The Ghost Of Electricity

School's Out For Summer

2009-07-17T10:15:00.013+01:00

Can it really have been a year? Again home come the masks they have made and the pictures they have painted, the pots they have fired and the papier-mâché they have, er, mâchéd. Tears in the playground from the leavers and the teachers who are being left, and flowers and chocolates and things the kids have made for their favourites and six weeks (six weeks!) of holidays begin.

With classic timing, the heatwave has crumbled and the skies are grey.

When I was little I knew we wouldn't be going anywhere exotic, it'd probably be Mid Wales again, and a long journey up the motorway in a Hillman Minx that rattled when it hit speeds above 60mph; for the most part though we'd be at home bombing about on our bikes, wishing the sun would come out so we could go to the beach, waiting for Something To Happen that never did. In the Famous Five they'd be off to Kirrin Island and caught up in a smugglers plot with gypsies, but we had Why Don't You Turn Off Your TV And Do Something Less Boring Instead, Belle & Sebastian and Flash Gordon films from the 30s (in 1975!). The summer holidays never really lived up to the hype, and a week in Tenby or Minehead hardly compensated.

Unless there was crazy golf, of course. Or we went to Butlins and rode the monorail (in the future we would travel everywhere on one of those....).

Happy holidays children.

Alessi Brothers - 'Oh Lori' (1977)

Simplicity Of Expression: Depth Of Thought

2009-07-13T11:40:00.014+01:00

Another vinyl rarity, £1 from my newest charity shop - today!

Funny, since we were talking about Billy Cobham only recently.

If you liked that and this, and Terry Callier's What Color Is Love, you'll dig this, baby.

Billy Cobham - 'Early Libra' (1978)

[Vocalist - Kenneth Kamal Scott. Randy 'American Idol' Jackson on bass - '110 percent']

Yeah Baby

2009-07-10T17:30:00.003+01:00

What's that Davy? New stuff ? On a Friday night?!

Oh yes! because this is so big and crunchy and synthy and funky, and we'll even forgive them for ripping off the Rotary Connection pose since they were decent enough to choose 'I Am The Black Gold Of The Sun' as their 'show and tell' track on Radcliffe & Maconie this week.

Groovy! To the bar!!

The Phenomenal Handclap Band - 'You'll Disappear' (2009)

[TheirSpace]

Doo Wop That Thing

2009-07-09T09:43:00.011+01:00

The Persuasions are an a cappella group who began singing together in Brooklyn, New York in the early 1960s and have gone on to produce many albums covering a wide range of musical genres, yet all filtered through their own four-to-six-part a cappella doo-wop sensibilities. During their major years of recording, to date, they have produced 25 original albums (not including compilations of their material) within a 35-year period, in addition to appearing on numerous recordings by other popular artists. They continue to perform and record on a regular basis, appearing in concert many times each year, and constantly expanding their repertoire to include more current compositions than the "street-corner" rhythm and blues doo-wop on which their style was founded (Wiki).

I've had this LP since my Camden Town rummage days and there are many lovely things on it, but this is the one I always come back to.

Goffin and King at their Brillest, and a fine song for a bright, crisp morning in the city.

The Persuasions - 'Up On The Roof' (1969)

The Pop Clock

2009-07-07T16:43:00.013+01:00

When exactly did cassettes become fetish objects? Just look at that baby...!

So I woke up this morning with 'War Baby' in my head, and then 'Cruel Summer' and 'Forbidden Colours' and I couldn't work out why, until BING! it dawned on me that all of these things were on this tape I made off of the radio Top 40; and when I checked the date they were all in the chart and the music-killing home taping must have occurred, I realised it was at exactly this time of year in 1983.

Kids, the Pop Clock never lies.

(DavyH has done his A Levels; he is hanging out down the beach; he will protest about, but still go on, a final holiday with his parents to Majorca in September before starting college in London in October).

The other things on the tape are: 'Come Live With Me' by Heaven 17 ('I was 37, she was 17' - curses! I'm nearly 44!!!) 'Do It Again/Billie Jean (medley)' by Clubhouse (it's Steely Dan with the diddle-diddly dinga ding guitar bit from Billie Jean plonked in the middle! A mash up before mash ups!) 'Club Tropicana' by Wham! (c'mon!) 'The Crown' by Gary Byrd (Kips!) 'Wherever I Lay My Hat' by Paul Young (erm...) and 'Right Now' by The Creatures (which I don't think I have heard since. And is excellent. In fact, I am so excited about hearing it again that I've just secured an mp3 of it which I present here for your delectation).

