Mood Piece

Feeling a little melancholy.

Only one thing to do - go with the mood.

Play a little Astrud.

Watch the rain.

Astrud Gilberto - 'A Certain Sadness' (1967)

Soul Friday

I guess that like last Friday's choon this might also be a contender for the 'covers that blow socks off' list, from the big fat bassline right on in (though the Sam Cooke'll always have a place in my heart).

The Stax sound baby, it never fades.

Play Loud.

Like you need me to tell you.

Eddie Floyd - 'Bring It On Home To Me' (1968)

Weather Report

Louis Armstrong - 'Didn't It Rain' (1958)

Season Cycle

Spring is here if I'm on my bike in Richmond Park, and yesterday I was.

Mind, it's not all green yet like it is in that picture, and of course I don't look 'professional' either.

But the air was fresh and the ground was stirring.

Keep those dogs on leads in designated areas, the skylarks are nesting.

(I've been listening to a lot of Courtney too).

Courtney Pine - 'Skylark' (1989)

Soul Friday

There is a strange mix of this on some Motown compilations that has that bad split-stereo thing going on and a distressingly prominent plonky piano coming out of the right-hand speaker - and children, it is wrong.

What we need is the full mono blast of the vinyl 45 and Levi Stubbs doing serious work on the song written by the Left Banke's 16 year-old keyboard player: surely a contender for your next 'cover versions that blow socks off the original' in-pub conversation.

So good it makes me cry!

The Four Tops - 'Walk Away Renee' (1967)

Alex Chilton (Dec 28 1950 – Mar 17 2010)

Like most people of my musical generation, I suppose, I came to him via the people he had inspired; they covered his songs, namechecked him in interviews, and because I liked them and trusted them, I sought his stuff out too. # 1 Record b/w Radio City on an early CD from Rhythm Records in Camden in the heat of Teenage Fanclub mania; Third after hearing 'Kangaroo' and 'Holocaust' on It'll End In Tears.

I didn't even make The Box Tops connection until quite recently. Wow.

What a bunch of work; what a powerful influence.

59 is - self-evidently - way too young to die.

RIP AC.

Big Star - 'Thirteen' (1972)
Big Star - 'Holocaust' (1974)
The Replacements - 'Alex Chilton' (1987)

Notes & Tones

Cover art: S.Neil Fujita

Yesterday in London felt like the first real day of spring; the sun didn't just shine, it was warm, and in EC1 I saw a woman sitting outside a cafe/bar sipping at a rosé wine.

I have all the windows open today.

And I've been going crazy for Mingus again; Ah Um. Truly great.

Charles Mingus - 'Goodbye Pork Pie Hat' (1959)

It's Cold Outside...

Hey! That's Billy Currie on keyboards!

Postscript: Glen Now

Yes, I'd have put 'Old Glen' but that sounds like the name of a sheepdog, or possibly an export Scotch whisky found in French supermarkets.

Anyway, this is very lovely. A Paul Westerberg song.

No cities in this one, move along.

Glen Campbell - 'Sadly Beautiful' (2008)

Cannons Flashing

I love everything about this recording; a great song of course (Jimmy Webb) - gorgeous melody, sparely evocative lyrics - but also a wonderful, soaring vocal, the playing of no less than the legendary Wrecking Crew, which included Campbell (that guitar solo two minutes in!), a sound that is the sea breeze and surf of that place he's left behind and all of his longing to be back there.

They quite genuinely don't make 'em like this any more, you know.

PS: The seafront at Galveston had a hard, hard battering from Hurricane Ike in 2008, by which time still more young men were cleaning their guns far from their loved ones, in invaded lands.

Interesting Artist - 'Great Song' (1969) (see below)

(12/03: Just had this 'returned to draft' and the Mediafire file deleted, so assume it's a copyright thang - have restored the post without the file: sheesh, you all already own it anyway. Ropey, but great, old video clip here).

(23/03: Brilliantly this has been 'taken down' AGAIN. even though there is no link here. So - I have now removed the words that identify the track. Call off the bots! Sheesh x 4).

Yeah Baby

Go careful with this - it's hot! from the tom-toms in.

