Music and Lyrics

Jonathan Wilson

2012-01-15T12:58:00.003Z

My wife bought me a subscripton to the music magazine - Uncut - some years ago as a birthday present. I enjoyed it so much that she renews it annually for me. She doesn't now have to worry about what to get me and I don't have to worry that each month will be full of music surprises!

There is quite a lot of material about bands from the late 'Sixties and 'Seventies which were the years I relate to most, musically. There are also stories about new bands and artists that I didn't know about. The magazine featured a piece on Jonathan Wilson recently which was really interesting. He's collaborated with the likes of Roy Harper, Jackson Browne, Crosby Stills & Nash and a host of other more well-known names and yet, had it not been for Uncut, I may never have heard of him. I sampled a few tracks on iTunes and it still sounded good so I bought the album Gentle Spirit from amazon.

It's very much in the easy Eagles/West Coast vein and made a marvellous introduction to Sunday for me today.

Civil Wars

2012-01-07T10:54:00.005Z

This very phrase conjures up so many images and memories of images doesn't it?

My earliest memories of civil war are the vivid black and white television pictures from Biafra and then Vietnam, followed by my first colour sighting of Crowland Abbey in Lincolnshire. Crowland was a Royalist stronghold during the English Civil War until its fall in 1643. Our own family tree has a branch there: my Granny was married and my Mum christened beneath the huge dog tooth arch that still remains.

Today the Civil Wars has a new meaning for me. The Civil Wars are musicians Joy Williams and John Paul White (who does look scarily like Hugh Laurie). With their own roots in California, Nashville and Alabama, their music forms a beautiful, haunting backdrop to inspired lyrics that take you forward as well as back. I got Barton Hollowfor Christmas and if there was any strife in my head beforehand it has long been replaced by a lingering sense of peace.

I never liked video games but then Lana Del Rey came along

2011-11-07T19:05:00.003Z

Late on Saturday evening I wasn't tired enough to sleep - despite copious amounts of red wine - so I decided to set the sleep timer on my lovely DAB radio that sits near the bed.

I tuned into Absolute Radio which I used to listen to when it was still Virgin FM. It's all grown up now but what a great playlist! Then a female singer I hadn't heard of before sang the most haunting song that I switched the radio off manually, not wanting to hear anything else.

It was 'Video Games' by Lana Del Rey (real name Elizabeth Grant) and I absolutely recommend it. I've just downloaded it and listened to it over and over again. The lyrics are fantastic

Andrea was true to her words

2011-10-08T15:02:00.004Z

While reading in the paper this morning about England's Rugby World Cup hopes - just after switching off the TV in despair - I tuned into the local radio station: Star FM, serving Ely and Cambridge. Our daughter was painting and drawing beside me as part of her GCSE art project. It was a comfortable family scene but a record came on that took me back to a time when I too was just a teenager, on the brink of discovering some of life's mysteries.

"More, More, More" by the Andrea True Connection took me back to the disco days of 1976. Although far too shy to go dancing much at school, apart from the termly school dance at the youth club, I certainly got down and sweaty to Andrea at college. Unfortunately my memory of the song is one of an angst-filled time of being desperate to have a girl ask me 'how do you like your love?' and then giving me more of it - much more.

Andrea had a pumping voice, from her Nashville home town, but also a great deal of experience of pumping of a quite different time, being a successful porn star before the notes became musical ones. This background only intrigued me more (more, more) and I must have spent hours in my bedroom dancing in front of the mirror and all the while imagining being king of the disco with Andrea draped over my arm.

I'd like to think our daughter will be content to draw and paint forever but, those simple pleasures will one day be insufficient to hold back an enquiring mind and body. Andrea knew that and entices me now just as she did thirty five years ago. The question now: 'is there more, more, more still to discover?'

Amazon.co.uk Widgets

Martin Rushent: Dared to be different

2011-06-11T17:36:00.003Z

I first encountered the work of Martin Rushent when he produced "Rattus Norvegicus" for The Stranglers. I loved the single "Peaches" and a friend - Tim Cook - and I sang the words out loud over and over again during a family holiday to Ilfracombe, North Devon.

