A farewell bon mot

"My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm's edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss."

Edvard Munch (1863-1944)

Oh, I know that feeling.

Great Drinking Songs (41 &42)

I find something eerily nostalgic about the popular music of the 1930s and 1940s. The period of my parents' childhood was still dominating the national consciousness in the UK when I was a kid in the 1970s. I suppose I got my first introduction to the music hall comedy double act Flanagan and Allen from the long-running BBC wartime comedy series Dad's Army, about the ramshackle volunteer defence force of the Home Guard, which used their song Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler? as its theme music. I later discovered their Underneath The Arches, and grew even fonder of that. It had been their signature song throughout most of their long career, written by Bud Flanagan in 1932. It really shouldn't be possible to write such a beautiful little song, such a cheery and upbeat song about homelessness. And yet, underneath the jauntiness of the tune, the hopelessness is still there. It's always struck a particularly personal chord with me. Although I haven't often been forced to sleep rough, I have - and continue to - come unpleasantly close to it. I always feel that precariousness in my life. But I try to regard my straitened material circumstances with Stoic indifference, to find crumbs of comfort wherever I can. "Underneath the arches, we dream our dreams away."

But that's just a quirky personal favourite of mine.

For the final post, the final song in this series, there can only be one choice: Ol' Blue Eyes singing My Way - the perfect balance of maudlin nostalgia and defiant self-assertion, a timeless pub singalong. Take it away, Frank.

But I fear Francis Albert is just a bit too mellow for my last video posting. Nasty, demented, sad Sid Vicious tearing the song apart is rather more appropriate to the current air of millennial despair.

So long, everyone. Thank you for reading (and commenting) over the years. And please continue to do so; I will still be monitoring the comments and replying, just not adding new posts after today (although I might sneak a few backdated ones in here and there - well, especially here and here - so keep your eyes peeled!).

A farewell treat: more 'hoopy' basslines

Although I am hoping to still add a few more 'Top Five' music posts retroactively to my 'Music Week' at the start of this month (my grandiose plans for that were much disrupted by my VPN and Internet connection going on the fritz), this will officially be my final music post before the end of the world on Friday. Well, OK, the penultimate music post; I've got one more lined up.

Today, we have a long planned conclusion to my Great Basslines series, a further roundup of what I have come to call 'hoopy' basslines, where the playing is more varied and intricate, rather than just propelling the song along.

Since this is the last entry in the series, I should perhaps apologise for some of my more egregious oversights in compiling it. I just haven't had time to consider jazz, for example. Or reggae, which is noted for its deceptively tricky lilting basslines. And, while I am aware that there are some outstanding exponents of the bass in the realms of funk and soul, these are not areas of music that I know very much of. I'm sure I probably could have had at least one 'Top Five' just of James Brown numbers, but I'm not famililar enough with his oeuvre (oh, go on, then - have a little blast of William 'Bootsy' Collins playing bass for him on Soul Power, from a great live show in Zaire in 1974). Michael Jackson is perhaps an even more glaring omission: songs like Billie Jean, Thriller, The Way You Make Me Feel and Smooth Criminal are certainly amongst the strongest and most recognisable basslines recorded (apparently it was Louis Johnson who played for him on the Off The Wall and Thriller albums, and Nathan East on Bad - although he is mysteriously not credited in Wikipedia entries on the individual songs). But, while I can't help but like such hooky songs, I never liked MJ; even before all the weirdness, the plastic surgery disasters and the paedophilia allegations, even when he was a little kid, there was something about him that just creeped me out. And that feeling got worse when he relaunched himself as an adult star; I never could stand that high-pitched voice, and his attempt to reinvent himself as a rock'n'roll bad boy - all that swagger and sneer, and the crotch-grabbing - struck me as ludicrous. So - sorry, Jackson fans, it has been a conscious prejudice of mine to leave him out of this series.

Having got that out of the way, here we go....

Another Top Five 'Hoopy' Basslines

5)  This Is Not A Love Song

We had Public Image Ltd in the first of these 'hoopy' selections as well, but you can't have too much of a good thing. I confess, though, I had thought this was still the great Jah Wobble playing. Music Mike pointed out in the comments below that he left the band after their third album, and this, from their fifth, actually has Louis Bernardi on bass. [The video for the album version is here.]

4)  Pusherman

Joseph 'Lucky' Scott is widely considered to be one of the greatest of all bass players, and this Curtis Mayfield track (from his score for the 1972 blaxploitation classic, SuperFly) may be his finest hour.

3)  War Pigs

We've had Black Sabbath in this series before as well, with Paranoid being one of the essential bass 'chuggers'. On this song, though, especially in the introductory section, Terry Butler isn't just the band's engine, but really gets to show off what a technically accomplished bass player he is. [This is a great live performance from 1970. You can listen to the album version instead here.]

