Current listening: Bella Hardy “Young Edmund”

Wow. Amazing. Bella Hardy was on the Folk at the Proms on the telly and BBC Radio 3 yesterday. And about time too. She got a bit of support from Mike Harding last year but not as much coverage as she should have done. Her album was one of my favourite Christmas presents of last year. And her home is just across the yard from my sisters house. So the album has been getting further airings since yesterday. I do hope this results in even more success. She is playing the folk festival circuit later in the summer so I should catch her live then.  Bellowhead were fucking ace as well. As usual.

Today (Three days ago in fact)

Heading down the garden first thing on Saturday morning to collect eggs and feed chickens, dampness still in the air but the morning filled with the brightness of a sun already risen and just about to make its presence known above the trees of neighbouring gardens.  Four screeching black slashes in the air screamed past about  five metres above my head.  The first swallows of the year.  I saw a single swift above the fields on the way home from work over a week ago but this was the first sighting on home territory. A heartlifting way to start a bank holiday weekend and a definite signal that summer is on it’s way if not already here. I still wonder at the fact that these small birds were hawking across the skies above African plains and deserts just weeks, in fact days ago. By Sunday evening the skies above my house were filled with tens of them, now a fixture until at least early September.

And further evidence by the way that the beech hedge immediately in front of the house on Thursday of last week was still completely covered in last years crisp brown leaves but by Sunday morning had been reclothed with the luminous lime green glow of the new season. The freshness of the trees and plants at this time of year is hard thing to beat for lifting the spirits.

 

Current Listening: Leonard Cohen “Who By Fire”

Listening to Leonard is so depressing.

You can’t help but reflect upon how inarticulate and untalented and imperfect 99.9 % of other poets and musicians are. Maybe apart from Bobby Dylan and Joni Mitchell.

Mind you it’s music for the head isn’t it and there always has to be music for the feet to complement that. 

Bring on Rodgers Edwards.

 

Shuffleathon 2007. Part 9

Norma Waterson - Reply to Joe Haines

Joe Haines was a journalist who wrote, to quote the sleeve notes, “an iniquitous article …on the subject of Freddie Mercury’s disclosure that he was HIV positive (indeed that he had full blown AIDS) and which the Daily Mirror saw fit to print”.

This is a song written by Norma’s late sister Lal, all of whose songs were some of the most beautiful skewed lullabies written in the last fifty years. Occupying a middle ground of somehere between Syd Barrett, rural English folk and Leonard Cohen, if that can be imagined. There are far too few of them but those that there are are shining gems.

Norma Waterson does of course have one of the great voices of our age and of any age. Shes a modern day living breathing Piaf or Caruso and I wish more people would see it.

A sad song but very beautiful.

Current listening: Daft Punk “Superheroes”

Discovery was such a fantastic album wasn’t it ?

Anger management: Waste waste fucking waste

Half of me is relieved to see common sense being promoted, half of me despairs at the fact that it is necessary.  Here. The only food which I ever throw out of my kitchen, literally, is salad that has gone over a bit and that goes to the hens so ends up as eggs eventually. Leftovers can be next nights tea or get frozen for a work night when I don’t fancy cooking.  Is it just me that behaves logically ?  Maybe my parents drummed the philosophy of “waste not want not” into me a little too much as a child but it does my head in. We don’t need it. The planet doesn’t need it.

The same goes for the likes of the idiot who told me earlier in the week that “they put the dishwasher on every day no matter how full or empty it is in case it starts to smell”.

Are we breeding a world of complete idiots or do people just not give a shit anymore in this odious meme I want culture ?

There. That feels better. 

Then I get even more depressed seeing how full of hate I am.  All those evil thoughts about wishing an armageddon on the west just to make people realise what they don’t need and what is important.  It’s not love is it.

