This Week I Are Be Mostly Listening To...
Playlist 17 Oct
I have had, as some of you might have guessed, a very difficult year, for a variety of reasons I’m not really able to talk about. But the difficulties came to an end a couple of months ago, and now the depression that came in the aftermath seems (touch wood) to be lifting somewhat. I’m writing and thinking much faster than I have in months — the three interlinked Zappa/Beefheart/GTOs episodes of the podcast, and the bonus episodes that went with them, are I think good work, but I felt like I was wading through treacle with lead boots on the entire time I was working on them. I don’t think it shows in the finished work, but I had to fight every inch of the way for them.
I’m now working faster, and hoping to start recording the first Bowie main episode tomorrow — I would have already had it recorded but I decided a few days ago that I needed to scrap what I’d written as I came up with a better structure, which also required me to read a bunch of extra books (including some Nietzsche, speaking of wading through treacle with lead boots). I’m still writing the script, but I’ve got enough of it that with luck I can start recording tomorrow and then Tilt can start editing it while I finish the script off. This one’s going to be a two-parter on “Space Oddity” and will be the first of many Bowie episodes — in the same way I did an episode a year on Elvis for the fifties and one a year for the Beatles for the sixties, there’ll be a Bowie episode a year, more or less, for the seventies — and so I had to get the structure very right, but now I’ve got it down it’s just a matter of doing the actual typing — the thinking has all been done.
But whenever my brain starts properly working, it goes into overdrive and wants to do more, more, more… so the newsletter has come back.
I’m going to try again to keep this going on a weekly basis, but you know by now that when I say “I’m going to try to do this on a regular basis” I end up meaning “I am going to do this two or three times and then something in my life will derail all my routines and I won’t do it for months”.
But there is one thing I’ve been doing on a daily basis all year now, so I thought maybe I could make that the basis of what I’m doing with the newsletter now (along with updates on how I'm doing and how work on the podcast is progressing).
About eighteen months ago I decided to listen alphabetically through my vinyl collection, and post about each album in order on Bluesky (I’m only up to the Cs in the very long thread there, partly because I keep going a few days without doing it, and partly because I keep backfilling when, eg, the Beatles Rubber Soul box came out or when I’ve bought a bunch of Bee Gees vinyl after doing my Patreon bonus on them.
But then at the start of this year I decided to note down for my own reference every vinyl album I listened to, not just the alphabetical listening through, and I’ve been doing that all year. So what I thought I could do (at least until the hypothetical Events make it impossible) is to do a playlist every week of one track per album from each album I’ve listened to on vinyl. This week there have been eighteen.
Now, before I start doing this, some caveats. My vinyl collection is not fully representative of my music collection more broadly. Much of my late teens and twenties was during the Peak CD era, when classic stuff was getting reissued on CD and when almost no new vinyl was being printed. So for huge swathes of my formative years, the music I was buying was on CD rather than vinyl because that’s what there was. So my record collection consists of stuff I bought in my childhood and early teens when I was living in a small town with no record shop; stuff that came from my parents’ record collection when they stopped listening to it and gave it all to me; stuff I found dirt-cheap in second-hand shops at a point when nobody wanted vinyl any more; and now prestige reissues of stuff.
This means that while it reflects some of my musical taste, it tends to skew towards, roughly, people who have had their photo on the cover of Mojo. It’s much lower on obscure sunshine pop artists, rockabilly, 50s R&B, avant-garde classical, outsider music, country music, and other genres I mostly discovered in my twenties and thirties, than my actual tastes would suggest.
All that said, here’s an eighteen-track playlist with one track each from the eighteen albums I listened to on vinyl between Saturday the tenth and Friday the 16th (Tune My Music should open this in your streaming platform of choice — I can’t guarantee every track will be on every platform, but they’re all currently on Tidal, the service I used to create it, as I write).
https://www.tunemymusic.com/share/5duE4CDZyC
We start with Hungry Freaks, Daddy by The Mothers of Invention, in the mono version from the new sixtieth anniversary box set version of Freak Out!. There are two different configurations of this set, and I bought both the vinyl and shiny-disc versions. The CD/Blu-Ray version contains far more material — it has the original 1966 stereo mix of the album (which I already had on my original vinyl copy, and which was also released on the The MOFO Project/Object box set about twenty years ago, but has been otherwise unavailable, Zappa having remixed it for the CD release), a “pre-master mix” (which is very slightly different from the original stereo mix, but not so much as you’d notice), the mono mix of the album which has been out of print for the best part of sixty years, a lot of live recordings, rehearsals, and demos, and an Atmos mix of the album on Blu-Ray.
