more random songs

Over the weekend the iPod was churning out songs on shuffle - here's some of them:

"It's A Long Way To the Top (If You Wanna Rock'n'Roll") a classic slice of AC/DC rocks like a good 'un with a Stones-like mega riff that just doesn't let go. Weirdly there appear to be bagpipes at one point (really). This track came to my attention via the brilliant Jack Black film School Of Rock which is enormous fun and has become one of Charley's favourites.

A complete contrast with "Open The Kingdom" from Philip Glass's Songs For Liquid Days. This is one of my favourite Glass records and one I frequently return to. The operatic drama of this track is all the more surprising when you remember that David Byrne wrote it. I love the singing on this piece.

"Re-make / Re-model" - I'm sure I've mentioned this before but can you think of a better opening song from a debut album? I can't. It's perfect. Roxy Music encapsulated in a five minute blast. Showcasing loads of different styles and sounds, this IS Roxy Music. Wonderful.

"If There Is Something" - more early Roxy but this is the Tin Machine cover from 1991. Now Tin Machine got a lot of stick, and still do whenever anyone wants to take a cheap shot at Bowie. But TM was actually a very successful attempt at a Pixies style hard / alt rock band. And DB gave that band some great songs too. Even this cover works surprisingly well, with the only weak spot being Hunt Sales' blanket bombing drumming (something that blighted a few TM songs - the man had no restraint). Bowie was obviously going through a bit of a Roxy kick at this point as he'd often insert verses from "In Every Dream Home..." into the breakdown parts of TM's "Heaven's In Here" during the 1991 tour.

"Banks Of The Ohio" - Johnny Cash singing a very traditional sounding country song. But then you listen to the lyrics and, like many of the best Cash songs, it's all about a girl pleading with her man not to murder her - 'I'm not ready for eternity' she rather poetically cries... but he still throws her into river anyway... All because she didn't want to be his wife. Not surprising is it, if he's that unstable!

"2,000 Light Years From Home" - the Stones recorded live at Atlantic City in late 1989. This was the last gig on the Steel Wheels USA leg and the show was broadcast live on US tv. Special guests abound (Clapton on "Little Red Rooster", John Lee Hooker crops up on his own "Boogie Chillum" and you can see the looks of awe on Keef and Ronnie's faces, and Axl Rose & Izzy Stradlin sing and play on a one off performance of "Salt Of The Earth" (Guns 'n' Roses were the support band on many of the US dates)). Anyway, it's a cracking gig. This song had never been played live before this tour and is played wonderfully with lotsa psychedelic lighting going on. It all dissolves at the end into a couple of minutes of mysterious swirly keyboards and dry ice everywhere which gives Jagger time to take the lift to the gantry high above the stage and put on a glittery top hat and billowing red cape. The swirls give way to Charlie bashing out the voodoo rhythm for "Sympathy For The Devil" and demonic Jagger yelps can be heard, but from where? It takes the crowd quite some time to realise that he's now perched atop the stage set bathed in blood red lights and he sings the first half of the song from there. Keef's first solo allows Mick time to get back down to the stage where he has enormous fun swishing his cape around and annoying Keef for the rest of the song.

"The Me I Never Knew" from one of Scott Walker's less well regarded albums, 1973's Any Day Now. These albums from the early 1970s may not contain any Walker originals and a couple of them veer a little too much into soft country rock, but Any Day Now is a fine album and Scott's vocals are arguably some of his best as he's just languidly crooning and enjoying the songs. The song may be fairly standard MOR fare, but Scott delivers the goods. The man is incapable of a bad vocal.

"Computer World II" which is basically the coda to "Numbers" but is so delightful anyway. Kraftwerk's synths are beautiful - so crystal clear.

"One Night" – I have a handful of Elvis songs on the iPod and this is one of them. And it’s terrific. What a voice that man had, and what a shame he wasted it on so many terrible MOR ballads and Vegas schlock before his way too early demise.

Part of the "Green Park Suite" from Robert Fripp’s soundscape performance in Bath in 1996. Here is where Fripp started incorporating those bell and piano sounds into his soundscapes. And it’s one of my favourite soundscapes. Very moving. The performance took place over some hours on a cold November day. Green Park Station had long closed to trains and had been converted into a shopping mall of stalls and bijou boutiques. No idea why Fripp was playing there, but he was. The performance was scheduled to last all day but Fripp packed up after just three hours due to a combination of the cold, the DGM team’s late arrival and over 100 complaints from the shoppers. Stallholders claimed that their takings were down and one even threw up, apparently because of the volume of the music. Because of this less than enthusiastic response, Fripp wrote in his diary - "Our overall impression was that it would be better for us to stop, and even better for us to stop very soon."