We were in the Lower Sixth Form at the time and a group of us had embraced punk and its anarchic snub of mainstream acts and also, quite incidentally, the Upper Sixth who were smug and knowing - except when it came to A'Levels a year later when they were proved to be just, well, smug.

A couple of years later I saw The Stranglers in concert at the Wirrina venue in Peterborough (my home town) and remember the extended version of "Toiler on the Sea" accompanied by Hugh Cornwell hurling bottle tops into the crowd, asking us if we wanted any 'sweeties.'

We then pogoed to Martin's work on The Buzzcocks album - "Another Music in a Different Kitchen", especially "Fast Cars" and "Orgasm Addict." I have the vinyl 45" of the latter and still play it.

But I suppose the album produced by Martin Rushent that I have always played more than any other is 'Dare' by the Human League. I have this on vinyl and also CD. I remember listening to "Don't you want me" - which made number one on both sides of The Atlantic - at a time when I was well and truly lost.

I had left Leeds University and was bound for Sheffield University a year later but didn't know that yet; I was just sad at leaving Leeds and the whole undergraduate adventure behind. Graduating meant finishing, leaving; a sense of achievement and reward wouldn't kick-in until some years later.

Once I moved to Sheffield, things began to improve and it was as though the Human League were all around me as, I suppose, Martin is now.

Andrew Gold: dust

2011-06-08T17:54:00.003Z

I was shocked to hear that Andrew Gold had died at the age of just 59.

'Never let her slip away' will always be synonymous with a time of awakening for me in 1978. I had my first girlfriend, was doing A'Levels and planning to go off to university. My boundaries seemed to be widening in every direction and it was exciting. It was also scary and I know that I misinterpreted love for the need for security. When Andrew sang:

"I love her, I'm hoping that I never recover
Cause she's good to me and it would really make me happy
To never let her slip away..."

I felt comforted: even though she and I were bound to part sometime soon, she was there for those moments in time - my rock and my anchor.

I didn't know until recently that Andrew had played for so long with Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys who I absolutely adored and formed part of the soundtrack to my life two years on from then.

There's a great US import available from amazon at the moment with all of Andrew's greatest hits.

He may have made his name with 'Lonely Boy' but his words meant that I never felt alone during a period of such change in my life.

Stevie Wonder's Musiquarium

2011-05-28T17:41:00.002Z

I've been listening to somne old vinyl albums this afternoon. They reminded me alternatively of the early '70's and late '70's.

I was living in Leeds in 1979 when I bought a double album by Stevie Wonder called 'Stevie Wonder's Original Musiquarium 1' I'm not sure that there was ever a Musiquarium 2 or 3 but this one was a kind of Greatest Hits at that time. I bought it from a fairly dodgy record store in the Merrion Centre in Leeds City Centre - just down from what was then Leeds Polytechnic. I spent a lot of time there and in Jumbo Records nearby researching and carefully selecting albums to buy from my grant money. I was studying economics and considered this review of supply, demand and cost to be a vital part of my fieldwork.

There are some great tracks on the album (and surprisingly very few scratches or crackles!). It was great to hear 'Higher Ground' and 'Front Line' again and especially 'Boogie on Reggae Woman' which I've always loved. I was going through a lot of angst at that time and remember having my worries blown away by this album. I'm less anxious these days but it still makes me feel like I can tackle anything.

No Moore Parisienne Walkways

2011-02-07T09:20:00.004Z

I was saddened to hear of Gary Moore's death today. In the mid-Seventies I loved Thin Lizzy - especially Gary Moore's guitar sound - and 'The Boys are Back in Town' will forever take me back to the summer of 1976. My friend Tim and I had travelled to Leicester by train on a stiflingly hot day so that he could spend some time with a former girlfriend, while I lay in the sunshine by the river in a nearby park and lazed the day away.

Two years' later, Gary Moore and Phil Lynott released 'Parisienne Walkways' which took me away from my worries about A' Levels and university places. The following summer, at the end of my first year in Leeds and with yet more exams safely out of the way for another year, we spent a lot of time relaxing in the sunshine, listening to the radio.

This song was played a lot and lines such as "Looking back at the photographs...oh, I could write you paragraphs" took me out of the song and back to the end of my teenage years which, though they would never come back, would always be indelibly stored in my memory with backing tracks like these by the late, great Gary Moore.

