Happy Birthday Boy

Number 1 son is sixteen today. I would post something that he likes but sadly his taste has turned to shit over the past couple of years. So here is a track that when he was younger about 10, he got really into after watching the Punk Britannia programme on YouTube and for about 6 months John Lydon was his hero. I will never forget the Saturday night when he poked his head round the door and asked "you got any dub?", apparently Lydon had been talking about it and he wanted to check it out. Stiff was right when he commented not long after that "he's going to run out of genres by the time he's twelve at this rate.

PIL - Rise

And here's the obligatory Hallowe'en song

Pogues - Haunted 

"The Moon Is There In All It's Splendour"

This lovely piece of ambience created on vintage analogue Roland synths complete with authentic NASA transmission recording by Hannah Peel was given away as a beautiful white vinyl 7" single with the July edition of Electronic Sound to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the moon landing and the cultural impact since. The only thing wrong with it is that it is way too short. Imagine a 10/12 minute version.

Electronic Sound is for me the most interesting music magazine out there and well worth subscribing to.

Hannah Peel  -  The Moon Is There In All It's Splendour (parts 1&2)

If It Don't Fit Don't Force It

A great bit of 70s Detroit Soul for you. A piano driven dancer with some forceful female backing vocals. I know nothing about Clarence Jackson but I do recognise a quality peace of vinyl when I hear it.

Clarence Jackson - If It Don't Fit, Don't Force This 

Monday's Long Song

WARNING OVERINDULGENT PROG ALERT!

As I warned months ago Genesis would appear in this slot at some point and today is the day.  I have mentioned on quite a few occasions the older hippy types that I kicked about with when I was an early teen, one of them Lex was a big Genesis and Kate Bush fan and most of the time when you visited him it would be one of those two that would be playing although he had a pretty large record collection for an 18 yr old, Inevitably I succumbed to some of the music I heard when up at his bit, I never really got into Kate Bush but some of the early Genesis stuff I really liked, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway and Selling England By The Pound are two albums that have remained in my head ever since, well bits of them anyway.

But it was Supper's Ready that made the biggest impression on me not least due to it's length, taking up the whole side of Foxtrot and clocking in at just short of 23 minutes. It was also bonkers, back then I had no idea what it was about but now there is a Wiki page dedicated to it and according to Peter Gabriel "is a personal journey which ends up walking through scenes from Revolution in the Bible"

The version posted is a live version from the Archive compilation 1967 - 75, recorded live at the Rainbow Theatre on 20th October 1973 and is slightly extended as the running time is 26:34.

Go on give it a listen, you might even like it.

Genesis - Supper's Ready

Keeping It Peel

Fifteen years, fifteen fucking years!

Maryanne, Lauren, the rest of 6Music, not least John's son Tom have tried to fill the gap and have just about managed to do it but it is telling that it has taken a whole station to fill those boots and come up with a daily playlist as diverse as the late man's one show. I say nearly as no matter how good all those djs are they do not possess those dulcet tones, the deadpan delivery and very few ever play the record at the wrong speed. I wonder if Peel had still been around what his show would have been like after his beloved Liverpool won the European Cup for the 6th time.

I had a few Peel sessions vying for inclusion today but as I am off to see the Wedding Present tonight,  in what I have no doubt will be another brilliant ninety odd minutes, especially as Bizarro my second favourite Weddoes album will be played in full, it seemed fitting that I should pick them and  the  band's final session recorded on 22/07/2004 and broadcast 12/09/2004 which contained at the time brand new tracks from Take Fountain, my favourite Wedding Present album.

Peel once said "the boy Gedge has written some of the best love songs of the Rock 'n' Roll era. You may dispute this, but I'm right and you're wrong!" His faith in Gedge can be attested by the fact that after M.E.S. Gedge clocked up the second most session appearances, 22 in total either with the Wedding Present, Cinerama or solo.