Trivia note: There's an interesting coincidence here. Terry Butler is, of course, invariably known by his nickname 'Geezer'; and it just so happens that Jah Wobble chose Memoirs Of A Geezer as the title for his autobiography. And what a great title that is!

2)  Taxman

A special treat for Music Mike, who has been a regular comment-thread sparring partner of mine over the last year or so and was the main inspiration for me getting started on this series... and is also perhaps the world's biggest Beatles fan, and thus regularly complains about my omission of Paul McCartney from this series so far. I've been delaying this post largely for the fun of antagonising him.

And just to antagonise him some more, I kept Macca out of the top spot here. What do we have instead?

1)  The Mayor of Simpleton

I've never been a particular fan of XTC, but they did produce some undeniably hooky tunes, and Colin Moulding's bass playing always commanded attention. A friend reintroduced me to this number a couple of years ago, and it has become a favourite.

Let the revelry commence!

Today, December 17th, is the Roman feast day of the Saturnalia - their major midwinter holiday, and the beginning of a week or so of merriment (well, 3 or 5 days of continuous celebrations at various times, but a full 7 days at its best, taking it up to and beyond the solstice). Time to start whooping it up!

I've always liked the pagan festivals (defying the cruel dark of winter with ebullient merrymaking), much preferring them to the commercialized shmaltziness of the Christian holidays.

OK, this is actually La Jeunesse de Bacchus by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a scene of riot from Greek legend rather than a Roman Saturnalia party; but you get the idea - Classical debauchery, yay!

Great Drinking Songs (40)

I can't believe I hadn't posted this before. Could have sworn I did years ago. Ah well, better late than never.

Here's The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me); Tom Waits letting his hair down with one of his more humorous numbers - although the imagery is as clever as always ("the newspapers were fooling, and the ashtrays have retired"): the greatest lyricist of our times, and also, as he demonstrates here, a comedy genius.

This is a marvellous 1977 performance from Fernwood Tonight, a short-lived spoof of a talk show on a local TV station that starred Fred Willard and Martin Mull as an inept pair of presenters. These are two major comic talents, but Tom more than holds his own with them.

You can also listen to the original version of the song from his 1976 Small Change album here (one of my very favourite albums of his, one that I played incessantly during my last year at university).

And this is an inspired rambling riff on the number from a Dublin concert in about 1981, later released on the Bounced Checks anthology album.

I love Tom!

Holiday spirit

In recent years I have found - with a vague sense of shame - that my favourite 'Christmas songs' are these two bad taste classics from the South Park Christmas special.

Here are Satan and Adolf getting festive down below.

And here's Mr Garrison displaying his cultural sensitivity.

A final 'unsuitable' role model - Fred Dibnah

Fred was an iconic figure for Brits of my generation, an ordinary bloke improbably catapulted to fame on national TV. 

He was a steeplejack from Lancashire, who made a particular speciality of demolishing Victorian factory chimneys. He complained that he didn't get much of this work, because he was much more expensive than standard demolition by dynamite, but he found a niche for himself because his more old-fashioned method - knocking a hole in the base of the structure and building a huge bonfire in it - could drop a chimney with pinpoint accuracy, and no risk of collateral blast damage if there were other buildings nearby. In very confined spaces where it was not practicable to topple a chimney at all, he would knock them down, as he said, "a brick at once", building a scaffold platform around the the top of the chimney and painstakingly knocking out one layer of bricks after another with a hammer.

It was fascinating to watch him go about this work, partly for the vicarious thrill of being so far above the ground and the spectacular views this afforded. However, what was even more compelling was the absolute mastery of his trade that Fred displayed, and the evident passion that he felt for it. It helped that he was also an intelligent man, deeply knowledgeable about and respectful of the central role his area of the country had played in the Industrial Revolution. And his hobby was restoring vintage steam engines! That alone might have landed him a TV series, even if his day job hadn't involved working at such giddying heights. [His own engine, the beauty below, recently sold at auction for nearly a quarter of a million pounds.]

Fred's almost childlike enthusiasm and his wry wit made him a natural for TV. A brief interview on local news had brought him to the attention of a documentary maker, who made him the subject of a 50-minute-long programme on the BBC in about 1978. That was such a success that a year or two later it was followed up with a six-part series. Others followed. And in his later years, he became a presenter, fronting several series on BBC2 about Britain's industrial history.

He was a bit of a stereotype of the northern working man - more than fond of a pint of beer, speaking with a broad Bolton accent, a flat cap permanently on his head as if welded there (and so impregnated with grime and grease from his beloved steam engine that he once joked it had a dangerously low flash point), he even kept a whippet, I think - but this too was rather engaging, because entirely unaffected. There was never any suspicion that he was playing to the cameras. This rollicking, genial man-child was who he was.

Fred was possibly the most enviable man I've ever seen: supremely self-confident, utterly at ease with himself. His shows were a pure joy to experience, because he so obviously loved his job, and loved his life. That's not something we encounter often enough, on TV or anywhere else.