Lee Fields And Sugarman & Co - 'Stand Up' (2009)

And You Try To Forget Your Past

I've been playing this over and over in the last few days. I really like it. It's from a synthy mid-80s album of his which is a mixed bag, but I've had it for years on this Beggar's Banquet sampler* that I bought in a junk shop in Wood St, Walthamstow when we were students in a flat above the chip shop.

John Cale - 'The Sleeper' (1985)

*I'm steering clear of some of the other things on it. Gene Loves Jezebel? You know I'm really not so sure.

The Sound Is Deep

I know. I never* post on a Saturday, but that new Ant & Dec programme's right royally getting on my nerves and this has been patiently waiting to be put before you for a few days now, bless it.


My first favourite Cure song, in what is perhaps its definitive version.

Still devilishly difficult to find.

And thirty years old.

The Cure - 'A Forest' (Peel session) (1980)

*hardly

This One Goes Out To The One I Love, etc

It is Mrs H's birthday today.

We have been to the Van Gogh exhibition, which is blow-your-socks-off brilliant ( go, go, go! if you can - the web booking is closed but we only queued for about 45 minutes on the day), had a nice lunch in our little local place by the river watching seagulls ride the wind and cormorants dive, and are now waiting until a semi-decent time to open the champers/gin.

And it's Friday too! Oh lawdy.

This is one of her favourite things, and I bet it's one of yours x

Blondie - 'Union City Blue' (1979)

Swimming Reindeer

In a half-term week spent dodging big squally showers, this was the best thing we saw.

It was found in Montastruc, SW France and is the oldest sculpture in the British Museum.

It is 13,000 years old.

And we'd have missed it if we hadn't have made a sideways glance to the left as we were leaving.*

It is made from mammoth tusk and depicts two swimming reindeer.

No-one knows exactly why it was made, or what it was for.

----

"The presence of antlers on both animals and the characteristics of the female coat show them as they appear in autumn when they cross rivers on migration to their mating grounds and winter pastures.

Was the sculpture left at Montastruc to bring good luck or ward off evil spirits? Could it be an apology to the reindeer for having to kill some of them or a representation of autumn, made in the hope that the reindeer mating would be successful, ensuring human and animal survival?

Was the sculpture a group totem, a shaman’s wand or the focal point of a story based on a journey in or between real and supernatural worlds? Such questions cannot be answered with certainty but the reindeer do suggest a religious impulse to be at home with nature at a deeper level."

----

Oh bless you dear Scientist, it is a work of art then.

A tiny, beautiful thing made at the onset of winter by a hunter in Ice Age France, now admired by thousands in a world and time entirely beyond his imagining.

Roy Harper - 'Frozen Moment' (1985)

*We had been to see the Staffordshire Hoard - which is very lovely, but not so much a hoard here as a bijou pile, since most of it is still in the Midlands.

Multimedia reindeer here.

Lionel Jeffries (1926 –2010)

It's a long clip (well, nearly 6 minutes - that's well beyond our alleged attention span in the Twitter age, isn't it?) but it is, of course, one of the greatest film endings in British cinema, and we owe it all to Lionel, RIP.

Hankies at the ready.

Yeah Baby

Our occasional series of extended disco classics builds into a magnificent library your whole family will enjoy.


This week when you love someone it's natural not demanding.

Ain't that the truth.

Shalamar - 'A Night To Remember' (1982)

Memphis In The Rain

Eddie Floyd - 'Oh, How It Rained' (1971)

London In The Rain

Julie London - 'February Brings The Rain' (1956)

Yeah Baby

Last year they brought us the instant classic fine-cut of new soul loveliness that was 'Cold Game' and now they are back with a record I think I like even more.

You'll be picking it up on 7" vinyl I'm sure, so I'll keep this link live 'for a limited period only', oh yes.

There's an LP coming soon.

Sweet as.

Myron And E with The Soul Investigators - 'It's A Shame' (2009)

Friday Morning, Coming Down

It hasn't exactly been a post frenzy here this week, has it? It's not that I've been busy either - in fact, I have been rather idle. Which means I get morose. And drink too much wine.