Of these, the least essential is the Atmos mix. This might seem surprising given that the surround mixes of other Zappa albums on similar sets have been highlights of them. But of course, a lot of those albums were recorded for Quad, which means that there were choices baked in in the recording stage which make surround-sound versions more doable. They were also recorded on 16-track or better, and built up through overdubbing.
Freak Out! on the other hand is a) recorded in 1966 and crucially b) recorded in LA. There is a very specific sound that almost all records made in LA in the mid sixties have, no matter who the artist or producer are (the exception, oddly, seems to be stuff recorded in RCA studios — the recordings that I know of made there don’t sound like this). There seems to be a house style of sorts across all the studios, with a standard method of recording — all the instruments recorded live together, in a reverb-heavy room, with minimal separation, so there’s a ton of leakage between mics, and recorded on only a handful of tracks. This reverb and leakage is great for mono recordings in particular, because it gives everything a punch — there’s a reason that so many hit singles were recorded in these studios — but it means that when you create a surround mix of anything recorded in these studios, it comes out as a sort of smear across the sound spectrum. I’m sure the mixing engineers did their best, but much like the various surround versions of Pet Sounds, you just fundamentally can’t make a good, listenable, surround mix from these elements.
But the rest of the set is fascinating, though not quite as much so as the earlier MOFO box sets, and is definitely worth obtaining if, like me, you’re a fan of the early Mothers of Invention. The vinyl box has a single disc of the best of the live and rehearsal material, along with the “pre-mix” and mono versions of the album. I’d have far preferred it if it had just had the mono version (which sounds astonishing — again, everything recorded in LA in the mid-sixties sounds best in mono) and included all the live and rehearsal material in place of the rough stereo mix, but the mono in particular sounds great.
Next up is Burn it Down by Dexy’s Midnight Runners. This is from their debut album Searching for the Young Soul Rebels and is a rerecording of their hit single “Dance Stance”. For those who can’t make out what Kevin Rowland is singing, this is the most danceable song ever recorded as a howl of outrage against anti-Irish bigotry, with the chorus just being a list of great Irish writers, in answer to someone who had talked about Irish people being stupid.
We follow that with Blue Train by John Coltrane, from the album of the same name. Blue Train is one of the all time classic jazz albums, and that’s for a reason. I don’t have the technical vocabulary to explain in detail why it’s so great, but it was at the time a thrilling reintroduction of the feel of the blues into the very intellectual world of post-bop jazz, and you can still feel that thrill in the piece. It’s a track that’s created from very intellectual processes, but which ends up being music to feel rather than analyse — something that’s true of most of the truly great jazz of the post-swing era.
Next up is The Fear by Pulp, the opening track to This is Hardcore, their sleazy, depressed, comedown album after the massive pop success of their previous album Different Class. This is Hardocore is a great album, but not a very easy listen, and not one I pull out as often as their others. “The Fear”, the opening track, is almost certainly the only song on a number one album to reference Paul Daniels’ catchphrase “You’ll like it — not a lot, but you’ll like it”, but it’s special to me for a different reason, because it was the song that gave me one of the most wonderful live performance experiences I’ve ever had, one which sadly couldn’t be replicated now in an age of ubiquitous Internet reports of shows.
Seeing Pulp at the Manchester Apollo in 1998, they opened with this song. The band came on, Jarvis Cocker started singing, it was a great performance… and then halfway through Jarvis Cocker came on and started singing. The first two verses had actually been sung by a lookalike/soundalike, and the entire audience had been fooled. They finished it as a duet, and then the real Jarvis did the rest of the show. Or at least I assume it was the real Jarvis.