You can see a video of and hear the song on YouTube here.

Gerry Rafferty found all the clues he needed in Baker Street

2011-01-05T15:48:00.004Z

I was really sorry to hear about Gerry Rafferty's death yesterday at the death of 63. Every time I hear Baker Street it takes me back to hot afternoons in 1978, stuck in my bedroom revising for A-Levels, with only the radio for escape. Although firmly in the punk domain at the time, I admitted to liking Stealers Wheel and thought Baker Street was like a vivid, fantastic dream. I still do.

Although Gerry Rafferty found real success with the City to City album from which this track came, Night Owl was probably his only other critically acclaimed album.

According to the Guardian he was still getting annual royalties on Baker Street of around £80,000. I passed my A-Levels but never made that kind of money or produced anything of that artistic quality - yet!

Three wheels on my wagon

2010-11-08T16:25:00.002Z

I heard this song on the radio over the weekend and it immediately took me back to when I was just six years old. I had a bladder problem and had to go into Stamford Hospital for a small operation.

We didn't have a car in 1966 so a very nice lady in the village - Mrs Coles - took my mother and I on the numerous visits to Peterborough Hospital for tests in the weeks leading up to it. She had a Mini Countryman and the thrill of the car drive more than made up for any worries on why we had to keep going back into hospital. In fact my parents didn't actually tell me why I was going into hospital nor make it clear that I would have to stay there for a few days (I had never been away from home for a single day before this momentous event). Only when Mrs Coles picked up me, Bonzer Bear, my Mum and a small overnight bag did I realise that I wouldn't be going home with them.

I was in for a total of three days and, apart from being very sore and only agreeing to eat Maltesers in all the time I was there, the event soon passed but I've never forgotten it. In a way, it made me realise how important it was to make sure I was always in full possession of the facts before facing and dealing with any situation. Some might just call that caution!

Either way, the New Christy Minstrels sang this song on Blue Peter just before I went into hospital. I loved it and sang it endlessly on the days leading up to my visit, not realising the irony of the song lyrics - don't worry about me because, though things look bad right now, I'm still struggling forwards...

If Mum and Dad had felt at all guilty about not briefing me fully before, I must have really put them through the mill as Mrs Coles drove us away that day. Certainly my wife and I try not to have any secrets from our children - apart from Christmas and Birthday presents perhaps - and I'm sure for my part, a lot of that is to do with what happened so many years ago. But, hey, I'm still rolling along.

Misty eyed

2010-09-08T17:13:00.003Z

So there I was, lying on the lawn in the back garden, listening to the radio on Sunday afternoon when 'Misty' by Ray Stevens came on.

I hadn't heard that song for years, though 'Everything is Beautiful' is a personal favourite of mine. Both songs take me back to my late 'Sixties childhood and early 'Seventies adolescence when girls and sunshine seemed to crowd my mind, if not my real world. I love this song for its simple exuberance and the naivity of young love.

I've found the track on this album which is just a marvellous collection of songs:

Malcolm McLaren: not so very anarchic after all

2010-04-09T10:58:00.002Z

I remember the New York Dolls from around 1975 after Malcolm had taken over their management the previous year. I remember particulaaly the Soviet-style red leather outfits.

However, Malcolm's name for me, and I suspect for many of my generation, was synonymous with the Sex Pistols. I was at school in late 1976 when Robert - a school friend - bought a copy of 'Anarchy in the UK' on the EMI label. He paid 30 pence for it in the cheap rack at Woolworths and then sold it to another school friend -Philip - for 35 pence about a week later and about a month before it gained any kind of notoriety. He was, of course, delighted with his mark-up but then had to endure years of mocking when, following their departure from EMI and A&M, the EMI version became a much sought-after rarity. If he'd found another copy in such good condition he probably could have bought the school and turned it into the punk venue we all wanted at the time.

Whenever I hear or read the word 'Anarchy' it always and without fail reminds me of that time. Although it only seems like yesterday I first put my copy on the turntable, the mention of MPLA,UDA and IRA adds a reminder that this was a very different time. I was going out with my first proper girlfriend - who hated the Sex Pistols and every other punk group - and the foundations of my world seemed to be changing daily. Everything certainly moved for me.

