Archive for the ‘songs’ Tag
Openings – first lines of songs
Filed under: john martyn, Music, poetry, songs | Tags: Bob Dylan, first lines, lists, lyrics, songs
Comments (1) In most creations with a time dimension (film, music, etc.), the opening is very important. This is particularly true of Short Form Video where the drop-off rates in the first minute on almost all platforms is very high (75%+). It’s all about grabbing attention and retaining interest. While it’s critical in this most modern of art forms, it’s pretty much as true of the positively ancient art of song writing.
Here are some favourites from a lively thread on our Facebook account…
I never needed anybody’s help in any way,
But I say…
Oh Bondage! Up yours!
But I’m quite happy with what I got
To the girl with the mousy hair
But her mummy is yelling, “No”
And her daddy has told her to go
A very strange enchanted boy
Since you took your love away
Since you took your love away
Best Music of 2019
Filed under: london, Music, songs | Tags: 2019, best of, best of 2019, bruce springsteen, celeste, divine comedy, kiwanuka, Music, nick lowe, paul weeler, songs
Leave a comment Just taking a moment to record for posterity/reference the highlights of 2019’s music from a London point of view in the form of the playlist of Robert Elms’ annual New Year’s Eve episode of his Radio London show before it drops off BBC Sounds (Audio on Demand app) in a couple of weeks. (The bolding is my recommendations.)
Celeste
The recorded music and live sessions from his show played by Robert Elms on 31/12/19.
- Bob James Trio – Ain’t Misbehavin’
- Hiss Golden Messenger – I Need A Teacher
- Jack Savoretti – Catapult (Radio London Session, 15 Jan 2019)
- Monkey House – 10,000 Hours [shades of Steely Dan – in a pleasing way]
- Danny Toeman – She’s Got Something About Her (Radio London Session, 8 Aug 2019) [shades of 70s soul – in a groovy way]
- Emily King – Look At Me Now
- HAIM – Summer Girl
- Celeste – Lately (Radio London Session, 4 Apr 2019)
- Nick Lowe – Love Starvation [can still teach the young’uns a thing or two]
- Natty Rebel – Copper And Lead [fresh roots reggae]
- Jo Harman – Cloudy (Radio London Session, 1 Mar 2019)
- Michael Kiwanuka – You Ain’t The Problem [contender for LP of the year]
- Ralph McTell – West 4th Street & Jones (Radio London Session, 27 Nov 2019) [lovely reflection on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan – a cover I own the original contact sheet from by photographer Don Hunstein]
- Paul Weller – You Do Something To Me (Live At Royal Festival Hall, 2018) [just a great song]
- Kat Eaton – Barricade
- Monks Road Social – If It Was All Down To Me
- Bruce Springsteen – There Goes My Miracle [his singing is impeccable on this]
- Kelly Finnigan – I Called You Back Baby [shades of Aretha – in a funky way]
- Khruangbin & Leon Bridges – Texas Sun
- The Divine Comedy – Norma And Norman (Radio London Session, 7 Jun 2019) [quirkiness at its best]
- Teskey Brothers – Pain And Misery (Radio London Session, 11 Feb 2019) [shades of Otis – in a surprising way]
- The James L’Estraunge Orchestra – Closer [shades of Aztec Camera – a lone Scot in his bedroom making an astonishingly big sound, playing everything himself]
- Durand Jones & the Indications – Morning In America [shades of Gil-Scott Heron – in a respectful way]
- Greentea Peng – Risin’ (Radio London Session, 24 Oct 2019)
- Gabriella Cilmi – Ruins
- Lissie – Dreams
- The Delines – Eddie & Polly (Radio London Session, 4 Nov 2019)
- Roseanne Reid – Amy [offspring on a Proclaimer]
- The Brand New Heavies & N’Dea Davenport – These Walls
- Maisie Peters – Favourite Ex (Radio London Session, 2 Aug 2019)
- Leif Vollebekk – The Way That You Feel
- Richard Hawley – My Little Treasures
- Judi Jackson – Better In The Fall (Radio London Session, 20 Mar 2019)
- Geraint Watkins – Heaven Only Knows
- Ady Suleiman – Strange Roses (Radio London Session, 7 Mar 2019)
- Jamie Cullum – Drink (Radio London Session, 10 Jun 2019)
- Yola
– Faraway Look
The original programme [3 hours] is here but will disappear at the end of January 2020.