We then go back to John Coltrane, this time co-billed with Eric Dolphy, for a twenty-two-minute version of Africa from the live album Evenings at the Village Gate. Recorded shortly after they recorded the same song on Coltrane’s Africa/Brass, this is an even longer version, with a more stripped down backing, with just six musicians rather than the dozen or so who’d played on the studio version. These are some of the top jazz musicians of their or any time — the other musicians on the track with Dolphy and Coltrane are Art Davis, Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, and Reggie Workman, all jazz legends in their own right. By this point, only a few years after Blue Train, Coltrane and Dolphy had moved on so far that the music is almost unrecognisable as the same genre they’d been playing in earlier. By this point Coltrane had almost entirely dispensed with chord changes, which were up to now the standard vocabulary of jazz musicians, and instead was playing with other aspects of melody and tonality. This recording shows Coltrane already moving towards the style that we’d see later in A Love Supreme, but it’s frankly Dolphy who steals the show here, and I often think that if Dolphy hadn’t died so tragically young (from medical racism — doctors assumed that because he was a Black jazz musician, the coma he was in must have been due to drug use rather than the actual cause, diabetes) he would have the reputation that Coltrane does now.
We follow that with two tracks by T-Rex. I bought a vinyl box of all the T-Rex albums a year or so ago and listened to most of them then, but until this week I never got round to the final two, by which point Marc Bolan’s muse had somewhat run out of steam. Even so, there are enjoyable tracks on even those albums. Chrome Sitar from Futuristic Dragon is Bolan in mid-tempo “Children of the Revolution” mode, though rather than singing about revolutions he’s singing “little girl won’t you hold my hand”. The addition of the titular sitar to the arrangement stops it being a straight remake of “Children of the Revolution”, and the screeched backing vocals at the end of each chorus (presumably Gloria Jones) are fantastic. And from Bolan’s final album, the wonderfully-named Dandy in the Underworld, comes I Love to Boogie, which could easily have been a classic T-Rex hit from the glam era had it not been so underproduced — it’s just two guitars playing a boogie riff, bass low in the mix, and what sounds like it could be a drum machine though is probably just a very mechanical-sounding real drummer. If it had come out five years earlier with a typical Tony Visconti production, slathering strings and echo and Flo and Eddie backing vocals on it, it could have sold a million. As it is it sounds like a demo, but a fun one.
Lonely Woman by Ornette Coleman is from The Shape of Jazz to Come. The album was accurately titled — it so changed the sound of jazz that it’s hard now to hear how different it was from everything that preceded it. But Coleman here ditched any form of harmonic support — his quartet had no chordal instrument at all, no piano or guitar or anything to provide a harmonic grounding for the melody instruments’ flights of improvisation. While “Lonely Woman” in particular is obviously composed — while there are passages of pure improvisation, there are also regular periods where Coleman and cornet player Don Cherry state the theme in unison or harmony — this album paved the way for the music that became free jazz, and for the ditching of a lot of the musical safety nets that had been necessary for jazz before that. But again, it was so influential that its innovations have become thoroughly absorbed by the culture, and it no longer sounds revolutionary. It does, though, still sound great.
Drinking Wine Spo-De-O-Dee by Jerry Lee Lewis is from The Session, a double album recorded in London in 1973 with a whole host of British musicians including Mick Jones (then of Spooky Tooth, soon of Foreigner), Peter Frampton, Albert Lee, Alvin Lee, Kenney Jones of the Faces, Klaus Voorman, Matthew Fisher of Procol Harum, and Chas Hodges (later of Chas & Dave). The tracklist is mostly made up of old fifties rock and roll and blues songs (including one or two that Lewis himself had previously recorded, but mostly versions of other people’s songs) with the addition of a few more recent songs that fit Lewis’ idiom, like “Bad Moon Rising”. It’s nothing musically spectacular, but the famous session people are relatively subdued and don’t show off — it’s Lewis’ album and they know it. You already know whether you want to hear Jerry Lee Lewis sing “Baby What You Want Me To Do” or “Sixty Minute Man”, and if you do it sounds exactly like you expect it to.
Kilroy Was Here by The Move is from their eponymous debut album, but in this case I wasn’t listening to it in that format. On a recent weekend trip to Amsterdam, I found copies of three budget Move compilations in a cheap second-hand record shop. These compilations had no overlapping tracks and all had different random selections from the band’s four albums and non-album singles. I picked them all up because I only had one Move album on vinyl (my least favourite, Shazam!) and the Move’s stuff is all great in whatever order. “Kilroy Was Here”, for those unfamiliar with mid-twentieth-century cultural ephemera, was a phrase that was graffitied on random walls and out-of-the-way places — and on bombs in World War II — especially those where you would think nobody could have been in. Roy Wood’s lyrics here see the narrator wanting desperately to find who this “Kilroy” is.
