Wednesday 24 July 2019

Greg Dull Covers



I think that today's cover is an interesting one and to be honest that I didn't realise was a cover if I'm honest, although the title was familiar.  Deep Hit Of Morning Sun was the opening on Primal Scream's 2002 album Evil Heat, not an album that I have listened to that often. In it's original form it is a trippy. psychy track with pretty rubbish lyrics. Dulli's version in his Gutter Twins guise with Mark Lanegan gives it the more straightforward rock treatment which I think works better but it is not outstanding or essential by any means. It was released as part of the Adorata digital only ep which consists of 7 covers and one original. The pick of the bunch is the Lanegan sung version of Duchess, penned by Scott Walker.

The Gutter Twins - Deep Hit Of Morning Sun
The Gutter Twins - Duchess  

Tuesday 23 July 2019

Sunny



This song was in my head yesterday all day. If you excuse the pun it always brightens up my day. For a song that if the story is true was a result of such a tragic event, it is quite remarkable how upbeat it is. It is said that Bobby Hebb wrote the song after his brother was stabbed to death, the day after the assassination of JFK  as a way of remembering better times.

Sunny has been covered numerous times by the great and the truly appalling. My favourite version was the Marvin Gaye one unearthed from the Motown vaults by Richard Searling at the turn of the millennium which I have posted a couple of times. So today you're getting Marva Whitney and James Brown's rather fine jazzy stab at it. I had never heard this before I bought the It's My Thing remastered double album which is well worth seeking out.

Marva Whitney/James Brown - Sunny

Monday 22 July 2019

Monday's Long Song



Up here summer feels as if it has been and gone as I type this it is poring with rain and incredibly windy for July, it is the second week of the Glasgow Fair so we don't really expect glorious sunshine but still.

Last week when I was contemplating filing the newly acquired Complete Matrix Tapes vinyl boxset, a thing of beauty both visually and aurally by the way, the shiny silver box housing I See You, the third album by the XX caught my eye and I thought to myself "haven't heard much from them recently and I can't actually remember that album at all, must play it again" and then duly forgot it again until last Thursday night when I contemplated doing a moon themed It's Friday . . .  Let's Dance but couldn't decide between Acen's Trip To The Moon or the Orb's Supernova At The End of The Universe so in the end didn't bother my arse but did think about the great video for Gosh and decided to listen to some Jamie xx tunes and remixes.

So today's track comes out of that listening session, In 2015 Young Turk's released a white label 12" of two excellent John Talabot remixes of Loud Places one of the best tracks from Jamie xx's solo album, In Colour. The Higher Dub, the b-side was the one that I flogged to death for months but this mix, the Without Me dub is actually pretty special too.

Jamie xx - Loud Places (John Talabot's Without Me dub)

Thursday 18 July 2019

Neil Armstrong



With all the buzz around the 50th Anniversary of the moon landing, this song has been running around my head.

In some of my least lucid moments I have been known to be a bit sceptical about whether we walked on the moon or not but after educating myself and also looking at some of the conspiracy theory guff I am quite annoyed at myself.

God, I miss Allo Darlin'.

Allo Darlin' - Neil Armstrong

Tuesday 16 July 2019

Greg Dulli Covers



This track was another that Dulli gave away from his website about 4 or 5 years ago. A Crime was originally recorded by Sharon Van Etten and appeared on Brooklyn based singer/songwriter's 2010 album Epic. Dulli slows the pace down slightly turns the folky acoustic ballad into a smouldering tune full of regret and longing.

Greg Dulli - A Crime

Monday 15 July 2019

Monday's Long Song



Bloody hell that was a quick two weeks, some clichés unfortunately happen to be true, especially the one about holidays being the fastest two weeks of the year.

As well as supervising the younger son's exploits on his bodyboard (no need for the elder who decided to spend two weeks in the caravan re-watching the Wire, a step up from last year's viewing, old episodes of Coronation Street on YouTube), I managed to read a few books and can thoroughly recommend David Ross's Welcome To The Heady Heights. One of the other two was "In Search of The Lost Chord - 1967 and the Hippie Idea, as the title suggests the book was all about the year that was the high water mark for the 60s counterculture movement. As you would expect there was quite a bit of emphasis on the music of the time, including of course the Grateful Dead. 

I have to be honest I am not a Dead Head and never really got into them the same way as I did with other bands from the late 60s. I did own a couple of albums when I was a young teenager. The first thing I bought was Shakedown Street, if I'm honest, I bought for the cover which was by Gilbert Shelton responsible for the Freak Brothers and Fat Freddy's Cat. It was pish, to my 14 year old brain this had nothing to do with psychedelia or what I expected. I also bought a copy of the first album which failed to bowl me over either and I ended my investigations there, deciding that LSd was obviously needed to get this guff. 

Fast forward twenty five years and I'm sitting at a table in a hotel in Bothwell after the end of a couple of friends wedding and another of the guests is waxing lyrical about "the Dead" and of course I had to stick my neb in, "hippy pish at is noodling, self indulgent worst" was my constructive input. But Jim gave a vigorous, impassioned  defence of Garcia, Weir, Pigpen etc" So much so that a couple of weeks later I followed up on his recommendation to buy Live/Dead as this is about the best representation of what the Grateful Dead were all about in the early days and listen to it especially Dark Star. And you know what, I rather liked it. The lyrics are embarrassing nonsense but the music is pretty good and I have listened to Dark Star in particular pretty often since, the tune would be a hell of a lot better in my opinion if it was an instrumental. 

I have never felt the need to investigate further but I have gone back and listened to Shakedown Street and it's not half bad too.

The Grateful Dead - Dark Star