Greentea Peng – more proof that young music is alive & kicking in London
Sweet Little Mystery
Filed under: gigs, john martyn, Music, painting, set list | Tags: dante gabriel rossetti, jane morris, jason rebello, john martyn, preraphaelites, ronnie scott, sarah jane morris, set list, singing, songs
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First gig of the year was an absolute cracker – spine-tingling and uplifting. It was singer Sarah Jane Morris (think Preraphaelites meet Janis Joplin) at Ronnie Scott’s. She was singing songs by my favourite of favourites John Martyn. The venue is one of the best, still redolent of the 70s. You just sip cocktails (no two the same) and watch&listen from just feet away.
Jane Morris as Proserpine by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1874)
The support act was Jonathan Gee Trio. As we share two-thirds of our name (my middle name is Jonathan) I felt compelled to go talk to the eponymous pianist after the set. He was delighted to meet on that basis. When I enquired whether Gee was all there was he explained it originated from Goldstein or similar, curtailed in the 30s. I said snap: Gewürtz.
SJM = Janis meets African Earth Mother
Sarah Jane Morris played the following John Martyn songs – her approach is to find her own way of rendering songs that are meaningful to her, like JM she has a baritone voice which therefore suits these songs (although she has a 4 octave range):
- Couldn’t Love You More – an unbelievably brilliant and simple love song
- Head & Heart – an unbelievably brilliant and simple love song, the heart of JM’s genius
- Call Me
- Send Me One Line – from the film 84 Charing Cross Road, bit of a rarity
- Over the Hill
- Solid Air
- One World
- Sweet Little Mystery
- Glorious Fool – one of my favourites, apparently dedicated to another Ronnie – Ronnie Reagan
- May You Never
Among these there were several transcendent moments (which is all you can really ask from a concert), sometimes from the singing, sometimes from the playing, particularly Jason Rebello’s piano.
What it made me realise is that John Martyn was a genius (truly) at writing powerful love songs – not like a poet or a micro-novelist but an honest-to-goodness songwriter – simple, repetitive, rhythmic.
The band were top notch:
- Jason Rebello, piano – one night only, gave it his all
- Tim Cansfield, guitar
- Tony Rémy, guitar and co-creator of the John Martyn covers project, realised in an album called Sweet Little Mystery (2019)
- Henry Thomas, bass – his double-bass was bust (SJM told me after the set) and so he was playing electric, not his norm – but he played it with a remarkable soft fluidity which really stood out
- Martyn Barker, drums
- Dominic Miller, guitar – played with Sting for a long time, a very distinctive, individual style, subtle, spare
It’s not surprising that it took three guitarists to equal one John Martyn, a guitar great as well as one of the greatest songwriters.
After the gig I got to chat briefly to Sarah Jane Morris and Tony Remy, the cherry on the cake of a brilliant night. I told her that I shared a birthday with John and that he is the only person I didn’t know, not family nor friend, whose death I deeply mourned. The day he died the world was a lesser place.
The moment I stepped out of Ronnie’s into the Soho night air the world was a greater place.
A touch of the messiah about him
Jane Morris, posed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his garden in Chelsea, 1865 – albumen print by John R. Parsons :: Jane Morris (1839-1914), wife of William Morris (1834-96), muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82)
Join Hands 11.11.1918-11.11.2018
Filed under: Music, poetry, songs, world war one | Tags: 1918, armistice, canadian, centenary, first world war, join hands, LP, LPs, Music, new wave, poem, poetry, poppies, punk, siouxsie, siouxsie and the banshees, siouxsie sioux, songs, vinyl, World War One, WW1
Comments (1) In 1979 I went to see Siouxsie & The Banshees playing at Hammersmith Odeon – it remains one of the best gigs of my life. Just before the tour half the band had gone AWOL so new musicians had to be drafted in including Budgie on drums (formerly the token man in The Slits, one of my favourite drummers – Stewart Copeland considers him one of the most interesting drummers for his “very economical and offbeat” playing, that offbeat being what I most like about him) and John McGeoch on guitar (formerly of Magazine). That tour marked the release of the LP ‘Join Hands’. The hands joining are those of four bronze WW1 Tommies on the war memorial between Horseguards Parade and St James’s Park (the Guards Memorial) – I passed it regularly when I was working at Channel 4 and it always brought me back to that music and excitement. The LP opens with the tolling bells of a 2-minute track called Poppy Day.