Blue Eyes

Ringway To Seatac

Shivers

Queen Anne 

White Horses

John Peel - The Fall

Forget You Ever Met Me Baby

Barbara McNair is responsible for one of my favourite soul songs of all time, You're Gonna Love My Baby and although Forget You Ever Met Me Baby isn't quite in the same league it is still an extremely good piece of sophisticated soul. Although this track was never released as a single it was on the second album she recorded for Motown, The Real Barbara McNair, released in 1969.

Barbara McNair - Forget You Ever Met Me Baby

Monday's Long Song

Not sure if Techno is the right thing for a Monday morning. It's not banging techno, Ripperton stretches and mellows out the Bristolian duo's 2011 release which may not have you pulling shapeson the floor but will have you nodding along. Ripperton does this kind of thing very well.

Emptyset feat Cornelius Harris - Altogether Lost (Ripperton's Underground Kingdom mix)

The Closing Act Of An Imaginary Festival (Second Stage)

A few weeks ago I was flicking through an old notebook looking for a record that I had scribbled down after hearing somewhere but could not remember what it was, when I came across a title that stopped me in my tracks for a couple of minutes. The header on the page was "Setlist For Spiritualized Closing The Festival" and as you can probably guess the page then listed a load of Spiritualized songs, some scored through others with arrows showing where they should be moved to and then the final running order.

The reason that this stopped me in my tracks was it had me remembering a most enjoyable series of email correspondence with Tim Badger from the beginning of May last year

Tim had emailed a few of us bloggers as he and SWC had had a mad idea (not like them that) to put on an imaginary festival over the August Bank Holiday 2018, over three days and multiple blogs. There would be three stages, the Main Stage where the acts would be complied by Tim, SWC and their  partner in crime KT (C) over the Friday,  Saturday and Sunday nights. A Second Stage with Jez, JC and yours truly and Another Stage maned by Swiss Adam, Robster and Walter.

There were some ground rules, the festival had to have bands that could physically play, ie were in existence at the time of the August Bank Holiday. The bands/artists would play for around an hour but headliners could have two hours. It had also been stipulated by SWC that my headliner had to be Spiritualized.

I put a lot of thought into this at the time and decided that I would add my own rule that my sets would consist of live recordings of the bands which narrowed down the attendees I could pick as I also had to already have mp3s of these. A piece of pish in relation to the headliners as I have loads of live Spiritualized stuff but a little bit trickier when it came to the rest of the line-up and possibly why in the notebook I only have a setlist for Spiritualized and no other bands listed.

I can't quite remember why this did not come to pass but I thought that I would post my Spiritualized set in memory of Tim, as I have been thinking of him recently, and of how at the start of the year when I was feeling quite low a comment he left made me feel just that little bit better.

Anyway,  below is my setlist for the final act on  the Second Stage  on the Sunday of Blogfest. I know shite name. I am sure that if it had come to pass the festival would have a much better and funnier name.


Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space

Hey Jane

I Want You

Lay Back In The Sun

Soul On Fire

Shine A Light-All Of My Tears-Electric Mainline

I Think I'm In Love

She Kisssed Me (It Felt Like A Kiss)

Come Together

Medication

Cop Shoot Cop

So Long You Pretty Thing

Encore

Take Me To The Other Side

Oh Happy Day

It's Amazing What You Find Food Shopping On A Sunday These Days

A few Sundays ago while doing the shopping in Sainsbury's Lynn was looking at the home ware and I stumbled across a rack of vinyl which was all very much mainstream fodder, Kate Bush, Pink Floyd, ELO, you get the idea. One thing did catch my eye as it had the Red Bird logo, the red bird playing a guitar. It was called "Go Girls: The Women of Red Bird. I was pretty sure that I would have all the tracks on the excellent comprehensive double cd The Red Bird Story and a few things on 7" but thought I would have a look anyway. As I suspected I did have all the tracks but was beginning to justify the purchase in my head. AS Go Now was on this, I wouldn't have to play my previous Bessie Banks 7" and the version of Baby would undoubtedly be better than the boot single I had and after all it was only 14 quid. But then I noticed that Don't Think My Baby's Coming Back by Dee Dee Warwick was also included, a song that has been on my vinyl wants list for quite some time, and that was it. It could have been double the price and I would still have bought it as a vg+ copy of the single Standing By released on the Tiger subsidiary label in 1964 that had Don't Think on the flip would set me back over £50.

