (or maybe dancing shoes).
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I’m currently reading Craig Brown’s entertaining ‘biography’ ‘One,Two, Three, Four: The Beatles In Time’. I haven’t checked to see whether the pre 1963 stories in Brown’s book are in Mark Lewisohn’s ‘Tune In’ but I suspect they are. And, of course, we’ll have to wait and see whether the stories from 1963 onwards are included in Volume 2. (Craig Brown’s research is not on a par with Lewisohn’s as he re-tells the story about Dave Dee being the trainee cadet who was at the scene of Eddie Cochran’s fatal car crash in 1960 and states that Gene Vincent was killed in the same crash. He wasn’t of course, dying in 1971.) Anyway, I digress. One story that fascinated me was about Paul McCartney judging a competition to mime Brenda Lee’s ‘Let’s Jump The Broomstick’ on Ready Steady Go in late 1963. He picked out 14 year old Melanie Coe as the winner and presented her with the ‘Please Please Me’ LP. Four years later Melanie became pregnant and left home to live with the father, a croupier, in Bayswater. Shortly afterwards, an article appeared in The Daily Mail – ‘A-Level Girl Dumps Car and Vanishes’ – about her distraught father » Continue Reading.
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Pinched from somewhere else. If you need something to read in these dark times, knock yourself out with this extensive catalogue of magazines and weekly like the NME, Melody Maker, Disc etc, going back years.
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I know there are recordings of John Peel’s shows elsewhere on the internet but some July 1967 shows have been uploaded to Mixcloud recently. Fascinating to listen to although it confirms my long held view that most people bought the Incredible String Band’s ‘The 5000 Spirits or The Layers of The Onion’ for the sleeve rather than the actual music.
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It doesn’t sound like Vol 2 will be out before 2023 at the earliest. Better find something else to read in the meantime!
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Well that was a Proustian rush! Watching Ready Steady Go in my teens was a formative experience. I watched a lot of the shows in the school holidays (I was away at school during term-time). Some great clips included in this programme, such as that of the Stones miming to ‘I Got You Babe’, complete with Andrew Loog Oldham. And the Motown and Otis Redding Specials. Wonderful stuff with Dusty performing with the Marvelettes, Eric Burdon and Chris Farlowe with Otis. Sadly, I believe that the James Brown special was wiped. I’m not sure how the BBC managed to sort the issue with the rights to RSG. I thought that Dave Clark owned the rights but has been very protective of them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000gg2t/the-story-of-ready-steady-go
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No idea where I came across this (hope it wasn’t here) but this is exactly as described – the original film theme slowed down 1000% and edited. Just under an hour of sublime chill out music. Ideal for those moments when there’s too much Priti Patel in your life.
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Does anyone use music server thingies such as Roon or Plex? I am using Plex at the moment but although it has some good features it can be a bit flakey, particularly playing nicely with my Sonos system. Roon is more recent, is a lot more expensive than Plex but is supposed to offer great navigation and discovery possibilities. It also operates differently from Plex, in that you control audio output (eg to Sonos) from Roon itself. It would be useful to hear from anyone who has experience of these services, particularly Roon.
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Just listened to the Nothing Is Real Beatles podcast featuring a two-part interview with Mark Lewisohn. Really worth a listener Beatles nerds. One fascinating snippet for me was that Mark was asked whether he was planning to create an archive of his research material. He said he was but hadn’t got round to it yet (right answer as he should be concentrating on finishing Vol 2 of All My Years before I pop my clogs!). He had, however, moved his office and the archive weighed over 13.2 tons! That’s an incredible amount of material, and he said he doesn’t really collect artefacts or obvious memorabilia, just loads and loads of information. Difficult to imagine what other band could come even close to such a mountain of material.