"All The Young Dudes" – Bowie live at the LA Amphitheatre in September 1974 just as the Diamond Dogs Tour was morphing into the Soul Tour. DB had very rapidly grown tired of the massive and complex set of Hunger City that was used on the Diamond Dogs Tour. After a month’s break (during which the bulk of Young Americans was recorded) the tour was due to resume on the West Coast, but DB decided to ditch half the numbers in favour of the new Young Americans songs, and restructure existing tunes into more Soul / disco arrangements. He also wanted to dump the massively expensive stage sets, but was persuaded to keep the sets for the weeks run in Los Angeles where he would be seen by loads of Hollywood stars (Liz Taylor came three times), would be filmed by the BBC for the Cracked Actor documentary and would upset Bob Hope. Really. Hope complained that the show’s volume was too high and such was his standing in Hollywood that the DB show had to keep the noise down over the remaining four nights. Anyway, the stage set was dropped completely after this week of gigs and the Soul Tour got underway in earnest with Luther Vandross and his friends helping DB out on a bizarre show which tried to be like a Night At The Apollo but fronted by a very skinny, very white honky with orange hair, who looked horribly out of place among these large black soul divas and seriously cool black dudes. This version of "All The Young Dudes" is slow, not terribly anthemic, and is thus rather dull. Which is a terrible shame when you consider how good the actual song really is.

"I Spit Roses" – from Peter Murphy’s last album. Superb stuff as always. Ninth is right up there with his best records I think. It sounds so alive and so exciting.

"There Ain’t half Been Some Clever Baskets" from the delightfully clever mind of the late lamented Ian Dury. And no of course he doesn’t really sing Baskets, but I can’t use the real word for fear of falling foul of the filters. (And how’s that for a bit of f'ing alliteration?) Great lyrics as always from Dury – one of my favourite lines is about Van Gogh "He didn’t paint the Mona Lisa, That was an Italian geezer." And at one point after the line "there ain’t half been some clever baskets" he says "they probably got help from their mum" which really makes me laugh.

More another day.

lettie - good fortune, bad weather

Lettie has been releasing her music since 2008's excellent debut album Age Of Solo, on which a charming and beguiling mix of old fashioned synths, guitars and clever looping combined to create startlingly original folky electro songs. This was rapidly followed by the more acoustic Everyman. Both albums mixed personal reflections with dashes of sci-fi, ecology and loads more to create hypnotic, dreamlike songs. Both albums were intelligent, catchy and hugely inventive and if there was any justice in this world then both should have reached a much wider audience.

2009 found Lettie occupying an excellent support slot on Peter Murphy's European tour (Murphy's producer David Baron had worked with Lettie on her albums), plus she gained some valuable exposure via the BBC Electric Proms, and in 2010 she was performing on the BBC Introducing... stage at Glastonbury.

Then it all seemed to go quiet. Occasional new songs trickled out onto you tube, there were indications that a new album, probably called Other Days, was underway but then everything seemed to grind to a halt. Lettie had to keep what seemed like several day jobs running in order to fund her music, but the daily grind appeared to be robbing her of her passion for songwriting. Her online blog hinted at more personal relationship problems too with the result that a number of completed tracks were then abandoned.

In the autumn of 2010 Lettie spent a couple of weeks with David Baron at his studios in the US and it was there that the bulk of the new album took shape. As on her previous records Baron co-wrote the music but this time, instead of it being mainly the two of them creating all the music, Baron called in some formidable talent to assist with many of the tracks. Among them were drummer Zachary Alford (Bowie, B52's and many others), bassist Sara Lee (Robert Fripp, Gang of Four, Robyn Hitchcock, B52's and tons of others) and guitarist Danny Blume (a massive array of artists from Kid Creole and the Coconuts to John Cale).

Over the course of 2011 the album was slowly tweaked and teased into shape - a few tracks were dropped as newer improved songs were added and by the end of 2011 David Baron had mixed and mastered the final version. The long and troublesome gestation period has been well worth it, as the new album is surely her strongest collection of songs yet. The title Good Fortune, Bad Weather obliquely hints at the ups and downs endured in trying to get this record finally ready (even the cover photo caused problems as the original photographer turned out to be a con man who ran off with Lettie's hard earned money!) But all those trials are forgotten when the songs kick in, for the album is a wonderful collection of uniformly strong tunes.

These songs (the fourteenth was added when Lettie decided that it would be bad luck to have only thirteen) cover all of Lettie's styles and add considerably more. Her vocals are stronger than ever across the whole collection and her lyrics range from what appear to be personal and intimate to rather more oblique subjects such as technology and robotics.