In the same way that Punk (especially The Clash) introduced me to reggae, through this track it introduced me to the First World War poetry of John McCrae, a typical example of the less known poets who emerged in the Great War, the one-hit wonders and offbeats. McCrae was a high-ranking Canadian army doctor serving on the Western front. In Poppy Day the resonant bells give way to the distinctive driving guitar wailing of The Banshees and then just a few short lines, delivered in a distorted Siouxsie voice:
In Flanders fields
The poppies grow
Between the crosses
Row on row
That mark our place
We are the dead…
I don’t think McCrae is credited for the lyrics which are very close to the opening of his In Flanders Fields, in fact every word is derived from the poem:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Siouxsie & The Banshees filtered out the patriotic and the warmongering/cheerleading to open their record with the zombie or heroic or haunting dead, we don’t know which. What we do know, two years after the Silver Jubilee and the Pistols’ God Save the Queen (the Fascist regime), with rubbish piling up in the streets of strike-bound London, is that these dead were neither glorious nor patriotic in the establishment way.
The band were inspired not only by the chaos and crapitude of the late 70s Home Front but also by conflict witnessed on their suburban Kent TVs, particularly in Iran. (Plus ça change).
The LP cover was extracted from this shot – L to R Steve Severin (bass), John McKay (guitar), Siouxsie Sioux (vocals), Kenny Morris (drums) – before McKay and Morris went AWOL
Banshee stalwart, bassist Steven Severin in the wake of watching the two minutes of silence in memory of the war dead on TV on Sunday 12th November 1978 explained about Poppy Day: “We wanted to write a song that would fittingly fill that gap”. On the inner sleeve of the record (which sits still in the room just below me, alongside its vinyl sisters The Scream, Kaleidoscope, Juju and A Kiss in the Dreamhouse) beside the lyrics of the song is specified (with echoes of John Cage): “2 minutes of silence”.
So here we are on Sunday 11th November 2018, 40 years after Severin watched that broadcast, 100 years after the world watched that bloodbath, that futile wiping out of a generation, and we are still all struggling to join hands. The irony of The Banshees brooding in the studio while recording this masterpiece of an LP and splitting up in its aftermath is as nothing to the irony that we mark this centenary at a time when the world’s international institutions are being deliberately dismantled, Europe re-fracturing and the zombie voices of patriotism, nationalism and fascism wailing more discordantly than John McKay’s guitar. We are the Dead. We are turning in our graves row on row between the poppies.
Reinforcements arrive: L to R John McGeoch (guitar), Budgie (drums), Siouxsie & Steve – Paris (1980) where 70 world leaders are arriving this morning to mark the centenary of the Armistice including Macron (accordion), Merkel (tuba), Trump (mouth organ) and Putin (triangle)
Something Is Happening
Filed under: Bob Dylan, Music, musings, poetry, Reflections, songs | Tags: Bob Dylan, dylan, lyrics, magic roundabout, podcast, podcasts, Song, songs
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Highway 61 Revisited photo session (New York 1965)
Just listened to a music podcast called ‘Is It Rolling, Bob? (talking Dylan)’ in which two actor blokes (Kerry Shale and Lucas Hare) talk to a journo bloke (David Hepworth) about a song & dance man, Bob Dylan.
It is a lot better than ‘Stalking Time for the Moon Boys’ in which two TV blokes (David Baddiel and Tim Hincks) talk to various other blokes and each other about a song & dance man, David Bowie. But it’s still not great. Entertaining enough if you’re keen on your Dylan.
One interesting fact I picked up was that Dylan named himself not after Welsh poet D. Thomas (which I’d believed) but after Marshall Dillon in some TV cowboy show (‘Gunsmoke’). Dylan as lifelong cowboy makes a lot of sense.
A question they asked David was how did you first come across Dylan. Got me thinking.
As a six year-old, just allowed to go by myself across one road to the newsagent (Eric & Mavis’s or perhaps it was the previous incarnation), I bought myself a fold-out poster magazine. I got it home expecting it to fold out to reveal a hippy rabbit (Dylan of ‘Magic Roundabout’ fame). Instead it was an unprepossessing bearded bloke with a guitar. A disappointing first encounter.
When I first fell under Dylan’s spell was having one of those Moments listening to ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’. I’d heard bits & pieces of Dylan during my childhood, listened to him a bit at uni through friends who were advocates (but I still had my Punk head on). But it was listening to this track on ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ when the light went on. It was the Surrealism of the lyrics that really grabbed me – I’m not really a lyrics man but the words made their impact, above all the non-rational, dream-like nature of them. I was in.