Shuffleathon 2007. Part 8

Shack - Finn, Sophie, Bobby and Lance

“What we see and what we seem, are but a dream, a dream within a dream”

I bought the “I Know You Well” twelve inch single for fifty pence from Our Price in Manchester’s Arndale Centre sometime as the eighties turned into the nineties and the Mondays and the Roses ruled the world. It was sublime, although it could have easily been mistaken as a Johnny Come Lately Stone Roses copy. But Shack had been raiding the nineteen sixties for years before then, ever since their Pale Fountains days with their hints of Love and Burt Bacharach. I liked the Pale Fountains and even bought their second single “Thank You” and in particular loved its wonderful soft focus b-side “Meadow Of Love”. But in retrospect I feel the Paleys were a mere rehearsal for what Shack were going to be. The first album Zilch was a sort of halfway house between the Pale Fountains sound and Shack proper but from then on they were motoring. Or not as the case may be what with lost albums, drug addictions and a baffling lack of commercial success. Their time nearly came in the mid nineties when their record company tried to tag them on to the Britpop phenomenon and while “HMS Fable” did reasonably well, it didn’t gain them the size of audience which was being enjoyed by the likes of The Verve or Oasis, which should have been their due. Maybe they were just too real and grounded for the 1990s. Of their six albums released since 1990, three are perfect. These are Waterpistol, The Magical World Of The Strands and On the Corner of Miles and Gil. My favourite is the The Magical World.. which was released under the name Michael and The Strands and is just a beautiful idyllic hazy dreamy summers day folk record.

Now I am the first person to admit that I know nothing about Home and Away. Apparently this song refers to characters from the long running Aussie soap. This shuffling, murmured song is so beautiful. It could easily be off The Magical World … but is from their last full studio release “On the corner of Miles and Gil” which was a return to form after the patchy “Here’s Tom With The Weather”. It sorts of sounds like some strung out beatnik poet landing in the world of daytime television and trying to make head or tail of it. It also namechecks “Dick and Judy”. ‘Tis good.

Current listening: Prince “Sometimes it snows in April”

It has been snowing in England the last few days. Not in any very major way but it is still pretty late in the year for it to happen. As I look out of the window smallish flakes are gently drifting down onto the bright pink of the viburnum bodnantense and canary yellow of the jasminum nudiflorum. Strange bedfellows. The cloches in the vegetable patch have been topped with a duvet of snow, the lettuce snug underneath. This song comes to mind for obvious reasons. It has always been one of my favourite tracks by Prince, from his glory days of the late eighties and is a song that frequently ends up swilling around my head, usually for no apparent reason. The start sometimes sounds like it is about to turn into some kind of raga with its eastern tones and then it turns into this beautiful piano and guitar acoustic lament. The first time I heard “Bed Of Roses” by The Lilac Time back in 1989 it immediately put me in mind of “Sometimes it snows in April” and since then the two songs have been inextricably linked in my head. I can’t hear one without thinking of the other. Maybe its the chords used or maybe its my imagination. I think there are sections in each song which are very similar. They certainly do sound good back to back. Ten minutes of real beauty.

Shuffleathon 2007. Part 7

Midlake - Roscoe

Such a good song. Yes, it wears it’s Fleetwood Macisms on its sleeve, but it manages to sound both beautifully evocative of a certain 1970s scene and completely at home in 2006 as well. The lyrics are as far removed from the Mac as you could get. The album this comes from (”The Trials of Van Occupanther”) is great too. They remind me of Grandaddy in their looking backward at the same time as looking forward.

Current Listening: Vampire Weekend

I automatically had a negative reaction to this when first listened to a few weeks ago. The African influences are there but it sounds like Vampire Weekend recreated rough sketches of what they heard on some African records without studying the actual method of creating those sounds. The music sounds rough and half baked without the smooth flow of the original African sounds which have been borrowed. And this put me off. I revisited it this week whilst driving, putting my original thoughts to the back of my mind, and now I think it’s a great record. I still think that the backing is vague, like a wooden version of something which should be made of marble, and they shouldn’t perhaps overplay those African steals, but if you ignore that the music still sounds good, in a noughties post punk kind of way. The songwriting is great and the lyrics and song structures put me in mind of Jonathan Richman. The more you listen to it the more the soul of these songs shows through. Anyhow, now a firm favourite.