Here's a clip from a tribute to Fred made after his death a few years ago, including the famous chimney toppling scene from the climax of that first documentary about him.

Great Love Songs (40)

I think The Wind Knows My Name was my favourite of the Mark E. Nevin songs from the superb Fairground Attraction album First Of A Million Kisses. The theme of restlessness and inconstancy strikes a particular chord with me. I don't think that's been an issue in my love life. Well, not on my side, anyway. Well, not directly; I suppose that if one is unsettled in the rest of one's life, it makes it difficult to form stable and lasting relationships. It's hard for a nomad to make a nest-builder happy, and vice versa.

One of the great songs of farewell, anyway. And so this seems an especially appropriate choice, as I prepare to move on from this blog. And, hopefully, from Beijing. And maybe even from drinking. Really. Lots of changes happening in my life at the moment.

Here's the lovely Eddi Reader singing The Wind Knows My Name. She might be the only singer to get three mentions in this series; I've posted on her previously here and here. [You can listen to the album version here.]

Great Drinking Songs (39)

Mention of Chumbawamba last week prompted me to play the whole of their Tubthumping album - one of the greatest, if not the greatest of the '90s - all the way through for the first time in quite a while, and I was bowled over by it afresh. It is amazingly good from beginning to end; the enormous titular hit was about the weakest thing on it.

This, Scapegoat, the track that ends the album, is my personal favourite. Not the best song (that's probably Drip, Drip, Drip or Good Ship Lifestyle), but it's got such energy about it, it's an irresistible singalong. And I tend to think of this as my No. 1 'China song' - rather too painfully apposite for a country in which buck-passing is a national pastime. [This looks like a fan video; a crude compilation of video clips, mostly of unfortunate mishaps. Mildly amusing. And at least it's a good quality sound recording. There don't seem to be any live performance videos of this.]

Unexpected tastes

For a final entry in this 'Music Week' (although I'm still playing catch-up after a week of problematic Internet access, hoping to insinuate a few more posts into empty slots earlier in the week - so keep an eye out lower down the page), I thought I'd review some of my slightly more left-field enthusiasms, the musical predilections that people tend to find a bit surprising about me.

A Top Five Unexpected Musical Weaknesses

5)  Early rock'n'roll

And the cheesier, the better! I'm not quite sure when I developed this vice. I suppose I must have had some exposure over the radio when I was a kid, but there was none of this good stuff in my parents' record collection (their tastes were very, very middle-of-the-road). I imagine George Lucas' American Graffiti must have been an important influence; that soundtrack album was probably one of the first (of many) '50s/'60s anthologies I acquired over the years. The Shangri-Las Leader of the Pack epitomises all that is so wonderful - and terrible - about this area of music: cheesy as all hell, yet an utterly irresistible singalong. Here's a 1964 TV performance of the song - ropey sound quality, but worth it for the visuals, especially the hilarious depiction of Johnny the motorcycle rebel. [You can listen to the album version here.]

4)  Henry Rollins

How can anyone not like Henry Rollins? He's so loveably crazy! But sensitive and literate with it. I like quite a lot of American music out at the more punk-ish edge of things (Dead Kennedys a favourite during my college days), but Rollins' work has more depth to it than most of these. Here's the Rollins Band doing Next Time. [Audio only, unfortunately. You can also check out a live video here: terrible picture quality, but a fun performance.]

3)  Country & Western

I mentioned my susceptibility to this yesterday (although I try to keep it hidden around my buddy The British Cowboy, because he proselytises a little too hard). It can be trite and cheesy, yes. But accessibility is not a bad thing. And, thanks to its folk roots, it is distinguished more than most other genres by its tunefulness and its lyrical craft. Hey, beyond just liking C&W, I actually like Canadian C&W. Well, I had a lot of exposure when I lived in Toronto for a year back in the '90s. And the dedicated TV channel there (CMT, I think it's called - Country Music Television) is way better than its American counterpart GAC. This, She's Got The Kind Of Heart That Breaks by Chris Cummings, is one of those earworm songs that got permanently lodged in my head during that year of watching CMT (The Cowboy probably wouldn't even admit this to the C&W fold; too poppy for his taste!). And it's a lovely little video too - a bit of a Gregory's Girl thing going on, with the goofy boys bewitched by the pretty girl who also happens to have superior skills on the hockey rink (so Canadian: they really are all obsessed with ice hockey!). [It's a pity it's such dreadful picture quality (transcribed from a VCR??), but this seems to be all that's available on YouTube at the moment; and likely to be pulled shortly because the record company are such fascists about their videos. As a back-up, here's a nice live performance from 2008.]