I don't actually mind food shopping, okay truthfully I really enjoy it (well until we are fighting in the isles over the last tin of Spam in a couple of weeks) but stumbling on this album made a pleasurable experience just that little bit better. Just one gripe, why did it have to be on fucking pink vinyl.

Dee Dee Warwick - Don't Think My Baby's Coming Back

Monday's Long Song

In 1976 Brian Eno travelled to Forst in West Germany to collaborate with the Harmonia, the German supergroup that consisted of two members of Cluster, Hans Joachim Roedelius & Dieter Moebius and the guitarist from Neu! Michael Rother who had released two albums to limited sales. For 11 days in September Eno and the other three collaborated before he buggered off to work with David Bowie. The output of these sessions weren't released until 1997 as the tapes had been considered lost up until then. The album that was released Tracks and Traces is a mixed bag, the long contemplative piece, Sometime In Autumn being the pick of the bunch which was remixed by Shackleton and released on a 12" with an Appleblim and Komonasmuk remix of By The Riverside the other main track from the 1976 session.

Harmonia 76 - Sometime In Autumn

Life In Mono,

I was listening to a rather good radio dramatization of the Ipcress File on Radio 4 Extra the other day which and I realised that although I have seen the film many times and read the follow-up, Funeral In Berlin I have never read The Ipcress File which when I think of it is rather strange. I went through a period in my middle teens when I was obsessed with all of this espionage type stuff and consumed all of the John Le Carre and the like I could find.

This particular radio adaptation used snippets of the excellent John Barry soundtrack throughout which had me scouring the cd shelves for the soundtrack which still cannot be found not sure where it's gotten to. So I dug out Life In Mono by Mono which was released in 1996 and samples BArry's soundtrack to great effect. This 12" single came out with a raft of remixes including 2 very good efforts by The Propellerheads who were very much mining the seams of spooks and espionage at the time. But for me the original is the best.

Interesting fact, in the original Len Deighton books the main protagonist is never named, apparently Michael Caine came up with the name Harry Palmer when having lunch those Christian name was adopted and the Palmer part came from a boy Caine knew from school who he thought to be the most boring person there.

Mono - Life In Mono

Getting Mighty Crowded

Sometimes you forget just how good some songs are.  Either through being too familiar or just in the context that you tend to hear them, you don't really listen and appreciate them, then you hear them unexpectedly and you see the song in a whole different light.

This happened to me the other week, I had the iTunes on the computer while completing the excruciatingly tedious job of uploading and classifying site documents to our eTMF. I was just about to lose the will to live when the horns and the clip clop intro to Getting Mighty Crowded come out of the desk top speakers that I have in my home office.  Then the gorgeous tones of Betty Everett's lush velvety voice started to give me goosepimples the faintly echoey production just perfect. I am not sure that I have ever just sat and listened to this song before, I associate it with dancing (badly in my case). I played it three times on the bounce.

Getting Mighty Crowded was first released in 1964 on Vee Jay Records, the first American label that the Beatles signed for. It was picked up by the Twisted Wheel crowd and has been a staple on the northern scene ever since.  Elvis Costello recorded and released a particularly pish cover on the b-side of High Fidelity.

I suppose a track that is 55 years old and can still stop you in  your tracks can be considered a classic. Well it is to me anyway.

Betty Everett - Getting Mighty Crowded. 