I admit I might also have been distracted by my new toy; there's something quite liberating about 1) being able to write anything at all and 2) having to be brief. It would be nice if some more of you set up in there too, but I do understand if you think it's a bit pointless or, as Drew memorably opined, 'for luvvies and the young'.

There's been a lot of music still, of course (playing Sinatra's masterful 'For Only The Lonely' on vinyl last night, e.g.) - and the best new thing I've heard all week will be along later for the Friday night post, if Mondo doesn't get there first.

Meanwhile, I must steel myself; it is our smallest girly's 9th birthday today and she's going to be bringing six of her friends back for tea after school.

Laters x

Notes & Tones

Patrick Heron - Red Painting: July 25 1963

Miles Davis - 'Circle' (1966)

Oh, This Too...

Ice Ice Baby

You know, people often say to me, "DavyH old bean, we appreciate that your occasional series of extended disco classics builds into a magnificent library our whole family will enjoy, but sometimes of a Friday we'd quite fancy a blast of off-kilter Icelandic indie pop from that crazy pixie's old band, especially if you can shove up the not-sung-in-English B-side too".

I am, of course, happy to oblige.

The Sugarcubes - 'Birthday' (1987)
The Sugarcubes - 'Birthday (Icelandic)' (1987)

More Bass

The Clash - 'The Crooked Beat' (1980)

Death Disco

People often say to me, "DavyH old fruit, we know your occasional series of extended disco classics builds into a magnificent library our whole family will enjoy, but sometimes of a Friday we'd quite fancy a blast of the Young Master Lydon in his prime, especially given the recent resurgence of interest in his second most-famous band".

I am happy to oblige.

Hit it Wobble.

Public Image Limited - 'Public Image' (1978)

'Musee Des Beaux Arts'

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

- W.H Auden

(a postscript for Greer).

Another Day On Earth

It's been a strange few days of plans thrown out and random stuff perking away in the rattly old coffee pot of my head.

Getting ahead of myself a bit, since it's still bloody cold out there, I was trying to find out where those lovely lines come from that the steadily-reforming Phil Connors quotes in Groundhog Day

And winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring

and found it was a poem by Coleridge.

And spookily, The Grauniad has given it away in a little free book today.

My head full of Eno (of which more here and, of course, here) I popped this on in the car on the way to collect my big sister who'd unexpectedly arrived in London and found it, in the light (or, I think we should say, darkness) of all the suffering in the news lately, very, very right and, well, moving.

Brian Eno - 'How Many Worlds' (2005)

-----

And she'd been to see the Aged Ps and felt 'things could be better' and that the little screws in the Old Man's mind may have shaken still looser since the last time she, or I, went down.

-----

I'm taking the biggest bag of old baby clothes up the road to this man in a minute; while all those mega-agencies and the mighty US military were noodling about at the airport, him and his little white van got straight through - and he's going back on Friday.

-----

Friday Reggae # 13

No matter what the people say
These sounds leads the way
It's the order of the day from your boss DJ
I King Stitt. 
Hot it from the top, to the very last drop!

He's right you know.

Clancy Eccles (featuring King Stitt) - 'Fire Corner' (1969)

Gumshoe Blues

Re-reading Raymond Chandler at the moment - it's been a while. God I love his writing.

I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living-room that had been closed too long. But the coloured lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. Fifteen stories high, solid marble. There's a boy who really made something out of nothing.

- 'The Little Sister' (1949)

----

Of course the best film of a Chandler novel, the one that truly and most accurately evokes Philip Marlowe's world of all-night drugstores, hired heavies with blackjacks, bent Bay City cops and platinum blondes who are not all they seem is, ironically, the one made, and set, in 1973 - albeit a 1973 shot through with and/or rammed uncomfortably up against Chandler's 40s, thanks in no small measure to John Williams' blue, blue score, and the constantly reiterated title song, with lyrics by Johnny Mercer...no less.

Jack Sheldon - 'The Long Goodbye' (vocal) (1973)
John Williams - 'The Long Goodbye' (vocal*) (1973)
Dave Grusin Trio - 'The Long Goodbye' (instrumental) (1973)

* I think, Clydie King.