2)  African music

Like most Brits of my generation, I got my introduction to this field through the wonderful Sowetan township sounds that Paul Simon incorporated into his Graceland and Rhythm Of The Saints albums in the mid-1980s. That led me to start checking out some compilations of '70s and '80s township bands, as well as, of course, the wonderful Ladysmith Black Mambazo choir who had performed with Simon. A little later, Peter Gabriel's Real World record label started introducing me to people like Youssou N'dour, Geoffrey Oryema, Daby Touré, and the Kenyan nyatiti master Ayub Ogada. And a guy I became friendly with while backpacking around Fiji in the early '90s later sent me a CD of Missa Luba, another tremendous choral record by the Muungano National Choir of Kenya. However, the fountainhead of modern African music - as I only started to discover in the later '90s, not long before his death - was Fela Kuti, the mercurial Nigerian who pioneered the 'Afrobeat' sound, a heady brew of jazz, funk and psychedelia infused with native African rhythms. Here's one of his great instrumentals, Expensive Shit.

And here's a live performance from some time back in the '70s. [You should also check out this great little excerpt from a 1971 documentary about him, shot by legendary drummer Ginger Baker.]

But the top spot today goes to....

1)  Michelle Shocked

I'm sorry - I'm an über-fan. I was completely blown away by her 1988 debut Short Sharp Shocked, and have bought everything else of hers I can get my hands on since. I saw her play live at the Apollo Theatre in Oxford (unaccountably renamed the New Theatre a few years ago) round about 1990, and it was one of the most enthralling shows I've seen (actually, not wonderful all the way through; she was experimenting with a 'big band' sound that didn't really suit her, and wasn't entirely winning over the audience; but then there was an interlude in the middle where the band left the stage and she played three or four songs solo on her guitar - and that was a shivers-down-the-spine experience). She is, I think, possibly the greatest female singer-songwriter of my generation - and certainly the ballsiest, the most politically engaged.

This song, Come A Long Way, is a particular favourite of mine, one that I often play to pep myself up before heading out for the evening. The beautiful tune gives it a very upbeat feel, although the subject - riding around the soulless streets of Los Angeles all day on her motorcycle to try to avoid having it repossessed - is actually rather downbeat.

An autobiographical anecdotal postscript:  In a bar I used to drink at quite a lot during my Oxford days, the student Beer Cellar in New College, they had an entire Shangri-Las album. This was just after CD jukeboxes had started to appear (so, I suppose it must have been during the early '90s, when I was working back in Oxford for a while, rather than when I was an undergraduate in the '80s). I wasn't a member of this college, but a mate of mine had been the elected student Bar Steward there for a while, and I'd hung out drinking with him so often that most of the staff had got to recognise me - and come to assume that I was a member of the college (it was stricter than most in trying to limit access to members only). I was still able to get away with this four or five years later, when I started hanging out there again - this time, in pursuit of a girl! On one occasion, I even managed to persuade them to grant admittance to two of my Oxford Union drinking buddies of the time, passing them off as my father and my younger brother - a somewhat implausible blag, since their ages were ten years either side of mine. But I digress....

Yes, I was fascinated to discover a whole Shangri-Las album - none of which I'd ever heard before, apart from Leader of the Pack, of course. I wasn't sufficiently fond of the group to check out many of the other songs, though. And other punters in the bar were apt to be intolerant even of my frequent selection of Leader of the Pack; I might have provoked a riot if I'd cued up any of their more obscure tracks. Once, I did a bad thing: I succumbed to a sudden mischievous impulse to feed pound coins into the machine until I could select the whole album, 10 or 12 Shangri-Las songs back to back. I never heard them myself, of course; I fled the scene of the crime as soon as Leader of the Pack had finished. And I didn't dare to go back to that bar for quite some time.

Bonus Treat  -  Henry Rollins on modern 'music'

Drinking Song leftovers

I just did a post this morning on Froogville about the 'leftover' candidates who hadn't quite made it into my 'Fantasy Girlfriends' series over there.

In similar vein (since these blogs of mine are going to end in less than a fortnight, even if the world isn't), I thought I'd offer you on here today a 'Top Five' never-quite-made-it possibilities for my Great Drinking Songs strand.

A Top Five Drinking Songs

5=)  Hank Williams Jnr. - Whiskey Bent and Hellbound

A special treat for my buddy The British Cowboy, who, after studying law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville a decade ago, has become a huge C&W fan - and keeps on trying to convert me. I am more susceptible than I usually let on to him. [Another good version here, where Hank's duetting with Kid Rock.]

5=)  Van Halen - Take Your Whiskey Home

Women and Children First is my favourite Van Halen album, and this is one of my favourite tracks from it. Here's a fun live performance from a gig in Baltimore in 1980 - but audio only, unfortunately. [You can try the album version here.]

4)  The Doors - Alabama Song

The Brecht/Weill show tune is a classic drinking song, but - despite Jim Morrison's notorious drinking proclivities - it was a quirky choice for a rock band. The Doors' version of it, though, has become one of my favourites. [Although I also have a weakness for Ute Lemper doing this, obviously.]