Monday's Long Song

I don't think that it is a coincidence that quite a few of the 10 minute plus tunes that I have also have the name Pete Kember/Sonic Boom in some way associated with them. Today's track is one such example. Ocean is a cover of a Velvet Underground track that was never released when the band were still going. This version by Sunray and was one of the tracks on their second and in my opinion best album, Tomorrow from 2007. Sonic Boom's not only contributes vocals, guitar, keyboards and Tambura but also produces the track as well. It's a great extended, blissed out, fuzzed-up version of the song not quite on a par with the Velvets take on the Matrix Tapes but then it was never ever going to be.

Sunray - Ocean

Monday's Long Song

An epic from the pen of Mike Scott today, a song that Scott himself called "big music". Red Army Blues was influenced by two books that Scott had been reading, The Forgotten Soldier and The Diary of Vikenty Angarov, both stories of the Eastern Front one from the German and the other from the Russian perspective.  The song is the story of a hero of the Soviet Union in the second world war who on his return is sent to the gulag as Stalin fears the influence that American troops had on their Russian counterparts when they met after the fall of Berlin. This was the standout track from the second Waterboys album, A Pagan Place released in 1984.

The Waterboys -  Red Army Blues

It's Friday . . . Let's Dance

For me no other genre of dance music is quite as goods as the progressive house sound that was kicking about from 1991 to 1994 which probably says more about me and my age than it does about any other genre of dance music, except the trance which followed progressive house that was pure pish. Hard Hands was a consistently good label not only did they have Leftfield on the roster, as label owners it may have been surprising if they had not been but also releases from Full Moon Scientist, Vinyl Blair and two belters of 12" singles from Delta Lady. Swamp Fever was the second release by Kris Needs and Wonder, which contains a very good Scream Team mix but the one you want on a Friday night ids the full on Delta Baptism mix. Magic stuff!

I can't quite believe what I'm typing here but Airdrieonians are sitting 4th in the league at the moment, granted the table is tight but fourth is fourth. Tomorrow sees the Diamonds welcome Raith Rovers, two points and two places ahead of them in the League. A win would be great but a draw and a performance like the one against Falkirk three weeks ago would more than do.

Have a good weekend people

Delta Lady - Swamp Fever (Delta Baptism mix)  

Age of Chance

I was sent a link yesterday on Twitter for the C86  Radioshow on Mixcloud  which included an interview with Geoff T from Age of Chance. You can get it here if you are interested.

For about 18 months from the first tine I heard their cover of Kiss and the Kisspower mix on the John Peel show they were one of my favourite bands, I loved everything about them from the mad record sleeves designed by the Designer's Republic, the slogans, the cycling gear at least two decades prior to the explosion of middle aged men in lycra,  the shouty vocals and most of all the use of a dj and sampling in their music.

When I look back at my time in Aberdeen in 1987/88, along with all the house music I was immersing myself in two albums also feature heavily, Public Enemy's Yo! Bum Rush The Show and 1000 Years of Trouble by Age of Chance both of which sounded nothing like anything I had been listening to previously. Age of Chance deserved if not to become superstars Like Chuck D and Favour Flav, should have been a lot better known than they were. Last night I played 1000 Years of Trouble and this may be the nostalgia talking but I think it still sounds pretty damn good. I think this evening I might go through the 12" singles as they include some pretty good remixes two of which done by Hank Shocklee and Carl Ryder bringing us back to Public Enemy.

Age of Chance - Learn To Pray 

Age of Chance - This Is Crush Collision

Five Years Ago Today

Things could have been so, so different but the majority voted no. Buying the arguments that we were too wee, too poor to go it alone, That the best way to stay inside the EU was to remain within the UK where we were a valued equal partner in the relationship.

How's that working out for you now?

Last week the # FuckoffScotland was trending due to the mendacity  audacity of the three highest judges in Scotland daring to suggest that the clown in No.10 Downing Street had been less than truthful to the monarch. All the tropes of "subsidy junkies", "scummy wee country full of drunks and junkies" "shite football team" etc were rolled out. Okay I'll give you the third one, that has been a given long before the resurgence of the SNP.