"Swirl" starts the album off with an amusingly sly lyric having a dig at X Factor and similar talent shows (surely that's Cowell as 'the puppetmaster'?). The irony is that while this song is 100 times better than anything ever produced by a TV talent show, I doubt Lettie would ever get anywhere on X Factor as she's too original to fit into any of their shallow pigeon holes. Thank goodness.

"Lucky" initially sounds like a throwback to an earlier Lettie sound, all simple keyboard and breathless vocals but with every passing line the sound grows and deepens and by the midway point you realise that a full band is playing. This is then topped off by a delightfully playful piano which joins the band and jauntily plays until the end. Such a fun song. 

"Bitter"- an incessant acoustic guitar underpins the whole song, but layers of other instruments all but bury it at times. This is a cracking tune with a terrific chorus. Great drumming from Zachary Alford. 

"Never Want To Be Alone" is a brilliant dance floor stomper, and would be great to hear on the radio. Interestingly it seems like Lettie and David let their influences run riot on the track. It might just be me but in the ghostly synth intro I can hear the choral fade out of Bowie's "Word On A Wing", the jumpy keyboard melody sounds a bit like "My Sharona" and the heavenly backing vocals on the choruses remind me of Kraftwerk's "Metropolis", but it's all stirred together in a perfect slice of infectious electro pop that manages to sound totally fresh. Possibly the catchiest track on the album, and certainly the most upbeat.

"Sanctuary" is up there with "Mission" as one of my favourite Lettie tracks. Again there's a rhythm track with skittering electronics mixed with Alford's powerful beats. I love the desultory 'oh, ohh's which come in faintly on the verses. As with many of the tracks on this record it's the little details that impress. Nearly every song allows the listener to find more and more happening in the backing tracks. The more you listen the more you discover. David Baron has managed to create fascinatingly complex musical beds for the songs, but at no point do any of the songs sound cluttered or overly busy, which is quite an achievement. 

"Digital" has some very amusing lyrics which seem to encapsulate Lettie's love of mixing the old and defunct with the modern, shiny and new. 'I've still got VHS, and tapes inside my car', yet everything is going digital... like the brilliant little synth solo in the middle eight which sounds like an updated version of Eno's analogue VCS3 freak out on Roxy Music's "Editions Of You".

Without a pause we move into "Pandora". Truly funky and full of little guitar licks from Danny Blume. Great bass work from Sara Lee. The chorus is beautiful, and the track is the seventh song in a row which would make a very commercial single.

"Fitter" - another one which could easily be a hit, given the chance. Great lyrics and I love the little touches again. The stuttering synths after the choruses are terrific, and the handclaps are lovely. (Another bit of back up to my argument that many songs are immediately improved with the addition of either handclaps or oboes - of course that depends on whether the song is upbeat or melancholy...)

Mind you, violins also really help with an introspective mood. "Mister Lighter" was available last year for a while but didn't have the beautiful strings or vibes that this version has. And both really complete the song. It's a lovely arrangement too, almost like chamber music. Gorgeous vocal, really intimate and up front, as if Lettie is right beside you. 

"Aluminium Man" was also up on you tube last year with a funny video. The idea of a robot boyfriend made out of recycled aluminium cans seems both very amusing and very ecologically sound. Much fun to be had from this song with the delightfully robotic synths and the rigidly clattering drum pattern.

A total change of mood with the title track as Lettie solemnly intones "Good Fortune, Bad Weather" over a dub reggae backing, all shuffling beats and heavily echoed rimshots. It's as if we're deep inside the speakers as the whole song takes on a very dreamlike quality. Gentle whistling and half heard guitar only add to the faintly spooky air. I could happily have more of this sort of stuff.

"Come Back" is a rather sad little song of yearning, but again it's full of detail and invention. Based around a pulsing guitar "Come Back" is expanded by some great swirly keyboards as well some incongruously jaunty whistling, which actually works perfectly.

"Crash And Burn" harks back to the sparser sound of "Everyman", but there's nothing wrong with that. Is it perhaps about the crook who ripped off Lettie over the album photos? Seems like it could be... 'can you forgive yourself?' But although the lyrics hint at retribution the song's arrangement is kept fairly light with some gentle piano accompanying the guitar for most of the song, along with some more of David's synths. 

"On And On" closes the album on a quiet note. Choral synths start us off before guitars and cheery keyboards join in, with slide guitar taking us to the fade out. It sounds to me as if it could have gone on longer, but the song decided that, once it's achieved what it needed to, it simply chose to fade away. Which again somehow fits perfectly with the sometimes dreamlike quality of many of the tracks.

Basically this one hell of an album. Every song is strong, different from each other, original, inventive, charming, supremely catchy and above all extremely entertaining. It's a great way to spend 45 minutes, and another 45 minutes, and another... Because I'm pretty certain that after one listen almost anyone would be hooked.