As if all of this were not frisson enough, at the end of the tape the not-quite 18 year old me stuck a load of little drum bits from various records together - Lord alone knows why, but it must have taken hours and occasioned a chronic case of pause-button finger.

The quiz-minded and/or terminally bored amongst you may have some fun with it...

Drum bit montage thing by DavyH, aged 17 and three quarters (1983)

And here's Siouxsie and Budgie...

The Creatures - 'Right Now' (1983)

PS: Yes. The cassette label really does say 'an embryonic journey down the acoustic annals of a great Revolving semi-styletto breath...' . I must have had some 60s psych stuff on it before. Cough.

PPS: Oh go on, have a Bananarama too, I won't tell.

Friday Reggae # 12

2009-07-03T09:00:00.002+01:00

It's the Bob Marley record no-one plays!

Which is, on the one hand, a great shame, since it is full of 'conscious' Afro-centric reggae music and mighty rhythms, but also, on the other hand, quite a good thing, since it has not been over-exposed in a thousand 'Bob Marley Bars' from Phuket* to Paphos.

I have been loving it all week @ 28 degrees C.

Bob Marley & The Wailers - 'Zimbabwe' (1979)
Bob Marley & The Wailers - 'Babylon System' (1979)
Bob Marley & The Wailers - 'Ambush In The Night' (1979)

*I actually have been in one here. It was at the end of the beach no-one went to. It was not really very Irie, but possibly they meant well.

Sound D'Afrique

2009-07-02T10:10:00.003+01:00

Five days in a row of 27c + temperatures in London and it's all gone tropical, baby - I have the midge bites to prove it. Obviously this will all end in an almighty storm sometime around Friday, but for now I'm all shorts and sandalled up and walking like a Jamaican (slowly and to an imagined reggae beat - it's the only way to stay cool).

Coincidentally, the eldest daughter has a Caribbean Day at school today; she has taken a coconut, and a steel band are allegedly dropping in later.

Meanwhile, I figured you could use some 'infectious guitar-based Soukous from Zaire' (Democratic Republic Of Congo) from a cassette I ordered from The Observer newspaper 20 years ago (and Sound D'Afrique Vol II, hipsters).

Pablo Lubadika Porthos - 'Madeleina' (1981)

Help with your moves here.

Summer Of Sam

2009-06-29T09:00:00.000+01:00

Swingin' !

Sammy Davis, Jr. - 'Too Darn Hot' (1963)

Remember Him This Way

2009-06-26T08:10:00.005+01:00

What a sorry tale it ended up being; what a talented young man he was.

Summer Soft

2009-06-24T10:49:00.003+01:00

Sort of obsessed with this track at the moment - two songs in one.

The sound of Stevie, the sound of summer.

Stevie Wonder - 'Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)' (1972)

The Right Stuff

2009-06-23T10:15:00.002+01:00

It's the summer of Space, in case you hadn't noticed.

I watched The Right Stuff last night. Don't test me on the names. Sam Shepard plays Chuck Yeager but Alan Shepard was the first American in space; he is played by Scott Glenn, but John Glenn is played by Ed Harris and Scott Carpenter by Charles Frank; Scott Paulin plays Deke Slayton and Scott Wilson plays Scott Crossfield. I think.

The rockets were mostly designed by Nazis.

No wonder I'd finished that bottle of wine before I'd finished the film.

Anyway. Chuck Yeager, whaddaguy: flew faster than the speed of sound with two cracked ribs because he fell off a horse the day before.

Unsurprising that generation's kids all fetched up with flowers in their hair; their Dads sure had the whole macho thing nailed.

Brian Eno - 'Here Come The Warm Jets' (1973)
Bryan Ferry - 'The Right Stuff' (1987)

Friday Reggae # 11

2009-06-19T15:08:00.005+01:00

Three from a record of Mrs H's we certainly won't be car booting; in fact, we've been enjoying it muchly these light June evenings, especially as played on the, ahem, Stanton...

Third World - 'Cold Sweat' (1978)
Third World - 'Cool Meditation' (1978)
Third World - 'African Woman' (1978)

I is well jammy, innit?

Jah bless!

Time In A Bottle

2009-06-17T10:00:00.002+01:00

We went to our first car boot sale as stall holders on Sunday; it wasn't very busy but we did OK.

We liked the man rolling a cigarette who phoned his brother to ask him if he wanted Mrs H's copy of Thin Lizzy Live & Dangerous (£3. I know, some of you would have taken it) and who came back later for the old viola; we liked the nice lady who bought a clutch of the girls' Polly Pockets for her niece and the big bloke with his wife who pumped my hand super-firmly when we agreed on a price for the wooden bathroom cabinet; we liked the whole 'anyone want a cup of tea?' ambience really.