But Malcolm? Well I don't think I can really forgive him for booking the group in to venues on that first tour and then claiming they'd been banned, allegedly pulling them out at the last minute on several occasions. At least Philip (of acquisition fame) did get to hang out with Sid for a while when they were passing through our home town of Peterborough; when I say hang out, it was more like sharing a cigarette at the bus station

Like the Soviet Union and the terrorist groups, the punk tide passed without creating the waves a lot of people - including me - thought it might. Now Malcolm has gone too. He controlled our lives for a while but was pretty vacant rather than anarchic.

Mark Rasdall

Fen Creative: Views from Cambridgeshire, in words at http://www.fencreative.co.uk , pictures at http://www.fencreative.shutterchance.com and business at http://www.burweb.co.uk

New Musical Express

2010-04-06T11:10:00.001Z

I read in Marketing Week today (http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/news/nme-to-relaunch-as-"heavyweight"-music-mag/3011894.article) that NME is being relaunched as editor Krissi Murison's first major development of the magazine. It's to have a new logo, assorted covers and is aiming to be more 'mature and aspirational.'

I'm not sure what the last bit means but I remember reading NME in the seventies as a raw broadsheet with carbon handprint to remember it by. I had progressed to NME via Record Mirror and often read the holy trinity of NME, Sounds and Melody Maker, though the latter was geared I think towards real musicians rather than those like me who just loved music.

I must have spent hours pouring over NME's concert and album reviews and the snarling shafts of darkness from the Sounds team thrown down on anything that wasn't punk. Luckily I enjoyed the Prog Rock stuff as well as New Wave and could just as easily read the music press to the background of Genesis or The Clash. My bedroom wall was adorned with cut-out pictures of singers and bands and album covers.

Life was mainly black and white then. I wonder if the new look NME will bring colour to a changing world, or is that an aspiration too far?

Mark Rasdall

Fen Creative: Views from Cambridgeshire, in words at http://www.fencreative.co.uk and pictures at http://www.fencreative.shutterchance.com

Blur - universal

2009-07-03T18:57:00.004Z

Ivan and I went to see Blur in Hyde Park last night, along with tens of thousands of others. We had a meal in Pizza on the Park first then a long chat in the baking hot sunshine. He's seventeen now and I don't imagine there will be too many occasions like this for us to share.

When he was a baby I'd walk around our London flat, endlessly, with him lying in my arms, more interested in listening to records or CDs or the radio than going to sleep. The background music to this tableau was usually Blur with their whole Britpop thing. I think I could see a lot of The Kinks in their music then and the songs just spoke to ordinary people like Ivan and me. Yesterday they sounded as good as ever and still resonated. At no time did they sound like a reformed group of old rockers going through a greatest hits back catalogue.

They finished with 'Universal' which I've always enjoyed and definitely took me back to days when Ivan was just a little boy:

"It really, really, really could happen
Yes, it really, really, really could happen
If the days they seem to fall through you
Well, just let them go"

I'd say exactly the same thing to him now, as he stands on the brink of an adult future, looking beyond ordinary days ahead to those flooded in light.

This is the original video:

and this is the 'Best of' album we have on CD and have played so very many times. Ivan now has a teeshirt with this picture on the front and 'Blur on tour 2009' on the back. He'll never forget yesterday and I'll never forget that Blur have been with us all along:

Michael Jackson - One day in your life

2009-06-26T07:56:00.003Z

If ever there was a day in your life to look back and remember the musical genius of Michael Jackson, it has to be today. Beyond all the hype and the weirdness and all the way back to an abnormal childhood, to say the least, Michael Jackson's songs were the background to so much of my own early life.

I have always loved this song, remembersing it as part of the early Jackson 5 repertoire in 1975 but, particularly, from a time in 1981 when I had just finished my Finals at Leeds. I travelled to Aberystwyth via five trains and seven hours of a glorious summer day to stay with a friend who became my first lover. As I left her at the station a few days later I had this song in my head - it had been re-released - and the words were never so poignant as then:

"You'll remember a place,
Someone touching your face..."

My friend died three years later. She was just twenty four years old. When our eldest son told us in the early morning that Michael Jackson had died I was taken back twenty eight years to that other summer morning and I did remember.