3)  Sam Cooke - Chain Gang

Not an obvious drinking song choice, perhaps, but I once sang it in the tiny back bar at the Bullingdon Arms in East Oxford, with an impromptu chorus of friends and strangers. I have such happy memories of that, I dream of repeating the experience some day.

2)  Chumbawamba - Tubthumping

I recall there seemed to be a reaction against this song at the time, or shortly afterwards, perhaps because it got rather overplayed for a while, or perhaps because the band's in-your-face style got a bit too uncomfortable for most people. Me, I never tired of it. I think this is one of the best singles of the '90s; though it is also, curiously, one of the less impressive songs from the eponymous album, which I think was my 'album of the decade'.

And what am I saving for the No. 1 spot this time?

1)  John Otway - House of the Rising Sun

Of course, I like The Animals' version too (it is one of the only things I have ever been induced to sing at a Chinese karaoke session), but it is stalwart British pub entertainer John Otway's idiosyncratic interpretation that I have particularly come to love - through having seen the man live more times than I can count; some dozens, certainly, over the space of about 28 years. I've never got to the bottom of how he hit upon the idea of doing it like this, but I imagine that some time early in his career he genuinely stumbled over a lyric and was offered a mocking prompt by someone in the audience. It soon evolved into a necessary centrepiece of his stage show that this song would be delivered as a kind of call-and-response, with facetious questions from the audience interrupting the singer every half-line or so. I have myself once had the privilege of leading this audience interaction, when the great man turned up to play a poorly advertised and thinly attended gig in Toronto while I was living there - and I was the only person in the bar who'd seen him before. Here he is, supported - for once - by a full-scale band (most of the time he performs solo, or with his mate Richard playing the fancier guitar bits); it's from a great concert video shot at London's Astoria theatre (my all-time favourite gig venue, now sadly defunct) - some time in the early Noughties, I believe. [I've just learned the old bugger turned 60 a few months ago. And he's still gigging just about as fast and furiously as he ever did!  Happy Birthday, John!!!!!!]

OK, if you insist, you can have Eric Burdon and The Animals doing it as well (since it is a rather excellent HD video).

Top Five Dance Videos

I have been toying with the idea of putting together a list on this theme for a while. But, since I'm not a great fan of what is described as 'dance music' these days (understatement of the century!), nor have I ever been much of a dancer myself, I wasn't confident that I was sufficiently familiar with the field to come up with a strong 'Five'.

I received a little nudge the other day from my blog friend JES, whose latest post contributed the first of these selections.

A Top Five Dance Videos

5)  Saint Motel - Benny Goodman

This new-ish band from LA seem set to make quite a hit with this single from their first album, released this summer. JES's post on this explains the inspiration behind the arcane song title (apparently the great jazz band leader had a similar flirtation with obscurity and failure at a critical moment early in his career) and the video concept in some detail. The precocious little moppet playing a young Michael Jackson is apparently a viral video sensation called Miles 'Baby Boogaloo' Brown.

4)  Kings of Convenience - I'd Rather Dance With You

The Norwegian electronic duo have a way with a catchy tune (what is it about Scandinavians and music?), but their sound is a little thin (and bloopy-bloopy) for my taste. But this is an outrageously charming video. [I've posted it once before, actually, over on Froogville, all the way back in 2007.]

3)  OK Go - Here It Goes Again

The Chicagoan alt rockers make the best music videos in the world (really - just check out the selection on YouTube). But this gym treadmill routine for their 2006 single, in particular, won all kinds of awards and was immediately hailed as a modern classic. There's now a whole video sub-genre of American high school and college students replicating it for talent shows.

2)  The Avalanches - Since I Left You

A charming, surreal, and finally very moving little fable from the Aussie cut-and-paste masters best known for the fabulous Frontier Psychiatrist.

But in the top spot this time, what else could it be but....

1)  Fatboy Slim - Weapon of Choice

I really don't like this kind of music at all. But Spike Jonze's video is fantastic. Watch it with the sound down, if you have to. Walken dances!

Great Love Songs (39)

Mention this morning of the Skatalites reminded me that I first came across this great version of I'm In The Mood For Love on a ska anthology twenty or so years ago, and was instantly smitten with it.

Here's the original recording, by Lord Tanamo and The Skatalites.

And here they are still tearing it up live at Glastonbury in 2003, which is some 38 years after they first recorded it.

Great Drinking Songs (38)

I don't know quite why I think of this as a potential drinking song. I don't think I've ever actually sung it, drunk or sober. But Shame & Scandal In The Family is a song I remember happily from my very early childhood (it was quite a big hit in England in the late '60s - for The Skatalites, I think). And it has such a great tune, such a simple structure, such fun lyrics (I must have been deeply confused and embarrassed by them when I first heard them!) that I've always thought I'd like to sing it one day....