Common People (Live) by Pulp is from their recent live album, just titled Live. Pulp are a great live act, and while a recording can’t quite capture that (Jarvis Cocker is one of the most stunningly charismatic people I’ve ever seen — indeed the first time I actually understood what “charisma” referred to was when I saw Pulp play Glastonbury in 1995) this is still a recording of them on good form. It was released in August (coincidentally on the same day they played Manchester on their most recent tour), and was recorded last year, right after the release of their first studio album in over twenty years. I saw them on their reunion tour a couple of years ago and enjoyed the show, but it was made up just of the old crowd-pleasers. Playing a set that mixed those with songs from a new, critically-acclaimed and commercially-successful, album, has given their shows an additional boost. “Common People” is, of course, one of those crowd-pleasers, but it might be the best political song of the last few decades, and the anger when Cocker sings “you will never understand how it feels to live your life with no meaning or control and with nowhere else to go” had me in tears at the Manchester show.
You Get the Feeling by Squeeze is from their new-old album Trixies. This is a concept album that Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook, the singer-songwriter-guitar team who have been Squeeze’s only constant members, wrote when they were teenagers before getting a record deal, forgot about, and then resurrected this year for their fiftieth anniversary as a band. I’ve only listened to the album once so far, and nothing has burned itself into my brain the way their truly great singles have (Squeeze are probably the best singles band of my lifetime, possibly other than Blondie, but it’s between those two with nobody else even close) but on first listen it’s remarkably good for an album written by children. I’ll definitely be relistening to this one a few times as I’m going to see Squeeze next month and they’re doing the whole album in the middle of the set, so expect more tracks from this, and more thoughts about it, in future playlists if I do them.
Nights on Broadway by The Bee Gees is from Here At Last… Live, the group’s first live album, which is genuinely one of the best pop/rock live albums ever recorded. It was recorded in 1976, just as the group were having their second comeback and were at what anyone sane would have assumed was a peak — they’d just had massive hits with “Jive Talking” and “You Should Be Dancing” and were back on top, as big as they’d ever been.
Of course, soon after this, Saturday Night Fever would come out, and the group would go from “as big as they’d ever been” to “bigger than any band, except maybe the Beatles, had ever been”, but at this point you can hear the excitement of a band who are vindicated and have just become stars again. They’re doing their new hits, and material from their current album, but much of the performance is made up of their sixties and early seventies hits.
The real interesting thing here is that it shows something that the group always said to be true — they talked often about how they weren’t “disco” but were trying to make R&B music, and it’s very obvious listening to them live, with the Bonneroo Horns augmenting their studio band, that this is the case. In particular it’s very, very obvious that they had been listening intently to Stevie Wonder, and their pre-Fever, post-comeback material is basically what you get if you put Stylistics style falsetto over mid-seventies Stevie Wonder arrangements, all scratchy funk guitar and Moogs.
The documents of their eighties and nineties shows are sadly a little flaccid, all cheesy keyboards, but at this point the Bee Gees were a genuinely great live band, with Maurice in particular being possibly the most underrated bass player of his era. And they were actually great live — while like most live albums this has a bit of overdubbing and post-production, the unedited soundboard recordings are widely available (the show was broadcast on the radio) and there’s very little audible difference on most tracks. The sweetening has mostly just fixed the kind of things that aren’t noticeable in an actual live performance, not radically changed the performances (the song I’ve chosen actually has one of the most noticeable differences — on stage, Maurice would sing the super-high falsetto parts on the tag, doing a very accurate impression of Barry, as on the record Barry sang both those parts and the lead. Those parts have clearly been rerecorded, and it’s hard to tell if it’s Maurice doing his impression again or if Barry did it in the studio). It’s a really, really, impressive album.
Oddly, while the album most people have is an almost-entirely-live album, my vinyl copy is less so. I happen to have got a copy of the South African pressing, and on that they dropped three of the mid-seventies album tracks and added a bunch of earlier songs that had been hits in South Africa, like “Melody Fair”, using the studio versions and overdubbing crowd noise. Happily, I like the songs they added more than the ones they dropped, even though it compromises the integrity of the show — and I have digital copies of the unadulterated album and of the soundboard recordings. In any configuration, though, this is an essential album.
