White _ _ _ _

Well the Lord Chief  Justice has upheld the 4 year prison term given to the two numpties who encouraged others to riot on Facebook. It makes you wonder what they would have done to Joe and Mick if they had released the single below in 2011 rather than 1977?

The Clash - White Riot

Career Opportunities

 Somehow this song seems quite apt this morning.

The Clash - Career Opportunities (Demo)

Record Store Day 2011

Tomorrow is Record Store Day 2011 and I'm looking forward to going into Glasgow with Max and trying to get my hands on the records that are on my wants list. If it's anything like last year it will be a really good day. There was a definite buzz going on at Mono. I am not the most patient person in the world and hate queueing, I think that I may have some German blood in my veins but even I didn't mind the wait, although I was a bit anxious about not getting a copy of the Fall single but I needn't have worried.

Anyway to get in the mood this afternoon I decided to make up a couple of compilation cds up for the car and decided to go back to basics and complete the task without the aid of the laptop or itunes, no dragging and dropping today, all of the tracks would be from vinyl or cd and would be recorded in real time.

It's ages since I made a compilation this way, it's ages since I made myself a compilation full stop, these days I either just pick a play list on the mp3 player or rely on the machine's impeccable taste on random.

I had a basic outline. I wanted to do a recent dance cd and also an indie/northern whatever one where I would just open one of the singles boxes pick out the first random single that my hand got to and see where it went from there.  The dance one was quite easy as I knew the tracks that I wanted and kind of knew the order in which I thought it should go but was kind of hampered by not being able to use two decks for a couple of reasons, firstly that my old mixer is knackered and the other decks are packed away behind a pile of other stuff in the cupboard half way up the stairs. It would have been better to have the tracks mix into each other and then it could officially be called a mixtape but after playing it back it sort of flows alright and the gaps between tunes are kept to a minimum.

The second cd has not been so easy. Due to the time taken to record the first and listen back through it I haven't even started it yet!

I have randomly selected the first single, posted below and I will let you know how the compilation turns out.

Please go and support your local independent record store tomorrow as we would all be in a sorry state without them, check the website here for participating stores.

Have a good weekend people.

Random single out of the box is  . .

The Clash - Bank Robber

The Definitive Version? You Decide

On yesterday's post I mentioned Every Little Bit Hurts and, how good Ms Holloway's version of the Ed Cobb song, the man also responsible for penning Tainted Love, was.

Swiss Adam in the comments section mentioned a version of the song by The Clash that if the truth be known I have always been rather ambivalent towards.

Last night I decided to play all three versions of the song and have to admit that there is not much in it between The Small Faces version  and Brenda Holloway's, although the Motown version still just shades it,  in my opinion. The big surprise is that the version by Stummer et al has it's merits too, however fails to pack the emotional punch of the other two and is probably why it remained unreleased until CBS were looking for extra product to make the Clash On Broadway boxset more appealing ("turning rebellion into money", indeed.)

So here are the three versions of the song that I posses. I know that these are not the only recorded versions of this song that exist. I think that their is a version by The Jam out there but I remain to be convinced that this is a song which would gain anything being covered by Weller and Co..

You decide

Brenda Holloway - Every Little Bit Hurts

The Small Faces - Every Little Bit Hurts

The Clash - Every Little Bit Hurts

Why Would You Do It?

Last Wednesday I saw SLF for the second time in 3 years, they did not seem quite as tight as they had on the previous occasion, but that may just have been due to my expectations being raised by the performance they gave that night  and them not being  the caricature of their former selves that I had imagined they would be beforehand.

It was also my distinct misfortune to witness, also for the second time in 3 years, the worst tribute band that I have ever seen (can there ever be anything but a bad tribute band), although my experience of this type of band is severely limited to this one band.

S and I discussed, why if you were a fan of a band would you try to then go on stage and do third rate covers of your heroes music? They couldn't be that deluded to think that they did any of the tracks the justice that they deserved, could they? If they were fans then they would have played these records hundreds of times and would have realised that what they were peddling was absolute pish in comparison. Which brings us back to why? I just can't fathom it out.

I have to confess though, me and S were definitely in the minority as most of the rest of the crowd gave them hearty applause after every murder and atrocity they committed. I can understand the urge to sing along to lyrics that have been seared into your brain but to applaud and give encouragement to what can only be classed as crimes against music makes those who do, complicit in those crimes in my eyes.

Still it could have been worse as S informed me that he had to endure Chelsea the previous year.

Here is my favourite ever Clash song, which is also one of my top 21 tracks ever and which that band totally ruined by taking all the subtlety away from and playing the song at about twice the speed of the original missing the whole point of the track in my eyes.

To paraphrase Joe Strummer - " Please mister, leave them alone"

The Clash - (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais

Sharia Don't Like It, But Then There Is No Accounting For Taste

I am starting to get a bit of demob fever and I still have, officially, 2 days left to work. This evening I have been listening to old tunes which get me in the party spirit and I suspect that nothing except more upbeat, dancey tunes will feature around here for the next week or so.

Thee first time I heard Mustapha Dance, would probably have been in the Mudd Club in Aberdeen around 1987, it was certainly Aberdeen. I thought that somebody had remixed the Clash, as in 1982  I didn't buy 12" singles and neither did anybody else I knew, so I was unaware that the track had been the b-side of Rock The Casbah, a single which I had bought but to be truthful was never that fond of. From the singles released from Combat Rock I much prefer straight to hell.

But this dubby, dancey,  b-side mix is a different story I love it and it always gets me in the mood for a good jig although there won't be much chance of that this Christmas. The reality will be more like me spending my days helping M build Lego creations. Still there is the prospect of playing with a rather large Millenium Falcon to look forward to.

The Clash - Mustapha  Dance

Just Because

I was listening to Black Market Clash today and thought that this should be shared. I think that I may have a bit of a dub weekend, which will not go down well with L. Now where is that Joe Gibbs box set?

The Clash - Robber Dub