It is one of the great standards of Caribbean music these days, and has been covered by everyone from Madness to German ska band Dr Ring Ding and The Senior All-Stars to the great Peter Tosh to - bizarrely! - the rather fruity British comic actor Lance Percival. I gather the very first recording was by a Trinidadian calypso singer who called himself Sir Lancelot. There's also another rather good early version by a performer called Shawn Elliott, who I've not been able to find out anything about.

Most of these YouTube postings, unfortunately, are audio only.

So, here's the Skatalites version - with a completely unrelated clip of the great tap dance duo, the Nicholas Brothers.

If you don't know the Nicholas Brothers, check out this clip of their show-stopping number in the 1943 musical Stormy Weather. Their speed and precision, and their exuberant, seemingly efffortless athleticism are quite astounding. This is one of the handful of best dance routines ever filmed.

Top Five Embarrasing Admissions

I have always maintained that I hated the Eighties musically. It was the decade where I passed through my teens into my early twenties, so it should by rights have been the peak period of my life for exposure to contemporary music. Many people in their forties - especially Americans - seem to have a huge nostalgia thing going for the Eighties these days. But I'd been a precocious brat: I turned on to music early in life, and was already perhaps starting to get a bit blasé about it by my late teens. And the preceding decades seemed to have produced far more worthwhile music: my childhood in the Seventies had seen the exuberance of glam rock and the iconoclasm of punk; the Sixties, which I'd experienced a little vicariously through my parents and my older brother, had seen things like protest folk, the blues revival, psychedelia, and... well, almost everything good that ever happened in rock music, really. And then in the Eighties the music business (re)discovered that there was more money to be made selling records to teenage girls than to teenage boys, so androgynously good-looking male vocalists became the vogue. Somebody thought it was cool that you could use a computer instead of a drummer to lay down the beat. And people started playing keyboards more than guitars. Yep, the Eighties SUCKED.

And yet, and yet, much as I deplored the general trend of the times, I have to admit that in amongst all of that synth-pap and New Romantic bollocks, there were a few really outstanding artists at work, and some fantastic tunes being written. Much as I would like to write the whole decade off as a musical aberration, I do find myself getting sometimes quite wistful about a lot of the stuff we listened to back then - even some of the synthy stuff.

So, here is my shame-faced confession of....

The Top Five Eighties Tracks That Froog Really Likes (Despite Himself!)

5)  Depeche Mode - Master and Servant

These guys epitomised the synthy sound that I hated, but damn, they produced some good songs, particularly on the Some Great Reward album which came out shortly after I started at university. Atheist that I am, I liked Blasphemous Rumours best, but this is unquestionably catchier. And it's hard to resist a song about BDSM (the only other one I'd ever heard was Tom Lehrer's Masochism Tango). [Also quite a good live performance here.]

4)  Thompson Twins - We Are Detective

I don't think I liked anything else this band did, but this was one of the best singles of the decade for me. The warped, witty lyrics, and the odd, lilting, folky feel of the tune - somehow evocative of Viennese café culture (I wonder if they were consciously seeking to conjure reminiscences of The Third Man?) - really made it stand out from the crowd.

3)  Big Pig - Breakaway

Australian Oleh Witer put together this drumming collective towards the end of the Eighties, and their debut album, Bonk!, briefly made quite a splash. Alas, it took them too long to put together a follow-up, and the project fell apart. But they had a really unique sound, and some very solid songs on their first album - and an outstanding vocalist in Sherine Aberaytne. I'm disappointed we haven't heard more from her in the last twenty years. [You should also check out their Devil's Song from the same album: not as catchy, but an even better song.]

2)  The The - Infected

I loved the dark intensity of Matt Johnson's lyrics, and he was one of the few artists of the early Eighties still emphasising guitars over synths (Johnny Marr played with him on a couple of his later albums). His 1986 album of the same name was a strong contender for album of the decade, in my view.

And there's a great live performance of this song here.

But my No. 1 this time, somewhat inescapably (since I was myself unable to escape it throughout my student days: it remained permanently lodged on the jukebox playlists of student bars for at least four or five years after its first release), is....

1)  Soft Cell - Tainted Love

Despite the underlying bounce of the tune, it was hard to credit that this song had started life as an early, unsuccessful Motown single (you can hear that original version by Gloria Jones here). Marc Almond made it completely his own. I'm always surprised to read that his version was released in 1981: I didn't really hear it until a couple of years later. And it wasn't until some years later again that I bought the album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret (one of the GREAT album names!); I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was a lot of other good stuff on it - not least Say Hello, Wave Goodbye, which somehow passed me by when it was first out as a single. These days, it's hard to conceive of a song becoming such a huge hit with such a terrible video; but video was very young back then.