I do think that we made a mistake. As you can see from Johnson's recent European jaunt, the smallest countries in the EU are allowed a voice whereas within our own "Union" we are allowed to be a part of it but don't dare step out of line.

If This Doesn't Make You Smile

Sure Twitter can be a fucking desperate place with all of the shit but sometimes some of the interactions can give you back your feeling that not all of humanity is like that horrible woman who was once on the apprentice and the guy who has unsuccessfully stood for Parliament 8 times. The other times it can make your day with one clip that has you smiling all day. Last Tuesday  was one of those days when the clip below was posted and it also had me scurrying to the soul boxes as, shamefully The Nitty Gritty was a single that I had but neglected for far too long.

The clip is from the Judy Garland Show and is probably the best example of a white guy getting his groove  until Pulp Fiction. The guy dancing like nobody is watching is Bobby Banas, who was a professional dancer and choreographer who was in West Side Story and also Down And Out In Beverly Hills.

Shirley Ellis is probably best know for the Clapping Song, however in my house it's Soul Time that is played more often. The Nitty Gritty was released on the Congress label in 1963.

Shirley Ellis - The Nitty Gritty

Monday's Long Song

Not sure I have anything to add to the reams of stuff that has been said about Bob Dylan or this song in particular apart from it is a work of fucking genius that you just don't want to end and when it does you can't quite believe that eleven and a half minutes have passed.

I first heard Dylan at a mate's house when I was either twelve of thirteen. Ben's dad was a huge Dylan fan and it was not uncommon to hear Bob's dulcet tones when entering the house it was either that or the Archers if I wandered up at that time of evening. So both parents were responsible for turning me on to two quite different forms of aural entertainment.

Bob Dylan - Desolation Row

It's Friday . . . Let's Dance

A few weeks after discovering Whyte Horses and buying both of the albums I found myself once again in Monorail, I'm not sure if they have some sort of tracking device but sometimes I find myself in there when I have gone in the town with absolutely no intention of going anywhere near King Street. So I was just flicking through the racks when I came to the W section and the divider stating Whyte Horses but the only thing there was possibly the worst album artwork this side of the Regrettes with the name Justin Velor and 2013 emblazoned across the front. On closer inspection on a sticker it informed me that Justin Velor is none other than Dom Thomas the man behind Whyte Horses and so I decided to take a punt on the double album, there was bound to be enough good music to justify the £6.99 price tag, surely on past evidence of the man's output.

So when I got home I put it on expecting something in the vein of Whyte Horses or Cowgirl In Sweden, I was not prepared for four to the floor house, electro, rhythms stolen from Detroit and a smattering of Balearica, actually the last one wasn't that much of a surprise. After a bit of digging it made a bit more sense as some of the collaborators were Jez Williams from Doves and Graham Massey, others were a bit more surprising, Gerry Love from the Fannies, Chris Geddes from Belle and Sebastian and Lee E John from Imagination. With a squad like this you may be thinking that the album will be all over the place and it is but there are more good tracks than duds with Energizer being the pick of the bunch for me.

Third tier Scottish football, you've got to love it. Three weeks ago Airdrie the Diamonds got an absolute mauling away to East Fife, so none of us were confident for the following week's home game against Falkirk, the team that had been relegated from the Championship last season and during the summer spent big, well in relative terms, to ensure that they would not be hinging aboot in League 1. What we got though was a thoroughly entertaining nil-nil draw where Airdrie more than held their own and could have sneaked it in the last minute. For the first time ever Leo saw the opposite stand open with the large travelling support providing much needed atmosphere to proceedings.

Last week it was time for cup action, the Tunnocks Caramel Wafer Cup, no less and the Diamonds welcomed European opposition in the form of Irish side Bohemians and a bizarre 13:00 Saturday kick-off . Another thoroughly entertaining game with Airdrie just edging to a 3-2 victory.

Tomorrow sees the team away to Dumbarton where hopefully they can keep up the wining ways.

Have a good weekend people

Justin Velor - Energiser