I was in Morrisons at lunchtime and the instore radio station played Hello It’s Me by Todd Rundgren. It was in my head for most of the afternoon. Any other examples?
Unexpected pleasures
by 33 Comments
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
In a shop, considering a quite expensive shirt purchase. The price made me hesitate. The sound system kicks in with Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence so I bought the shirt.
Heard Wilco the other day in my local supermarket
Another one. I moved to Zurich in the 80s. First thing I needed was a plug for my water heater so I could make tea in the hotel where I stayed for a while. So I went to the nearest department store and got one. Bizarrely the song playing I can still remember was a cover of Yoko Ono’s Walking on Thin Ice by Elvis Costello.
Drinking a coffee in Departures at Gatwick a few years ago only to hear ‘Heroes and Villains’ by Brian Wilson sail out amidst the playlist dreck .
Sidmouth Folk Festival campsite, midweek, 2024, 7 or 8 in the morning, raining, in the Breakfast tent. Beach Boys Greatest Hits, played loud. Bloody wonderful, and played again, at my request, the following day.
That does sound a rather lovely thing to happen.
I was with my wife at Gatwick, above, and she laughed at the look on my face as ‘H and V’ started. She knows I only have time for the cool stuff. 😜.
Not quite the same, but listening to the Pulp Fiction soundtrack for the first time in many years the other day I remembered when the film was fresh in the cinemas and the album a bestseller. Which is probably why someone in Woolworth’s record department decided to put it on the store sound system one morning when I visited, not realising that it’s starts with the rousing words:
Which is far as it got.
Reminds. me of the time when I worked at a coffee shop, precursor to Starbucks, near Bank tube, around 1997. I had just got a copy of Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space and despite the company mandated store music of bland American muzak, convinced the duty manager to put it on during the early rush hour.
First few tracks were OK but as Jason and co wafted into the first of the album’s many voyages into grinding torrents of white noise and screeching strings, the semi comatose early morning coffee queue began protesting. it was swiftly yanked. And we were back to endless easy listening versions of Dream A Little Dream of Me.
Exactly two years ago today I was here atop a mountain in Cyprus, visiting the cafe I heard Delilah from the SAHB.
A pleasure, yet also an oddity (especially when one has a working understanding of the background and lyrics).
Kids Halloween Party in the pub on Saturday:
Monster Mash – as expected
Ghostbusters – again, unsurprising choice
Thriller – OK, makes sense
but then …
Ghost Town
OK, it has “Ghost” in the title but not sure a kids party was quite ready for the social comment of industrial decline in the Midlands in the late 70s.
“All stand for the national anthem..”
Funny you should mention Morrisons Vince.
Last week whiklst doing the weekly shop “Psychotic Reaction” by The Count Five came on.
I wonder if they’ve got a new music programmer in?
I had the DJ play that at the end of my wedding do. Not everyone got it or appreciated it but those closest to me did…I think Father Fintan Stack said it best.
That’s a tune and a half!
My local Savers store (huge second hand outlet) played to my delight over their speakers Roadrunner by the Modern Lovers.
I was recently in a lovely bookshop in Whitby where they have quite a surprisingly large and well curated section of music books and rock biographies. They also stock a small number of LPs (or ‘vinyls’ as I suppose I must learn to call them). A really nice little shop.
Stick with calling them LPs, @Boneshaker – you’ll feel less queasy, trust me…
I saw two large murmurations of Starlings in less than a mile of driving at lunchtime today. They didn’t play any tunes tough.
Was thinking about Starlings just yesterday. And then thought about the band Starlings , from New Zealand I think, who released a couple of grungy singles some years ago. “Every single thing I do is wrong “ was one of them I think. Will go and check and edit if needs be. Over and out.
There’s always that Starlings track by The Elbow if you want something closer to home.
There is that.
Can’t track down that Starkings song btw..Memory must be wrong
I was a well known furniture shop in Abu Dhabi a while back and I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) by The Electric Prunes was playing. They have a section with noveltyish wooden sign boards there and in the Sale section was one with that line from the song on it.