PS:  I really wanted to include something by the Kane Gang here, but there's still not that much of them around on YouTube. Here are links to my two favourite songs of theirs, Gun Law and Losersville; but the former has rather dodgy sound quality, and the latter is audio only. Better than nothing.

A Top Five Jukebox Favourites

I'm not thinking about just any old jukebox here, but the wondrous contraption they used to have in one of my all-time favourite bars, The Black Swan in East Oxford - a principal hangout of mine in the early 1990s. As I described in that early post on here, one of its unique attractions was an old 1950s style jukebox that contained a record-player and a stack of 45rpm vinyl singles. The machine might indeed have been that old, a gorgeous vintage piece. And many of the records were too: personal favourites, I suppose, of the elderly Irish landlady. There was some fantastic stuff on there, though - records I remember fondly from my childhood, when, from a very early age, I was given free run of my parents' music collection for hours at a time.

One of my happiest discoveries here - the song that I probably used to play on that machine the most - was Roger Miller's King of the Road. But I've already done a post on that; so, here's a rundown of the next best songs from that marvellous selection.

Top Five 'golden oldies' from The Black Swan's jukebox

5)  Frank Sinatra - New York, New York

A great drunken singalong, almost as brashly self-assertive as My Way. This would probably have made it into my 'Great Drinking Songs' series one day, but... I've run out of time.

4)  Sam Cooke - Wonderful World

Which, of course, always calls to mind the cafeteria sequence in Animal House....

3)  The Bellamy Brothers - If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body (Would You Hold It Against Me?)
This cheesy Country classic was a favourite pick of my buddy, The Bookseller - who had a touching but entirely misguided optimism that if he used this line often enough, it would eventually work for him.

2)  Pérez Prado - Cherry Pink (and Apple Blossom White)

The Cuban 'King of the Mambo' has enjoyed a bit of resurgence in popularity in the last couple of decades through tracks like his Mambo No. 5 and Guaglione, but this has always been my favourite - for the exuberantly drunken lurch of the lead trumpet (not sure who's playing this [Pete Candoli, possibly?]; Prado the bandleader played keyboards).

And in the top spot this time (well, No. 2, behind Roger Miller) we have....

1)  Guy Mitchell - Singing The Blues

Not a blues song at all, but I forgive it - because it is the most absurdly perfect little pop song. It was a huge worldwide hit in 1956, a simultaneous No. 1 in the UK and the US - and a great favourite of my parents, from their young married life together, before my brother and I came along to spoil things for them.

Girl power! - A Top Five songs by female vocalists

To kick off the advertised 'Music Week' here on The Barstool, here's a varied roundup - possibly compromising my usual macho image??!! - of girly songs that I rather like.

Not a very considered or definitive pick, just an off-the-top-of-my-head (and what I could find on YouTube) selection.

Froog's Top Five Girly Songs

5)  Lisa Loeb - I Do

Ridiculously hooky little song, with the hint of inner toughness and self-assertion that I always look for in my women (I can't stand drippy "I can't live without him" love songs!). And Ms Loeb is quite a compelling character: she has that librarian-sexy thing going on.

4)  Meredith Brooks  -  Bitch

A song that perhaps goes a bit far to the opposite extreme from the soft-and-fluffy/pathetic/can't-get-by-without-a-man image of femininity, but I've always found this sort of sassiness very appealing - even if it can be scary, vexing, and impossible to live with. I wonder if this song got under my skin so much because it came out just after the great break-up of my life (from a gorgeous Aussie academic I later jokingly dubbed 'The Evil One'): there did seem to be rather too much appropriateness in it.

3)  Sheryl Crow - Strong Enough

A similar stance to Bitch, but not so in-your-face, and with a touching overlay of vulnerability: not so much 'I will make your life hell just for the fun of it' as 'I will make your life hell because I'm a bit of an emotional basketcase'. This one is probably even more appropriate to that break-up, but not so contemporary.

I can't resist adding this duet with Stevie Nicks that I just found.

2)  Throwing Muses - Honeychain

I've mentioned a few times before that I'm a big fan of Tanya Donnelly and her subsequent band, Belly; but I wasn't so familiar with her earlier work with Kristin Hersh in Throwing Muses. My mate Ned introduced me to their 1991 album The Real Ramona, and this song really got under my skin somehow. That line Stare holes into the wall I find particularly haunting.

And at the top of this particular heap...

1)  Transvision Vamp  -  I Want Your Love

I believe someone - it might have been Malcolm McLaren - slightly snarkily dubbed Wendy James "the face of the '80s". It was a backhanded compliment because she and her band didn't break big until the late summer of 1988; and sadly prescient, because the band would soon fizzle and die in the '90s. But oh damn, their infectious pop-punk was tremendous FUN for a while, a late high point in what had been a mostly rather musically uninspired decade. And Wendy James might just possibly be the sexiest female singer Britain has ever produced: not just supermodel gorgeous, but brash, ballsy, smart as a whip - and she had a decent voice too. (Elvis Costello wrote a solo album for her, which suggests that I'm not alone in thinking she had some talent.) I remember the first time I heard this, I had just finished at university, and I was walking through London on a gloriously sunny day, the streets almost deserted on a midweek afternoon; suddenly, there was an open window on an upper floor, and someone had cranked up their hi-fi to full volume to blast out this song. "Damn," I thought to myself, "this is, um... bouncy!" And then I saw the video...