https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/adrian-carty/nothing-is-real-a-beatles-podcast/e/64459556
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Partly inspired by Peter Doggett’s comment in the recent Word In Your Ear podcast – that you could create a sizeable compilation of songs CSN&Y and their coterie wrote about each other – I started to put together just such a compilation (playlist). However, in the end I decided to broaden it out to include other songs by artists about, er, other artists. Any other suggestions for songs warmly welcomed. This is a collaborative Spotify playlist so presumably anyone can add their contributions. A few notes where the reference isn’t obvious: ‘Willy’ by Joni Mitchell is about David Crosby (William is his middle name) ‘Pretty Girl Why’ by Buffalo Springfield is about Stephen Still’s first wife, singer songwriter Nancy Priddy. ‘You Can Close Your Eyes’ by James Taylor is about Joni Mitchell. ‘Empty Garden (Hey Johnny Johnny)’ by Elton John is a tribute to John Lennon. ‘Au Contraire’ by They Might Be Giants is about David Bowie.
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“There’s nothing like the smell of a playlist in the morning”.
I can’t remember the last time I played an album from start to finish (actually it was probably ‘Abbey Road’ several months ago). My go-to approach for listening to music is almost always a playlist. This is probably anathema to a number of contributors here but I find that a well-constructed playlist maintains my interest a lot better than an album by a single artist. I accept that this might say something about my low attention span but there we are. Of course, the availability of streaming services has revolutionised music listening. I’m lucky enough to have a Sonos system so I can build playlists from several sources, including my own music library, to create Sonos playlists. I used to invest in Hi Fi equipment but now accessibility and ease of use is much more important to me.
There’s quite a lot of imagination, even skill, in making a good quality playlist in my opinion, taking account of mood, flow etc. I can’t recall who on here contributed the ‘Beauty’ playlist from a year or two back but that is a prime example. It’s a real favourite of » Continue Reading.
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Apparently Fraser has put all the Word podcasts, from the beginning, on Spotify.
https://whatsheonaboutnow.blogspot.com/2019/10/theres-nothing-so-poignant-as-old.html
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Pretty surprising change of career for the ganja-infused reggae star? Photographed in Topsham, Devon near where I live. Perhaps you’ve had an ex-member of Pickettywitch come to service your boiler? Or Howard Jones’ mime chum clean your windows. Time to reveal all.
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Not sure if Colin H has mentioned this in his recent Mike Westbrook mega post, but Bandcamp are releasing a recording of the Mike Westbrook band live at Ronnie Scott’s Old Place in Gerrard Street (Soho) on May 25th 1968. Essentially this is a live (and extended) version of the ‘Release’ album. Release date is, appropriately, May 25th 2018, the 50th anniversary. For those who may not know, The Old Place was Ronnie Scott’s original club in Chinatown before moving to Frith Street and as Ronnie had a lease to use up he featured young and up and coming musicians, pretty exclusively. Here’s Richard Williams’ write up on the album :
LAST NIGHT AT THE OLD PLACE by Richard Williams
So many good things were contained within the Mike Westbrook Concert Band of 1968 that it’s hard to know where to start. Its personnel included the components of a whole scene of young London-based jazz musicians, bursting with energy and the desire to express the sounds they were discovering collectively and as individuals. For a time, this band gave them the ideal structure. And when they needed a setting, Ronnie Scott and Pete King were there to provide it. » Continue Reading.
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On Wednesday night I went to a preview of ‘My Generation’ co-produced by Simon Fuller and Michael Caine. This was a fascinating overview of the 60s (almost exclusively London in the 1960s), narrated by Michael Caine who also carried out interviews with Paul McCartney, David Bailey, Twiggy, Mary Quant, Roger Daltrey etc. Following the film there was a live Q&A with Michael Caine (on the evening of his 85th birthday) and the director, David Batty, simulcast to 400 cinemas across the UK. During this it emerged that the researchers spent 3 years trying to track down footage that hadn’t become too familiar over the years. Their big breakthrough was tracking down Peter Whitehead, director of ‘Tonite Let’s Make Love in London’ among other films, who is now in his 80s and living in Scotland. Amazingly, he has in his garage hours of original rushes, outtakes etc from his various 60s films which he agreed to loan, provided they were restored and properly digitised. ‘My Generation’ is well worth seeing if you are interested in the 60s or lived through them. There are apparently going to be six TV programmes which will feature the various interviews in full.