There was a chap at the end selling old bottles, which put me in mind of this one I've had since I was about 12. I like its connection to a very specific place (a small village between Totnes and Dartmouth in Devon). I can't remember where I got it exactly - either at a school jumble sale, or maybe I dug it up, because me and my friend Brian certainly went through a phase of doing that after I got a book on collecting from the library - but it sat on bookshelves and window sills all through my teenage and student years and it's stood behind me now as I'm writing this.

After the boot sale I thought I'd try to find out about the old 'mineral water works' of Harbertonford and W.G Grills & Son, but drew a blank apart from stumbling on this site and in particular this picture, taken in 1965 - the year I was born. It could have been taken in 1865.

Some lines from the last chapter of the Eno boo k leapt out at me as I finished it yesterday.

Sheppard writes about trawling through old photos in Eno's personal archive...

It was difficult to reconcile the neatly side-parted schoolboy Brian, smiling by his father's side in a sunlit back garden in the middle of the last century, with the pouting, futuristic figure in gold lipstick and ziggurat-like platform boots I'd just picked from a fat folder marked matter-of-factly, '1970s'. These contrasting images seemed to speak volumes - a vivid illustration of the chalk and cheese disparity between the predictable, buttoned-up England of the 1950s and the outrageous, liberated 1970s. To have grown up in Britain during the intervening hothouse decades was to have experienced an unprecedented acceleration in social and technological transformation that is almost inconceivable to anyone born after about 1970.

Jim Croce - 'Time In A Bottle' (1973)

Yeah Baby

2009-06-12T13:37:00.005+01:00

A story that started over two years ago with a post from Emmett at the excellent Art Decade (who are celebrating their 1,000th post today in characteristically self-effacing fashion) reached one of those once-in-a-blue-moon, 'my my the gods of vinyl are smiling down on us Centurion' conclusions a few weeks ago in my local Oxfam shop's closing down sale when I picked up this rare and special gem in mint condition for just 75p. You can, I am sure, imagine my surprise and delight.

Today it supplies our track for Friday cocktails and I'm sure you'll find its easy groove, light vocals and typically brilliant Hungarian-inflected jazz guitar conducive to your happy hour(s).

By coincidence, the musical quotation from William DeVaughn's 'Be Thankful For What You Got' at 3 mins 30 links us back again to Massive Attack, who covered the song on 'Blue Lines'.

Garcon, I shall require a beverage.

Gabor Szabo - 'Keep Smilin' (1976)

[More about the genius that was Gabor here ]

A Massive Attack

2009-06-10T10:14:00.001+01:00

It starts with New Agey keyboards before the drum solo with the bubbly synth beneath bursts and then, three minutes in, that 'Safe From Harm' bassline breaks.

Is it jazz? Is it rock? Is it.....prog????

It's 'kin massive, is what it is maaaan.

Billy Cobham - 'Stratus' (1973)

Aftermath

2009-06-08T17:30:00.006+01:00

I couldn't face posting earlier. I took the morning off and went to the Courtauld Gallery to look at the paintings and I had a mooch in the record shops and a wander about town and I tried not to think about the nearly quarter of a million people in the North and North West who voted BNP last Thursday, and tried not to watch the men in suits on the TV today who start off talking so smoothly but become so angry so quickly and the skinhead thugs behind them that say nothing but everything with their dead eyes and all the hate crimes this poison fuels and perpetuates and 'excuses' and the Great British Public on the messageboards unapologetically outing themselves as supporters and 'proud of it'.

Not In My Name.

Nitin Sawhney - 'Bengali Song' (1996)

Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before

2009-06-05T00:01:00.008+01:00

This is Chris Packham, broadcaster, naturalist and new presenter of four nights a week, three week, seasonal live BBC family nature programme Springwatch.

Chris is a little different from sexagenarian predecessor Bill 'The Goodies' Oddie. Chris was born in 1961. He has a quiff, and two pet poodles called Itchy and Scratchy. He likes The Jesus and Mary Chain. And The Smiths.

And seemingly without the knowledge of his production crew and co-presenters, Chris has bet a friend that he can slip a Smiths song title into every episode of Springwatch.