Howdy, pardner!

Blue Cowbie - a very palatable local brew with which I quenched my thirst down in Zhenyuan - on my trip to Guizhou province last month. The logo is a crude rendition of John Wayne. 

Ah, Chinese advertising!

Toronto locals

The other day, I was reflecting for a moment - for reasons which now escape me - on the time I spent in Toronto about 15 years ago, working as a legal intern.

My scholarship programme provided quite a nice apartment for me, down near the waterfront on Queen's Quay. And I had a bar in my building. One of the strangest bars I have ever encountered - the Purple Pepper, a bar chiefly notable for its name: a deeply naff but undeniably very memorable alliteration. The Pepper, alas, didn't really feel much like a bar, since it was in a mall. Well, in the middle of a rank of shops along the ground floor of this block (the dry cleaners and the 24-hour supermarket and, especially, the great little takeaway pizza joint on the corner were all very welcome facilities to have within 5 minutes of home, but the Pepper was nothing but a disappointment). And hence it was a bit of a goldfish bowl, with floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows along the front. At least it was quite cosily dim inside - after nightfall - and the 'purple' motif was quaintly underscored with a purple lava lamp behind the bar (I'm a big fan of lava lamps: I could watch them for hours!).

There was also a rather beautiful Eastern European (Croatian, possibly - I forget) girl who worked behind the bar there a few evenings a week. But even this was not enough to entice me into becoming a regular. The place lacked atmosphere. Nor, indeed, did it have very much custom. It was a little expensive. And the service - from the gorgeous Croatian, and everyone else - tended to be a bit offhand and surly. [It seems the Pepper is still going after all these years, but is now promoting itself more as a café/restaurant.]

That, I found, was a more widespread problem in Canada, or certainly in Toronto. Canadians have a rather gratingly self-righteous pride about their supposed superiority to their American neighbours: they seem to believe - with overbearing earnestness - that their country is better in every way than the USA, and that they are a fundamentally nicer people than the Americans. And I'm afraid it just ain't so - not in the country's service culture, anyway. Whereas the almost ubiquitous "Have a nice day!" attitude you find in America usually seems genuine, or at least well faked, in Canada serving staff mostly seem as if they are just going through the motions. There's no perkiness, no breeziness, no friendliness. It wasn't just in the Pepper, but every bar I went in during that year in Toronto (and a fair few in other places I visited, too: Montreal, Ottawa/Hull, Quebec City, Edmonton, Vancouver). Even worse, bar staff there used to aggressively demand their tips, rather than just accepting that tipping was ultimately a matter for the customer's discretion. In America, I don't mind tipping, and tipping heavily - because bar staff give value: they're pleasant and friendly to you, they make conversation if you're on your own, they introduce you to other people at the bar; they'll quite often give you a complimentary drink every once in a while; and they almost invariably slice a big chunk off your tab at the end of the evening, if you've been a good customer. In Canada, they give you your drink, and ask for a tip. That's it. No smile, no chit-chat, nada. I soon grew to hate going to bars in Canada: it was more expensive than in the States, and not nearly as much fun.

Insofar as I did have a local in Toronto (the severe winters are a serious deterrent to going out; and I was away travelling a lot, anyway), I came to favour the Acme Bar & Grill, just around the corner. It was about a 10-minute walk away, but that's no bad thing. (A 'local' can be too local. There's not really any extra convenience in having a favourite bar only 2 minutes away rather than 5 or 10 - and 'convenience' is overrated anyway! - but the reduction in daily exercise can become significant.) Of course, it was the Wile E. Coyote reference that initially attracted me. And it did seem like a very promising venue: long, narrow, essentially windowless - nice and dark, lots of wood; almost the paradigm of the perfect (North) American bar. It had a pretty decent food menu too. Again, it was the frosty demeanour of the staff that let it down. If this place had been over the border in Michigan, I'm sure I would have enrolled it amongst my favourite bars of all time; but my experiences here were always undercut by irritation and disappointment with the service. [I learn that the Acme was relaunched as the more British-sounding Duke of Argyle in the early Noughties, and closed altogether a few years ago, when the area was redeveloped. I would like to summon up a little wistful regret, but I find myself unable to.]

Perverse and bizarre as it may seem, my 'local' during that year became the wonderful T. Hogan's - some 300 miles away in Philadelphia!

That's how much Canada's bars SUCKED.