Boredom got me wondering how far I could get – I stopped at 24, had to dip into jazz for 19 and 22 was a bit of a stretch (it was a promo piece Dean Wareham recorded for an amp manufacturer).
Nina Nastasia – One Way Outballboy – I Need Two Hearts
Kathryn Williams – Three
The American Analog Set – First of Four
The Go-Betweens – Five Words
Lee Hazlewood – Six Feet of Chain
Luna – Seven Steps to Satan
The Beatles – Eight Days a Week
The Bats – Nine Days
Frank Black – Ten Percenter
Jack Frost – Number Eleven
Michio Kurihara – The Wind’s Twelve Quarters
Big Star – ThirteenBeat Happening – Fourteen
Standard Fare – Fifteen
The Decemberists – Sixteen Military Wives
Sex Pistols – Seventeen
The Eighteenth Day of May – Eighteen Days
Andrew Hill – Flight Nineteen
Dr. Feelgood – Twenty Yards Behind
Electrelane – Tram 21
Dean Wareham – 22 Minutes
Luna – 23 Minutes in Brussels
Dusty Springfield – Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa
The Wikipedia entry for the children’s song I Can Sing a Rainbow importantly states that…
…despite the name of the song, not all the colours mentioned are actually colours of the rainbow, and they are not presented in order of the visible light spectrum
No results found for site:britannica.com “i can sing a rainbow”
Last week I saw Anna Calvi and Throwing Muses on consecutive nights at The Shepherds Bush Empire. Anna and Kristin made a noticeably different choice of footwear – one chose comfortable, sensible shoes and looked cool, one chose rather ridiculous shoes and looked awkward and quite, quite silly…
Neither picture is from the London show – but their chosen footwear was very similar
I spent Friday and Saturday trying to help dad clear out his garage… in the garage is packed up a great deal of my past and poking around in that is sometimes difficult. To be honest a lot of my fave metal bands I do still love but there are a few areas that make me cringe… here’s a selection. As a defence rather than just post the clips as usual, I’ll try and explain how they came about!
I’ve included video clips but seriously suggest you give them a miss!
#1 Spider
Paul and Ju were huge Status Quo fans… and so were the band Spider, we went to see them… a lot, for some reason they got signed to a major label who poured money at them, but they were so very very ordinary.
#2 Tank
Actually Tank were OK, they had a fine pedigree (Algy Ward played on one of The Damned’s finest albums) and their first album had a few gems on, the second was passable… but then came… This Means War – a pro-Falklands War concept album – I guess I can probably stop there! I have a picture disc copy of the album!
#3 The Tygers of Pan Tang
This was a surprise… I don’t remember being a particularly big fan but two albums a pile of singles suggest otherwise…
#4 Two albums with sleeve notes by Garry Bushell
Oh god! This is the hardest to write – The Beerdrop Explodes had a few gems… but also Bushell sleeve notes and a track by fucking Jim Davidson puts it very firmly on the embarrassing pile. Oi Oi That’s Yer Lot was even less good! This is one of The Beerdrop Explodes highs:
#5 More than one Yes album!
Yes were clearly a band I have been desperately trying to surpress – A year or so I would have claimed to have never liked them and owned nothing by them but then I heard some tracks from the Yes Album (possibly on the Freak Zone) and not only knew them but was able to sing along to them. In the garage at my dad’s I found more Yes albums!
#6 The Jackie Lynton Band
Jacko was a classic pub singer – he had a bit of a pedigree having been one of Savoy Brown‘s vocalists back in the day but by the time we were seeing him in the early 80s he was very much a archetypal blues/rock pub singer… but funny – very rude, sometimes tasteless but often just plain funny.
We saw him literally hundreds of times around Surrey and South London over the course of a a couple of years – he was fun live and we got drunk listening. I found albums, singles and a couple of books of obscene poetry.
Adam listens to a lot of Nirvana but it took a while before I realised thar Love Buzz was not an original but actually a cover of a Shocking Blue song (just like Venus wasn’t a Bananarama original!) – and you know that it’s better than the original… mostly because Nirvana did it pretty straight. Sadly there’s no video on YouTube of them performing it – but this is ok too…
Shocking Blue – Love Buzz (with Louise Brooks)
Nirvana – Love Buzz
And here’s a bit more Shocking Blue…
Shocking Blue – Venus
And then a couple of new Shocking Blue best friends
One of my most beautiful and lump-in-throat inducing discoveries of the Internet age was coming across (10 years ago or so) this recording of Sandy Denny playing a live (radio) show at Ebbets Field in Denver in 1973 – until I heard this Sandy was a beautiful voice and a sad, sad story. Afterwards she was a sweet and funny and very real person with a beautiful voice and a sad, sad story.
I was teased at the weekend with the prospect of a clip of Sandy that I’d not seen before, there’s so few clips of Sandy that the prospect of something new was quite exciting, alas it turns out that it was the clip of North Star Grassman and The Ravens that shows up periodically (along with the clips of Late November and Crazy Lady Blues from the same show). But it inspired me to have a long overdue Sandy search on YouTube and I came across this (sadly just one minute) clip of her playing White Dress with Fairport Convention.