This moment lead directly to my ending up with a son called Dylan (who looks at times a little like the Big Man of this vintage).
You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked and you say, “Who is that man?”
You try so hard but you don’t understand
Just what you will say when you get home
Because something is happening here but you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?You raise up your head and you ask, “Is this where it is?”
And somebody points to you and says, “It’s his”
And you say, “What’s mine?” and somebody else says, “Well, what is?”
And you say, “Oh my God, am I here all alone?”
But something is happening and you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?
List of Lists
Filed under: Cinema, films, lists, Movies, Music | Tags: lists, LPs, Movies, Music, songs
Comments (4) I’ve been thinking about updating some of the lists that punctuate this blog (usually around Christmas when I’ve got a bit of time on my hands and am in a playful as well as reflective mood) so I’ve gathered a few here by way of preparation…
Blasts from the Pasts (musicians)
Doing the Box 1 (singles)
4 Tracks really worth a listen
I’m thinking of doing next a Best Movies list and revisting Best Songs.
Songlines #7: Soul to Squeeze
Filed under: musings, Reflections, Songlines, songs | Tags: mortality, red hot chili peppers, Song, songlines, songs, Soul to Squeeze
Comments (2) Songlines is a project I’ve been doing for some years (in fact, decades!), recording the answer to the question
“What song or piece of music means the most to you and why?”
from all kinds of people. I am now expanding it to video as well as audio – way back when it started on one of these:
No. 7 is a very moving contribution from Morgan.
The Song: Soul to Squeeze
The Artist: Red Hot Chili Peppers
The Reason:
The Song Performed:
And here are the previous Songlines on Simple Pleasures part 4 (these are just a small selection of the Songlines to date)
2 Dayenu
4 for 66 (Happy Birthday David Bowie)
Filed under: Music, musings, Reflections, songs | Tags: david bowie, songs, Where Are We Now?
Comments (6)
One Bowie
Two Bowie
To mark that special Londoner David Bowie’s 66th birthday today and the release of his new single Where Are We Now? here are four of his best ever songs:
- Unwashed and somewhat slightly dazed (Space Oddity) – the height of his hippy phase and I’m a sucker for the blues harp
- Life on Mars? (Hunky Dory) – from intimate to epic in the space 3’52”
- Station to Station (Station to Station) – a journey and a half of electronic, stereoscopic, systematic, hydromatic, goodbuzzin’, cooltalkin’, highwalkin’, fastlivin’, evergivin’ self-dramatisation
- Aladdin Sane (Aladdin Sane) – more madness, this time with crazy plinking, the perfect soundtrack to teenage chaos
Three Bowie
And now a line or two from each:
- It must strain you to look down so far from your father’s house
And I know what a louse like me in his house could do for you
- Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man! Look at those cavemen go
It’s the freakiest show - The return of the Thin White Duke
Throwing darts
In lovers’ eyes - Clutches of sad remains
Waits for Aladdin Sane
My last Bowie adventure is here at Heddonism
Four. Four Bowies make a bunch – and so do many more.
Bitter Crop
Filed under: lyrics, Music, new york, poetry, Politics, Reflections, songs | Tags: Abel Meeropol, Barney Josephson, billie holiday, blues, cafe society, civil rights, injustice, jazz, jews, lyching, lyrics, new york, segregation, songs, the south
Comments (5) The night before last the New York jazz club of the 30s and 40s Cafe Society was recreated in London at the Purcell Room on the South Bank for one night only. The club was set up in 1938 as an alternative to the largely segregated, mob-run nightclubs then on offer. Behind it was Barney Josephson, the New Jersey-born son of Jewish immigrants from Latvia. His declared ambition was to create ”a club where blacks and whites worked together behind the footlights and sat together out front”. His socialist tendencies are well captured in the club’s motto: The wrong place for the Right people.
Cafe Society was opened in 1938 by Billie Holiday and it was there within the year that she unleashed upon the world Strange Fruit, a song like no other. Picking up on my earlier post about great song lines, Shelter from the Storm, there is one line in this poem turned song that ranks among the all-time great song lines:
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
If you ever wanted to illustrate irony… that word “gallant” kills off a view of the Confederacy in one mighty blow. When Holiday first heard the lyrics her one question was: what does ‘pastoral’ mean? Which is ironic in itself in that her whole being understood what Strange Fruit meant which is why she made the song so much her own.
