Month: October 2012

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366 Songs 293: French Disko

I have never owned this song, but there was some period of my life – my time in art school, specifically – that this was the soundtrack to, somehow. It’s the sound of the guitars that feels as if it’s come from some old 45″, the vocals that are almost unintelligible, the way it puts its head down and just goes for it; I’d hear it on the radio, in clubs, at friends’ houses. “French Disko” brings a particular nostalgia now, for a life spent outside myself, of being with friends and belonging on some level that I normally wouldn’t be able to fully comprehend. Quite fitting for a song that starts with the lines, “Though this world’s essentially an absurd place to be living in, it doesn’t call for total withdrawal.”

La resistance, indeed.

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366 Songs 292: Ghosts

There’s something sticky about this song; it’s not just the tumbling piano threading its way through the entire song, as irresistible as it is, nor the “do do do do do do do/do do do do/do do do do”s, even though you find yourself wanting to sing along almost immediately. It’s the ramshackleness of the whole thing, the fact that it sounds casual and friendly, for want of a better way to put it. There’s something warm about this song, even as it bemoans the apathy of smalltown life (“All my friends are talking about leaving/about leaving/But all my friends are sitting in their graves”) and feeling trapped in the place where you’ve always lived (“Is it any wonder that we all leave home/When people say “I knew you when you were six years old”/You say ‘But I’ve changed/I’ve changed, I’ve changed/I’ve changed'”). Or maybe because of that. After all, who hasn’t felt those things at some point in their life, and hearing them being expressed back to you in a way that sounds… comforting, I guess, is something that’s hard to say no to.

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366 Songs 291: The Girl Can’t Help It

Cliff Richard was never cool. He was too square, always, too clean, too unsexy; even when he tried to get funky and sexy in the 1970s, it didn’t work because he was trying too hard. It was like a musical version of Steve Carrell describing breasts as like sandbags in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. How, then, to explain away this song…?

Well, the fact that it’s a cover probably helps. This song was originally, as far as I can see, a Little Richard “joint” –

– but that doesn’t explain the sensational arrangement here that reinvents the original’s caffeinated jitter into something with more swagger and confidence. Listen to that casual drum beat, the crouching bassline, at the start. The horns that keep everything grounded, but also provide the aural fireworks as the song continues (along with the wonderful backing vocals); it sounds like someone was listening to some awesome psych-rock and soul at the end of the sixties before coming into the recording booth, and thought no-one would really pay any attention if they played around with some of those textures on this album track. The result? Cliff’s finest hour, and then some.

Then again, this is what it has to compete with; it’s not really any contest, is it?

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I Can Hear The Soft Breathing of The Girl That I Love

A genuinely weird day, with things breaking up what would normally be my working rhythm, such as it is – A vet’s visit, phone calls with the accountant and the resultant rush and stress that provided, lunch with a friend – to the point where I never felt like I settled into the day at all. Everything was continually just rushing to meet deadlines, the entire day having that I’m late I’m late feeling and discomfort the entire time, meaning that it’s 6pm and I still haven’t directed you to my Time piece for the week, about the way in which the new Beauty and The Beast show manages to miss the point of the entire B&TB fairy tale. My research for this one? Watching lots of versions of Beauty and The Beast, which made for an odd weekend, I can tell you.

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By the Power of Grayskull

It’s funny, as an adult, to realize how stupid a name “He-Man” is. When I was a kid, I didn’t think anything of it; it was the character’s name, after all, and I didn’t see anything beyond that. I was given a He-Man figure before I’d heard anything about the character or any of the rest of the Masters of the Universe (Such a 1980s product line, in terms of names!), along with a bunch of other figures from the line – Man-at-Arms, maybe? Stratos, the guy with wings on his arms? – by my gran, and I loved them a lot. In part, I think, because I loved her; they felt especially rare and special because of her, if that makes sense.  The cartoon that accompanied the toys was a favorite, for some time, too. The golden age of my childhood, in terms of toys.

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366 Songs 290: Joining A Fan Club

You can tell, from the Queen-esque guitar opening, that “Joining A Fan Club” has set the dial for “epic.” This is such a wonderfully overblown song, completely over-the-top at almost all times and very much in the spirit of Freddie Mercury’s old band in their prime – The harmonies at 1:14 leading into the guitar, for example – without sounding like a slavish recreation. Put this is actually a reconstruction of all manner of pop history; the bassline is McCartney from Revolver-era Beatles, the harmonies are as Beach Boys as Queen, and stealing the strings from “When You Wish Upon A Star” at 1:55 is… well, just kind of inspired, really. By the time you get to the freakout at the bridge. There’s some element of glam rock in there, too (The saxophone I read as oddly David Bowie-esque for reasons that don’t actually make sense to me, I admit), and overall the entire thing just feels like four minutes of rock opera that sum up almost everything I could possibly want in a pop song. Why this isn’t something that everyone knows and adores is constantly a bafflement to me.

Still: At least some people have covered it, where you’d least expect it.

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All Over The World, Tonight, All Over The World

I’ll admit it straight off; there were times today where being in Venice seemed like a bizarre abstract notion, like it wasn’t really real, and all the stress and the phone calls (and all the “Can you speak English?”s) and all of that were just trials I had to go through to test my patience or something, and there wasn’t really an outcome to it. Even wandering through London this afternoon, killing time between flights, it didn’t feel like anything that unusual. And the plane here I just felt lost and thed different with a sense of history about it (compared to Aberdeen… I mean, come on), drifting through places with exotic names. Without realizing it, I’d disappeared from real life and started living in a film after all. Gondoliers went past, singing, and it’s not often you can say that. Add to that the fact that sheer luck led me to ask a complete stranger (who turned out to be French) the way to my hotel, and she took me to the very door, and you know I’ve been pretty blessed.

I’ve found something called Kind of Hush, which was a travel diary I wrote back in 1999 from a trip I took to Venice. Re-reading it, I realized that it was my first paid journalism; I wrote it to fulfill a grant I’d been given by the Scottish Arts Council to visit that year’s Venice Biennale. Because I’ve been thinking, endlessly, about Kindle Singles and digital ebooks a lot lately, I’m re-working this (Trying to find the missing text from the file I found this weekend) with an eye of putting it out there for 99 cents just because. I doubt anyone would buy it, but I just like the idea of it being out there.

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366 Songs 289: She Said She Said

The guitars actually chime. There’s something about this song that still surprises, years after I first heard it and almost four decades after it was first recorded; the sound of the guitars, the texture they create and structure they build. This is guitar music as crystalline palace, as something to feel all around you and get lost inside. Close your eyes as you listen and follow the music as it towers up all over you, and you’ll see what I mean.

(And those vocals: “I said,” stretching the word, taking it outside of language and into pure sound. Such a great song.)