The iPod MUST have some sort of little brain – sometimes it gets fixated on a particular artist, but not in any way that the iPod can actually know. For example the other day I had a whole batch of Stones related music. But not simply the obvious I Can’t Get No Sympathy For The Street Fighting Jack Flash Rolling Stones stuff either; there was Jagger and Richards solo stuff and Stones covers too. Weird or what.
“Parachute Woman” live from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus in December 1968. A superbly rockin’ little blues monster, with a storming slide solo.
“Can’t Be Seen” from Steel Wheels. One of Keith’s best ever solo songs, and certainly one of his best ever vocals, soulful and almost smooth at times.
“Lonely At The Top” from Mick’s 1985 solo album She’s The Boss. This is the only Jagger / Richards track on this record having been attempted by the Stones during the Some Girls sessions as a fairly dull shouty rocker. Here’s it’s revamped into a rather more funky song, with lots of irritating stop / start moments and Jagger giving a performance that all but tips into Jagger Impersonator territory. Every annoying vocal tic and trademark yelp is present and correct here. He’s really trying WAY too hard. Overall She’s The Boss isn’t a particularly bad album, there are notably some good ballads, but this really isn’t a good song.
“You’re So Vain” – Carly Simon’s classic. Brilliant performance, brilliant arrangement and yes that’s Mick on backing vocals. He probably thought the song was about him… Actually, has it ever been revealed who this song does refer to?
“Eileen” – one of Keef’s solo songs. A fairly unremarkable rocker though it does have a very catchy chorus.
And then we move onto even more random stuff...
“Camarillo Brillo” – ahhh… nothing whatsoever to do with the Rolling Stones… finally. Yes, it’s Uncle Frankie attempting a commercial song, and succeeding on most levels (apart from the slightly risqué lyrics). One of my all time fave Zappa songs actually. It’s so unapologetically cheery and summery.
Two from Bryan Ferry - "Windswept" from 1985's Boys And Girls has always been a favourite of mine, but how I wish that the production wasn’t so clunky. Today Ferry would be a lot subtler with a song like this. The overbearing percussion and overly flowery guitar almost swamp what is actually a very delicate song. On the other hand, the almost absurdly busy and cluttered mix of “The Right Stuff” just seems so right for the track, and this is a song which I’ve grown to like a lot more than when I first heard it back in ’87. Sadly the whole Bête Noire album of 1987 is an object lesson in how to spoil a bunch of generally excellent songs by way too much ‘modern’ production. I bought Bête Noire on the same day as David Sylvian's beautiful Secrets Of The Beehive and Sylvian’s less-is-more approach is wonderful on this uncluttered and unhurried album. The Ferry record by contrast has far too many screechy backing vocals, far too much clattering drum machine, far too many guitar lines overlaid on top of one another and far too much time spent on the whole thing leading to Ferry obsessing about the detail and missing the bigger picture by not realizing when he’d done enough. Having said that, the good songs on Bête Noire are great – “Limbo” is classic Ferry, “The Right Stuff” is superb (it’s based on an old Smiths instrumental b side – really! (Johnny Marr plays on this song and nearly toured with Ferry, but there was a clash of dates. Ferry said of Marr ‘I liked the cut of his jib’)), and the exotically latin title track is the sort of slinky song that Ferry does so well. So not a complete disaster by any means.
“Moonage Daydream” – from the Ziggy Stardust album, and arguably the best track on that album with Mick Ronson's scorching guitar work and his amazing string arrangements, and one of Bowie's best ever vocals. Just pure brilliance from start to finish.
“Wall Street Shuffle” – I have but a small handful of 10cc tracks, but the ones I have are cracking and this is a prime example of the inventiveness of 10cc.
“RDNZL” – Uncle Frankie lets his band go nuts with insane percussion and complexities galore for the first half; tremendous musicianship. Then Zappa lets rip with a real blast of a guitar solo – possibly his most frenzied studio solo. “RDNZL” was a major fixture of the 1973 / 74 shows and this version was recorded in 1974 at the One Size Fits All sessions, but bafflingly wasn’t issued until 1979.