With the same irony that has Danny Boy being composed by an English lawyer, it was actually written by a white man, a Jewish school teacher called Abel Meeropol – pen name Lewis Allan, after two children he lost in their infancy. Meeropol’s motivation was simple: “I wrote Strange Fruit because I hate lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people who perpetuate it.”
Here’s the poem he brought to Holiday and Josephson at Cafe Society, already set to music, already performed in obscure left-wing circles, ripe for the magic of a singer who could perform it from her soul and evolve it into something uniquely powerful.
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
Holiday delivered this body blow to audiences throughout her career – here’s one later take on it (the instability of the picture seems to suit the song, as if it can’t fully be retained by the technology):
Update 19.xi.11
Barney Josephson didn’t seem to have his own Wikipedia entry so I’ve just made him one
Shelter from the Storm
Filed under: lists, lyrics, Music, musings, Reflections, songs | Tags: Bob Dylan, bruce springsteen, david bowie, jim morrison, jimi hendrix, john coltrane, john lennon, john martyn, lyrics, PJ Harvey, songs, the clash, the doors, walter pater, yoko ono
Comments (20) 
Walter Pater, the art and literary critic much admired by Oscar Wilde, wrote that “All art aspires to the condition of music.” I read that as other arts striving for the direct impact music has on the heart and spirit without recourse to any physical medium and being able to by-pass the intellect. Much though I love music I’ve never tended to listen to the lyrics of songs in a coherent and systematic way. Phrases and lines emerge over time in their own way and hook themselves into the brain.
I was jogging along yesterday morning listening to a podcast of the evergreen Desert Island Discs when a Bob Dylan song came on and a line really resonated for me as a perfect expression of what women mean to men. When I got home and sat down in front of my machine for the first time that day I whacked the line into Quotables for posterity – and to look at it on its own for a moment.
“Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm”
Not particularly poetic. Quite ordinary really. But in its context perfect and to the heart of the matter, to the matter of the heart.
So I felt inspired to pick out 10 great lines from songs that are worthy of the condition of music, that have the resonance and penetrative power of the supreme art. I tried being strict about one stand-out line per song only (only cracked once with a couplet).
1. Bob Dylan, Shelter from the Storm (1974)
“Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm”
2. John Lennon, Oh Yoko! (1971)
In the middle of a cloud I call your name
A powerful yet simple expression of romantic love.
3. John Martyn, Couldn’t Love You More (1977)
If you kissed the sun right out of the sky for me
Song lyrics straining to capture Love (is there a theme emerging?)
4. Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze (1966)
‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky
This could be love or drugs that’s fogging Jimi’s brain – either way it’s a great line.
5. The Clash, Garageland (1977)
Back in the garage with my bullshit detector
A spirited (spirit of Punk) response to an early bad review (of a gig with The Sex Pistols at Islington’s Screen on the Green): “The Clash are the kind of garage band who should be returned to the garage immediately, preferably with the engine running”. [Charles Shaar Murray – what did he know?]
6. Bruce Springsteen, Atlantic City (1982)
Well now everything dies baby that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Reckon there’s a load of philosophy buried in this couplet.
7. David Bowie, Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed (1969)
As I am unwashed and somewhat slightly dazed
Loved this phrase for a long time, the “somewhat” is just what’s needed to throw it off kilter.
8. The Doors (Jim Morrison), The Wasp (1968)
Out here we is stoned – immaculate
One of those lines that throws a word into a whole new light.
9. John Coltrane, Acknowledgement (1964)
A Love Supreme
Sometimes you don’t even need a whole line or clause – this is a transcendent chant. They’re the only words in this track and all the more striking for that.
10. Well, why don’t you add this one? What song words do it for you?…
[I’m treating this as a work in progress – going to be putting some more bath time into it]
UPDATE 11.ix.11
After some more bath-time reflection here are some other stand-out lines, plus some picked out by commenters below that strike a chord with me too:
Michael Franti & Spearhead, Oh My God (2001)
I slept with Marilyn she sung me Happy Birthday
Magazine, Song from Under the Floorboards (1980)
I am angry I am ill and I’m as ugly as sin
The Passenger, Iggy Pop (1977)
We’ll see the city’s ripped backsides
Marvyn Gaye/Dick Holler, Abraham Martin and John (1970)
Has anyone here seen my old friend Martin?
PJ Harvey, Let England Shake (2011)
England’s dancing days are done
You seem confused by your own ideals
You will not be able to stay home brother
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
It took it 3.5 billion years to decide that you live just where you live [it = the universe]
Simple Pleasures part 4 