It's a song I'd like to be played at the end of my funeral and many people should remember Michael Jackson for songs such as this:

"You'll remember me somehow,
Though you don't need me now
I will stay in your heart and,
When things fall apart,
You'll remember one day..."

I once travelled to a different drum

2009-06-21T16:26:00.003Z

When I was twenty years old I was in a relationship at college that broke up just before the Easter of 1980. I went to stay with my sister in Thame near Oxford. She had been married for two years and was still living in those joyous moments of certainty that true love brings. In contrast I felt that something had broken that could never be repaired. In a record store in nearby Aylesbury I found an album (on vinyl of course) by Linda Ronstadt, called 'Different Drum.'

It was written by Mike Nesmith of The Monkees (who I absolutely loved) and from it's opening lines:

"You and I travel to the beat of a different drum
Oh can't you tell by the way I run
Every time you make eyes at me"

I knew that this song was going to help me to heal. It seemed as though my ex-girlfriend, Helen, was singing to me, not out of some kind of self-justified glory but trying to make me understand how she felt:

"Yes, and I ain't saying you ain't pretty
All I'm saying is I'm not ready
For any person place or thing
To try and pull the reins in on me"

We were young and came together as part of college life which was never going to last and neither was our love affair:

"So good-bye I'll be leaving
I see no sense in this crying and grieving
We'll both live a lot longer
If you live without me"

I still feel a little pain in my eyes whenever I hear those words but they were both right - Linda and Helen.

I didn't know about the groups she performed her country/folk songs with - The Stone Ponys - but found out from Brian Matthew's early Saturday morning show featuring music from the '60's. Here's a great video where you can see what I meant:

Muse: Sing for Absolution

2009-01-03T19:32:00.004Z

Our eldest son got the Muse Album: HAARP for Christmas

It features a CD and DVD of concerts at Wembley Stadium, London on 16th and 17th June 2008 - the first band to play live at the new Wembley. Our son and I went there on the first of the two nights and it was a great concert, except they didn't play my favourite song - Sing for Absolution:

I've always loved this since he first bought the Absolution album home for us to listen to. I heard in it a curious fusion of Queen, Sparks and contemporary rock. The words were appropriate to us in a way they hadn't been intended:

"...sing for absolution
I will be singing
and falling from your grace..."

I feel that music holds our relationship together so it was so nice to be at Wembley on that summer's evening - which we'll never forget and which the HAARP album has refreshed in our minds. I know I will fall from his grace and

"...our wrongs
remain unrectified..."

but at least we'll have had some great memories by then.

John Lennon: Instant Karma

2008-11-12T13:27:00.004Z

I was travelling through Swaffham Bulbeck at about 6.10am today when I glimpsed a channel of light over one of the houses to my right (north). I though at first it was an upstairs light or even an aeroplane coming into Cambridge Airport. Except it wasn't moving! I then realised that it was a layer of the moon, exposed through a gap in the cluds. It looked a little like one of the gas layers surrounding Saturn.

For no apparent reason I instantly had the words in my head: 'Like the moon and the stars and the sun' but couldn't remember the song. It then came to me: 'Instant Karma' by John Lennon (and the Plastic Ono Band). I remembered the single release from 1970 but only really listened to it when I got the 1975 'Shaved Fish' compliation.

I bought the album on vinyl when on holiday in Ilfracombe, North Devon, mainly because I wanted to listen to 'Imagine' which remains an all time favourite. However, they are all great tracks and Instant Karma does always give me, well, an instant karma of positive thoughts, as it did this morning:

"What on earth you tryin' to do
It's up to you, yeah you...'

It took me away from my daily worries and the here and now. When I remembered the song, it took me back to easier, less stressful days as a teenager, then it brought me forward again to the future which I am more in control of than perhaps I realise!

You can still get Shaved Fish from Amazon:

Echo & the Bunnymen: The Cutter

2008-03-05T13:36:00.004Z

My wife and I went for lunch at The Cutter inn in Ely on Monday. Bordering the river I have often walked past it on my way from the Broad Street car park round to the station. I usually take this route when we have meetings in Nottingham and I catch the train from Ely instead of Cambridge. It's actually a similar mileage from Burwell and the car parking is free there.