My wife thought they sang I Had Too Much To Drink (Last Night) when she first heard it and thought it was extremely funny
In the northern German town of Lüneburg, where I was two weeks ago, there are many fine shops and boutique to attract the tourist. I was in a rather lovely tea shop, looking up at the storied ranks of large tins of tea rising up on both walls as you walk into the heart of the shop (herbal and fruit on one side, black tea on the other), when the familiar strains of rapidly yet delicately plucked guitar, pattering congas, rumbling Danny Thompson double bass and the distinct, gentle, clipped vocals of Nick Drake emerged discreetly from well-placed speakers, wrapped in the warm timbre of the cello strings.
One of my favourite tracks from his first album, Cello Song was just the trick to lull me into the sense of synaesthetic contentment to índuce me to buy packets of malted Assam and smoky Russian teas, gently shoveled into crinkly unfolded paper and foil bags.
It didn’t hurt that the rear room of the shop had a shelf of records and discount CDs by regional and global indie artists, most of whom I’d never heard of. 5 euros for an ‘Of Montreal’ album – what’s not to like?
Here are those CDs
I wonder if anyone knows any of them?
I read a nice interview with Linda Thompson once wherein she talked about hearing a Drake song playing in a shopping mall in California and how such an occurance would have been completely outside the realms of his wildest imagination.
Doctor Who should do a scene like that Van Gogh one.
Chazzers aside (always Abba, always shite) the only place where I’m assaulted by unasked-for pop music is in football grounds.
On the referee’s half-time whistle a few weeks ago, the tannoy, having not hinted at anything as good before the game, suddenly blasted out ‘No Matter What’ by Badfinger.
In a crowd of about 400, I reasoned that I might have been the only person to know what it was.
One of the few pleasures of watching Wigan Athletic is the number of Northern Soul classics played pre and post-match/half-time.
We were watching this show where this celeb (swedish TV) buys a run down house in the south of France that she’s going to do up. As they do they play a mass of old tunes in the background. One of these was a French cover of Ruby Tuesday. You can hear a song so many times that you can’t really hear it any more but this really freshened it up as if new and I thought wow this is such a great song.
Mrs duco and I were on holiday in Matera, Italy last week.
We were having lunch in the Sasso Caveoso when a song came on the radio. It sounded like “Something is Happening” by Herman’s Hermits, except that it was sung in Italian. “It must be an Italian cover version of the song”, I said. I was completely wrong. It was the original version of the song “Luglio” by Riccardo Del Turco, of which the Herman’s Hermits song was a cover.
Matera! Very much my ex neck of the woods. Been there many, many times. It used to be dead poor and neglected, like something out of Christ Stopped At Eboli, but they did it up really nicely when it won the European Capital of Culture in 2019 and made it far more tourist-friendly (in a good way). The Passion Of Christ and No Time To Die being filmed there also helped gentrify it for the better too. It annoys me that it very often gets lumped together with the region of Puglia and no mention made of it actually being in Basilicata, purely on account of it being one of the most striking towns of Southern Italy and whilst tourists flock (in enormous numbers now) to Puglia, no one wants to go to poor old Basilicata except to see Matera.
Talking of Italian versions of well known songs, this is (or at least used to be) an extremely well known song in Italy. I used to hear it everywhere. In this case though, the original version is the English one, though most Italians don’t know that. They think this is the original. See if you recognise it:
Somewhat unrelated, but inspired by the OP mention of Morrisons…..
So what is the AW demographic on supermarkets ? Mostly posh Waitrose or Aldi / Lidl – or simply whichever is closest (which is always my default -although being halfway around the world, we have completely different supermarkets)
I have a Waitrose within a short stroll, in fact on the circuit I anyway walk the hounds. So it gets a lot of custom But “big shops” tend to get done at Tesco, apart from a spell with Morrison’s during Covid. Apart from Lidl/Aldi and the ever ubiquitous Co-op, that’s all we have in Lich, so I enjoy holiday trips to others, especially Booth’s. Never much took to Sainsbury’s.
I love supermarket exploring in foreign countries, enjoying French and Spanish the best. American ones are awful.
Aldi. And if I can’t get it there then Sainsbury’s or Tesco.
Sweet Suburbia