So: he informs his co-presenter Kate 'looks more like a Chris Rea fan' Humble that she doesn't get any points for correctly predicting the date the baby blackbirds would fledge because 'You Just Haven't Earned It Yet Baby'; he describes a male bustard in courtship plumage as resembling a 'Vicar In A Tutu'; he says that with the warbler chick "it really is the case that 'Bigmouth Strikes Again' "; and he wonders, in a solemn discussion about the global threat to bees, if indeed 'The Queen Is Dead'.

He is also a t-shirt connoisseur...

....and has my daughters wondering 'why Daddy is laughing again'.

Genius, genius, genius.

Can we please make him Prime Minister?

The Rutles - 'Let's Be Natural' (1978)

A Kiss To Start The Morning Off

2009-06-03T06:23:00.002+01:00

A London Lee Picture - respect!

Doh! I'm mad, mad, bonkers busy taking sick-makingly early trains out of St Pancras to Nottingham and back to London and up and out again tomorrow and just loony bonkers mad busy.

Still...at least I might get to finish that cracking Eno book in transit.

Here's a song for hot weather fading in and out and out and in, and gone, gone, gone on the train from Platform 3 with a snatched croissant and an Innocent smoothie.

Maaan, I love this one.

Stevie Wonder - 'Summer Soft' (1976)

High, High, High, High There

2009-06-01T10:30:00.001+01:00

And Scorchio it continues.

This is something I used to play a lot on happy Hospital Radio Nine when things got sticky on the gritty streets of Tooting.

My vinyl copy of Sly's Greatest Hits is a tad worse for wear, so have this nice clean mp3 instead.

Wear sunscreen!

Sly & The Family Stone - 'Hot Fun In The Summertime' (1969)

Your Weekend Outlook

2009-05-29T13:13:00.002+01:00

Whit Sun

2009-05-27T11:12:00.009+01:00

I took the girlies to Littlehampton yesterday (the 'real, sandy beach Daddy') while Mrs H selflessly finished the gloss work on the stairs (= true).

We were struck by this cafe on the East Beach and well done I thought to the I imagine not especially radical local council for commissioning it; and lo, it turns out to be incredibly famous and in one of those thrilling coincidences we love in life is even in the paper today. It has a posh restaurant inside, but we mistook the long line of people waiting to be seated for a queue for takeaway chips, so we passed it by for the hotdog stand further down - by the lighthouse, which we also rather liked.

[Sorry, rubbishy picture from my phone - no competition here for Dane].

We came back tired and sunsplashed, with wet jeans and a plastic bucket full of shells, as is the tradition.

And the bannisters looked lovely.

Alison Statton & Spike - 'Seaport Town' (1994)

Meanwhile...

2009-05-22T21:06:00.020+01:00

Bless 'im.

Five of your Anglo-Irish decades old today.

"History" Stephen said, "Is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" (James Joyce - Ulysses)

Morrissey - 'Irish Blood, English Heart' (2004)

Bronx Holiday Weekend

2009-05-22T15:31:00.004+01:00

So, in the end Dean and I kind of lost touch; maybe it was his constant touring, maybe it was my insouciance. Still, I have no regrets. I look back on our time together fondly, but I accept I must now move on. Only occasionally I hear his songs on the radio and feel a tinge of sadness at what could have been.

Feckit. Let's rap! (old school stylee).

The snippet of the NYC street trader at the start of this ("Look at the bargains over here ladies") is also at the start of 'If I Was Your Girlfriend' by Prince. Do I get a prize?

Spyder D - 'Big Apple Rappin' (12") (1980)

I Have No Alibis

2009-05-20T11:30:00.013+01:00

Like many great dramas it begins in medias res.

What is it that she has said as we join the song? It can't have been a direct reference to 'Lisa', that comes later - perhaps a suggestion though that he'd rather be with 'someone' else?

Ha! Changing the subject to be catty about her mother's hardly going to help, is it!

Did he see Lisa? Yes he saw Lisa. Is that why he's angry? He wasn't angry.

Lisa's life is in disarray. She still goes around as if she is always stumbling off a cliff. And yet...

Does he still want her?

(Why won't he give a straight answer.....?)

-----

Shurely a shoe-in for Best Worst record of all time.

Magnificent to sing, I can vouch, when you are very, very drunk.

Co-vocalist Denise Marsa, uncredited on the single and Top Of The Pops, now runs her own PR firm and 'writes original music for films and TV'.

Dean Friedman tours Britain in July.

Lisa's whereabouts are unknown.

Dean Friedman - 'Lucky Stars' (1978)

I've Seen How You Sparkle

2009-05-17T11:00:00.005+01:00

Aretha Franklin - 'If Ever I Would Leave You' (1963)