The Cutter used to be a real dive of a place - a kind of floating disco bar on land. However, and I wasn't fully aware of this before Monday, new owners have completely transformed it since their arrival in 2006. The restaurant was bright and airy with a light, contemorary feel - and the food was fantastic.

Throughout lunch, I had an Echo & the Bunnymen track in my head - "The Cutter" which was a single release and which my friend Jeremy Holding and I danced avidly to when it was first released back in 1983. We were students in Sheffield then and the Bunnymen performed at Sheffield City Polytechnic as it was then. It was a marvellous gig, especially the dry ice which unintentionally sat like a blanket of South Yorkshire fog throughout the set. You can see a video of the song here.

I saw them perform it again at Hammersmith Odeon a couple of years later but it didn't have the magic of the first time around.

My favourite album from the band was Heaven Up Here - especially the track 'Over the Wall' which has been one of my all time favourites. I had to rush home and strap this particular piece of vinyl to my record deck: much better even than The Cutter's desserts.

Deep Purple: Never Before

2007-05-04T08:07:00.000Z

I went to see Deep Purple at Wembley Arena in London last Saturday (28th April 2007).

As a teenager I first discoverd the band through my sister's German pen-friend, Elisabeth. I remember her coming over to spend a holiday with us and us trying to find albums by this band who were 'big in Germany.' We scoured WH Smiths and Boots but to no avail. Peterborough clearly wasn't ready for this kind of ear bruising.

A couple of years later I discovered music for myself and bought 'Made in Japan' which was never off of the record deck of my parents' Philips Music Centre. When they went out shopping or to church or, frankly, anywhere else, I'd crank up the speakers until I was sure they'd be able to hear 'Child in Time' or, of course, 'Smoke on the Water.' It remains, for me, the best live album of all time.

So, having seen that the band were going to be playing tracks from 'Machine Head' I bought the 25th Anniversary edition on CD - which features the original album, some extra tracks and a re-mastered version. Our two sons and I listened to it extensively, on the CD Player, in the car and on iPods. I had forgotten what a good album it was and was only cautious as to how good the band would be nearly thirty years after Elisabeth had tried to seek them out in England.

I needn't have worried. Ian Gillan's voice was still in great shape and Roger Glover's bass just drove everything along in a thrilling way. Our elder son is really into guitar music (he's about the age I was when 'Japan' hit me) and nothing will ever be the same again, as it wouldn't be for me. 'Never Before' probably sums up both our experiences in that this band has been life-changing for us both and yet good to see that some good music and good musicians is still good, though I am so much older!

Small Faces: Lazy Sunday Afternoon

2007-02-26T18:57:00.000Z

I've always loved this song, from The Small Faces's second album: Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake. A concept album, apparently conceived during a knees-up on a boat trip up the Thames in 1968, the disc features Happiness Stan's story, based on Ronnie Lane's seminal question: 'Where is the other half of the moon?'

Stanley Unwin's mis-use of English by way of commentary still makes me smile today. Lyrics such as "life is just a bowl of All bran" from Happy Days Toy Town and "his bed was the damp and the cold but his friend was the sun" from Mad John are just as uplifting now as when I first heard them nearly forty years ago.

We have the CD in our collection, but the original vinyl sleeve's artwork featured pictures from Gered Mankowitz, who I later met in his Swiss Cottage studio when being photographed for some ads for The Times.

But it is Lazy Sunday that I really love. It only got to Number 2 in the charts, compared to All or Nothing, their best effort which topped two years earlier. But surely this is their most well-known and most-played song? Apparently Steve Marriott really did have problems with his neighbours at the time and wound the band up after this psychedelic walking across the water. But Lazy Sunday lives on for all who heard it in that hot summer of 1968:

"Lazy sunday afternoon, I've got no mind to worry, close my eyes and
Drift away, Close my eyes and drift away..."

This simple chorus has been the background to so many lazy afternoons in the garden and still sounds as fresh to me today as birdsong (I'm sure they knew all about that too).

I heard the song again a few years later on a Sunday afternoon in Devonshire Hall, Cumberland Road, Leeds. This was my Hall of Residence during my first year at Leeds University and the experience was lonely at first. Listening to Anne Nightingale talking about it on her Radio One show felt like they were reaching out, through her, to me, and life quickly got better as a result of a less serious approach to life.