We follow with more Bee Gees. Every Christian Lion-Hearted Man Will Show You is from Bee Gees 1st, actually their third album, but their first released outside Australia and New Zealand. This is a great Mellotron-driven psych-rocker which shows that they’d been listening very closely to John Lennon’s tracks on Revolver. It’s very silly, probably unintentionally, but also absolutely wonderful.
We then have Creeque Alley by the Mamas and the Papas. The album I listened to this on, The Complete Singles, is sadly out of print and not on any streaming services. This is very irritating as it’s the only collection ever, as far as I know, to actually use the single mixes rather than stereo remixes. Which is a problem as, as I said before about the Mothers, recordings made in LA, more than anywhere else, benefited from being in mono. And this is especially true for the Mamas and the Papas. The stereo versions of their tracks have some of the worst mixing decisions I’ve ever heard, panning the harmonies (which need to blend together) hard left and right a lot of the time, and mixing the vocals lower than the instruments — a travesty for a vocal group. I can’t think of a group of the era who have been worse served by reissues. The version of “Creeque Alley” I’ve linked here is a mono version on a compilation, but it’s not the mono single version (and the thing on that compilation that’s labelled the single version is even less so, being the standard stereo mix). This is apparently taken from a very scratchy vinyl rip of the album version of the track, missing the overdubs on the hit single version.
As I say, hugely ill-served, and you should try to get a copy of The Complete Singles if you have any wish to actually hear one of the better singles bands of their era as they sounded at the time.
Psycho Killer (September 1975 demo) by Talking Heads is from Tentative Decisions, a collection of demos and live recordings from before they signed to Sire Records. There’s a multi-CD version of this that came out this year which I’ve got, but this is actually a Record Store Day single-disc LP version of just the stuff from before Jerry Harrison joined the band, when they were just David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth. It’s fascinating stuff if you’re a fan of Talking Heads, and this track in particular is delightful to hear — while Weymouth has already worked out exactly what she’s going to play, and has it exactly right from the start, Frantz is a little stiff yet on the drums (though the part he plays on the “fa fa fa” section is really good), and Byrne’s guitar part is totally different, a jangly folk-rock part, and he’s not yet worked out how to get into the character vocally — there’s none of the tension in the famous version, and he’s not doing the “I-I-I-I” vocal pyrotechnics. Indeed, on the “fa fa” parts and so on he seems to be embarrassed and just mumbles them, as if gesturing at a part that should be there. The lyrics aren’t quite yet worked out, either, and at the end there’s what sounds like a theremin buried in the mix. You can see the great record that they’re getting towards, but they’re not there yet.
Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War by Paul Simon is from the new album release of one of his A Quiet Celebration tour shows, this one from last year but identical in setlist to the show I reviewed here a few months ago. On vinyl it’s a return of the classic seventies format of the triple live album, and the first disc is a complete live performance of the Seven Psalms album.
I’ve no idea how well the album would work for someone who hadn’t seen a show on this tour, because it brings back very clearly my own memories of the show, but it’s quite lovely. Simon makes no pretence at all at being any younger than he actually is, and this is a very old man’s voice singing these songs he mostly wrote more than forty years ago, but it really works.
And we finish with a third Bee Gees track, Lemons Never Forget from Horizontal. The reason for so much Bee Gees here is that when I was doing my Patreon bonus on the group the other week, I discovered that they’re one of the few bands where you can still pick up second-hand copies even of out-of-print albums for the kind of prices you used to pay in the nineties (apart from Odessa, whose “classic album” reputation makes it more expensive), and so I bought half a dozen albums I already owned digitally on vinyl — Here at Last, for example, I think only cost three pounds plus P&P, making it the best bargain I've had since I found a copy of Ray Charles' Modern Sounds in Country and Western for 50p. “Lemons Never Forget” is another Beatles pastiche, and one Barry Gibb always says was poking fun at Apple Records, even though it was released before Apple Records even existed.
Anyway, I hope you liked that playlist, created just by me noting down in order all the LPs I listened to last week. Hopefully there’ll be another one next week, again made up of whatever I’m listening to — likely more Bee Gees, more sixties jazz, more spiky vaguely-intellectual late-seventies/early-eighties New Wave, and a couple of random other things. See you then.