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Found in the bottom of a cupboard!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05w8rzt
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I recently came across this intriguing playlist, put together by DJ Bill Brewster, of funky music performed by unlikely artists. For example, ‘Ease Along’ by Sir Cliff and David Cassidy doing Ned Doheny’s ‘Get It Up For Love’, ‘I Dig You’ by Demis Roussos, ‘Tribal Dance’ by Peter Green and so on.
There must be many other hidden gems out there, like this one by Alan Trajan. Any other suggestions?
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I seem to play pretty much all my music on Spotify these days, even if I have the CD sitting somewhere in my garage. As a result, the number of ‘saved’ albums is growing fast and becoming pretty unmanageable. The Spotify app is fairly poor (eg compared to the Amazon Music app) but I’ve started creating playlists specifically for albums, eg ALBUMS – ECM, ALBUMS – ALICE COLTRANE etc so at least I can find the damn things. Anyone have any better ideas how to manage their music in Spotify? The Albums field is pretty limited when you have a lot of albums saved.
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Nice collection of blues programmes on BBC iPlayer under the BBC 4 Collections series. Curated by Julian Joseph, the series includes several Arena Blues Night editions (BB King, Sonny Boy Williamson and the ‘Chicago Blues’ documentary) and the Alexis Korner series from 1979, ‘The Devil’s Music’.
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I’ve just come across a Spotify tool called Organise Your Music. Basically, it analyses all your playlists and presents them in a variety of ways – by genre/micro genre, moods (amped, chilled etc), styles (clean, quiet, loud etc), decades, when added, popularity. You can then create new playlists based on these categorisations, amend them to your heart’s content and save them to Spotify. Some of the micro genres are new to me. I apparently have 4 tracks defined as ‘deep chiptune’ which is news to me (tracks by Magic Sword, 65 days of Static, Anamaguchi, Peter McConnell since you asked). And if that wasn’t enough, you can access a plot of each grouping with X and Y axes showing such variables as ‘acousticness, anger, energy, loudness etc. I guess this tool gives you more of an overview of your ‘collection’ plus it’s tremendous fun to play with.
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One of the joys of Spotify is creating a hand-made playlist (I’m not talking about grabbing Fleetwood Mac’s Greatest Hits for example and sticking it in a playlist). I’m sure it’s been done here before but how about sharing some of your favourite personal creations? Here’s mine, called Mellow 1 and designed as a party/dinner party playlist. It’s meant to be played sequentially. I’ll try and share some more but how about yours?
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What does it sound like?:
The conventional impression of 1950s Britain is of a rain-soaked and foggy land exhausted by the war and struggling to come to terms with lingering rationing and austerity. To counter this view along comes a sparkling new box set from Jonny Trunk featuring all manner of exotic recordings by artists with names like Reg, Ted and Eric. The Americans too had their own brand of exotica with artists such as Arthur Lyman, Esquivel, Les Baxter and Martin Denny but, as the sleeve notes suggest, the British experience was rather different. ‘Recovering from war, steeped in tradition and closer to European, Middle Eastern and Asian influences. Quietly reserved, gently comic and slightly confused.’ The three albums included in this box set are : ‘London’s Rarest Primitive Pop and Savage Jazz’, ’Persian Pop and Casbah Jazz from the Wild British Isles!’ and ‘Polynesian Pop and Placid Jazz from the Wild British Isles!’. Each album explores a different substrata of this fascinating music. Highlights include ex-Vernon Girl, Lyn Cornell, with a spirited vocal version of Johnny Dankworth’s ‘African Waltz’, folk singer Nadia Cattouse’s frantic jazz chase produced by her big band arranger husband, Dave Lindup, and ‘The » Continue Reading.
