Posted in Folk Music, Rock on Oct 25th, 2009 No Comments »
1971 - my third year trying to teach skinheads in East London - and drowning. This is Leon Russell, from the same year, complete with false start. The song, a blues, is by Bob Dylan. The lyrics are typical Dylan whimsy - and don’t mean very much. It is given substance by Russell’s self command and chainsaw vocal. He lags fractionally behind the beat, in that way characteristic of blues and jazz. It’s not something consciously learnt, but absorbed, as by a child, from the sounds of the world around him.
Read Full Post »
One of Lennon and McCartney’s best songs. The opening verse - if verse is what it is (chorus and verse conventions don’t always operate with Lennon and McCartney) - is a touch prosaic, like a preliminary pleading.
‘If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true and help me understand, ‘cos I’ve been in love before and found that love was more than just holding hands.’
In the Beatles’ original recording, John Lennon takes the lead vocal. It’s gritty and unsubtle - there are no dynamics, no rise and fall of emotion - he is not helped by the crude unrhythmical accompaniment of clunking guitars. Things pick up a bit when Paul McCartney takes up the harmony vocal at ‘If I give my heart….’ but overall it is too primitive to do justice to the song. The potentially heartstopping moment when the melody rises at ‘…’cos I couldn’t stand the pain’ is missed.
Musical and emotional subtlety is missing. This is one of their first adult songs, and deserved better. As the words say, we’ve moved on from the teenage puppy love of ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ to something more tentative and fragile. The very insistence of that ‘If…’ is uncertainty, agony of doubt that love might be returned, knowing the real pain of rejection.
Here is Maura O’Connell’s recording of the song. She provides the vocal quality it deserves.
Read Full Post »
Posted in Rock on Mar 26th, 2009 No Comments »
Van Morrison’s 1989 album ‘Avalon Sunset’ is not, it seems, generally regarded as one of his best and tends to get overlooked. I think part of the reason for this is that, like his earlier, and much less worthy, ‘Inarticulate Speech of the Heart’, the theme of religion runs throughout. The opening song, ‘Whenever God Shines His Light’, a duet with Cliff Richard, is the most well known and was issued as a single at the time. I guess the presence of Cliff and his Born-Again Christianism was a bit hard to take for Van Morrison fans. But, though the God theme is there it is not typical of the rest of the album.
The last four songs on the album - ‘Whenever God Shines His Light’, ‘Orangefield’ (a return to the Ireland of his childhood), ‘Daring Night’ and ‘These are the Days’ - are, in my opinion, among the best he has ever done.
The lyrics of ‘These are the Days’ are a bit pretentious, with its religious reference to the ‘one great magician turned water into wine’. But this doesn’t matter much. Van Morrison is best when he is at his most improvisatory, and here he is. Particularly towards the end, when, after the song is sung, he and the female backing group vocalise wordlessly – “na, na, na, na” – female wailing above him gospel fashion.
UPDATE: I have been requested by Web Sherrif to delete the link to this track. The album can be found here.
Read Full Post »
Posted in Rock on Mar 8th, 2009 No Comments »
Joan Armatrading’s recording from 1981 of her own song, “The Weakness in Me”, is about the bewitchment of new love, and its destructive power. Under its sensual pull she becomes self-deceiving, talking away the old love, half aware of what she is doing, witnessing the games and stratagems lovers play, hers as well, without owning up to them.
Why do you come here, and pretend to be just passing by?
And she honestly confesses her intentions.
But I mean to see you and I mean to hold you
She acknowledges the baseness in herself, in her longing for the new love and her treachery to the old, and she can do nothing about it.
This old love has me bound but the new love cuts deep.
One of you has to fall and I need You – and – You.
She is the and held trembling between the poles of old and new. She leaves it in the air. But the hard decision is hers, and hers alone.
Read Full Post »
Posted in Country Music, Rock on Feb 26th, 2009 No Comments »
I mentioned Jackson Browne in passing in my previous post on Francis Cabrel. I then realised I hadn’t posted any of his songs here. To rectify this omission here is my favourite Jackson Browne song, from his album ‘Late for the Sky’. It’s a song about the fleeting and the fragile - youth, joy, life - captured as he watches her dance. Here’s the final verse, on all we have left to do before we die.
‘Into a dancer you have grown, from a seed somebody else has thrown. Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own. And somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go may lie a reason you were alive. But you’ll never know.’
Read Full Post »
Posted in Popular Song, Rock on Feb 3rd, 2009 No Comments »
Buddy Holly died fifty years ago today. He was twenty two years old. He had come over to England the year previous and I remember seeing him on TV, with the Crickets, on the family variety performance show ‘Sunday Night at the London Palladium’. He sang ‘Oh Boy’.
Shortly afterwards I bought my first vinyl LP, ‘The Buddy Holly Story’ on the Coral Record label. I have it here before me. The cover is held together with cellotape, but the record itself is still playable, despite the battering it had over the years on my old Dansette record player.
Buddy Holly was among the first rock’n'roll stars to write their own songs - another was Eddie Cochran, who also died tragically young. Holly’s songs were disarmingly simple - often consisting of no more than three simple chords. But his example - a young man writing songs for people his own age, which they could relate to - gave a lot of singers who came after him the courage to do the same. Lennon and McCartney above all.
In Memoriam.
Read Full Post »
Posted in Popular Song, Rock on Jan 13th, 2009 No Comments »
“Extraordinary how potent cheap music is”.
This is Noel Coward’s celebrated remark about popular music. It’s true too. An instant bridge with others, in our nostalgia for lost youth, lost love, for the good old days.
Here’s mine, with no apology. It was 1965. I was 19, she was too. I was going to love her forever - now I can hardly recall her face.
Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders.
Read Full Post »
Here’s another version of a Lennon and McCartney song that I offer in confirmation of my thesis that their best versions are not by the Beatles. This is Emmy Lou Harris.
Read Full Post »
Posted in Folk Music, Rock on Aug 25th, 2008 No Comments »
An intense, insistent and hypnotic version of this tragic and vicious ballad from Fairport Convention. The late Sandy Denny’s deadpan vocal suits it perfectly. Dave Swarbrick on banshee wailing violin, Richard Thompson’s guitar crackling with electricity.
“I’d rather a kiss from dead Matty’s lips than you with your finery” before being skewered to the wall.
The coda is a long instrumental, an improvised duet between Swarbrick and Thompson, a tribute to their close musical relationship in the band, cranking up the tension.
Read Full Post »
I’m pretty much set against authenticity in music - the idea that the only way to play a piece of music is by replicating the conditions under which it was originally played. So we get whinnying valveless trumpets, catgut wailing violins and any keyboard piece before 1780 played on that instrument guaranteed (like a nail across a blackboard) to set my teeth on edge - the harpsichord. The best version of the Well Tempered Clavier is by Wilhelm Kempff, played on the piano.
By the same token the best versions of songs aren’t always by the originals. I think this is particularly so with Lennon and McCartney songs. In many cases the Beatles did them worst - naive top-of-the-voice vocalising, clanging guitars, primitive bass and Ringo’s thumping-headache drums.
Here’s an example of one done better - Maura O’Connell singing I Will. Heaps better than McCartney.
Read Full Post »