“Magic And Loss” – the title track from Lou Reed’s most cheery of albums - all the songs address Death... This is a frustrating track. It’s actually one of the best things on the album, with an unusually excellent melody and a pretty decent vocal from Lou, but… the horrendously tight and constricted production really hampers the song. The drums are way too loud, as is Lou’s voice but when the song really should let fly towards the end everything is compressed to hell and what was clearly quite a wild and powerful performance (eg the big stonking power chords on the guitar) is mixed way too low (as is the bass). So the song ends on a something of an anticlimax. Good old Lou, starting off with something promising then squeezing all the life out of it – though you can bet that he was insisting that it sounded like the best thing ever recorded.
“Hallo Spaceboy” – more Bowie, this time from January 1996 in Paris at the end of the Outside gigs. This band really beat the you know what out of this track. It’s always worked so much better in concert than it does on record. Live, the song becomes a massive bruising pounding noise machine, and it’s terrifically exciting. However, despite the sheer volume on display, the song is brilliantly mixed and always sounded superb in the concert halls. This is from a radio broadcast so it sounds fabbo to the max.
“Valtari” – as always, the shuffle setting will come up with recent additions. This is the title track from the forthcoming Sigur Ros album and is wonderful within the context of the album, but doesn’t work on its own, and certainly not after the pasting that “Hallo Spaceboy” has just dished out. The calming reflective strings and sense of drifting on clouds that the whole album conjures up is entirely lost with just the one piece. Also, a word of warning, the Valtari album is rubbish if you play it in the car. All the detail is entirely lost and you are left with irritating Jonsi squeals and snatches of melody that don’t connect with anything. Some Sigur Ros is fine in the car, but this one really isn’t. The album itself is really excellent though, but it requires a quiet evening and a glass or two of wine. Anything else just overwhelms it.
“Happiness Is A Warm Gun” – Lennon having fun on the White Album. One the best late period Beatles songs for sure.
“Election Day” from Arcadia. Which was basically the pretentious half of Duran Duran (while the rock half of DD went off and did the Power Station with Robert Palmer and Chic’s rhythm section, Bernard Edwards on bass and Tony Thompson on drums). Anyway, Arcadia just sounds like a slightly funkier Duran (Le Bon and Rhodes being the main architects of DD’s sound anyway) and what with the addition of Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay parping away on multilayered saxophones it’s all darned fine, if overly pretentious, fun.
“Dazzle Ships (Parts II, II & VII)” - ha ha ha ha….what a load of nonsense this is. How on earth did OMD think they’d get away with such silliness? But what I really like is the implication that there are other parts of “DS” kicking around somewhere, perhaps they are waiting for a deluxe edition… or perhaps the subtitle “(Parts II, II & VII)” is just so ‘arty’ that there aren’t actually any more parts at all. In fact, I like that idea. It’s exactly the sort of thing OMD would do!
“Warm Leatherette” – brilliantly sinister stuff from Miss Grace Jones. Cracking performance on this track. Knocks the original by The Normal for six - the sheer power of Jones’ version, and especially her superb vocals, are way better than the rinky dink synths and rubbish vocals of the original. Fortunately Daniel Miller stopped being the Normal and set up Mute Records soon afterwards. (Mute of course, soon scored massive success when they signed Depeche Mode. Mute is still going as a subsidiary of EMI, still overseen by Miller and still releasing oddball stuff such a reissues of Residents albums and the Kraftwerk Katalog box). Grace Jones also popped up on “Election Day” muttering incoherently, which only added to overall silliness.
“No Orders” from J Peter Schwalm’s Musikain. A good song, with lyrics and vocals from Brian Eno. A nicely lopsided beat runs through the song and Eno delivers one of his patented unemotional vocals with some inscrutable lyrics - “We had no orders to…. Go that way…. So we go that way… so we go that way…” Good stuff, and yet another reason why Eno really should sing on more songs.
Blue Oyster Cult's swirly “Don’t Fear The Reaper”. For what at first appears to be such a classic rock song it’s extremely laid back, with layers of seventies sheen squashing the sound into a weird kind of hazy mush. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a cracking song, but I question the production choices here.
“Prisoner Of Love” – one of the best Tin Machine songs, a mid paced almost-ballad which reigns in Hunt Sales’ blanket bombing drumming and allows the band to rock out in a fairly conventional manner over one of the best melodies on the album. This also allows Bowie to contribute a cracking vocal without resorting to shouting over the noise.
And finally some Walker Brothers on shuffle. The title says it all - "The Saddest Night In The World" Oh the drama! The heartache! The loneliness!
