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).

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It's been ages since we had a Great Love Songs entry, over 8 months. I am loth to post one on the eve of the dread day, lest anyone think that I am succumbing to the ersatz emotion of this dratted festival. On the other hand... well, Love Songs is starting to fall badly behind the rival Great Drinking Songs strand, and I wouldn't want anyone to think that drinking is more important to me than romance (it probably is; but I wouldn't want anyone to think that!). So, the time is ripe.

I developed a bit of a weakness for Country & Western music when I was living in North America for a year-and-a-bit towards the end of the '90s - not least because the female singers all tend to be rather gorgeous. (And I was based most of the time in Toronto; C&W is also very big in Canada, and their music video TV station for it - CMT, Country Music Television - I find rather better than its cross-border equivalent, GAC [Great American Country].) And Faith Hill is one of the most gorgeous of the gorgeous; she made a particularly big splash that year ('98, I suppose it must have been) with a rather poppy album, from which this infectiously catchy number, This Kiss, was the main hit single. (I'm sure many C&W purists denounced her for jumping on the Shania Twain 'crossover' bandwagon and deserting 'true' country music. And I gather she has subsequently returned to a more traditional style.) In addition to its hookiness, though, it's also got some very clever rhymes - always something I'm a big fan of (how can you not love a song that includes the word 'subliminal'??). It even includes aposiopesis - now how many songs can you say that about?

I was reminded of this song by the improbably mind-bending - if disappointingly brief - smooch I enjoyed with an old flame at New Year this year, so I've been meaning to root it out and post it for a while now. Unfortunately, Faith Hill's "people" at Warner Records have got YouTube well locked down, so you can only view her original video for it here. However, there are quite a lot of good "homemade" videos accompanying the song; this anthology of clips from Disney cartoon romances is probably the best. I just hope the Warner Records killjoys won't demand its deletion too soon.

[For some reason, anime video compilations for this song seem to be especially popular. Well worth checking some of these out, too.]

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Well, I've mentioned Jimmy Buffett on here once or twice before, have enrolled him as one of my 'Unsuitable Role Models', but, somehow, I haven't previously got around to posting his signature hit in this 'Great Drinking Songs' series.

Since today is going to be a day for drinking-and-maudlin-reminiscence - my birthday and my first day off the wagon after a month of abstinence! - Margaritaville seems particularly appropriate. (Although the weather is not tropical enough here any more to support the drinking of margaritas, alas. But I'm sure there will be a few tequila slammers consumed at some point.)

[There's also a little musical treat over on Froogville today.]

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Last month over on Froogville, when talking about puns, my blog-friend Moonrat complained that she had been confused by a convoluted reference in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to the phrase Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong (well, I think Pynchon may have reduced the number of Frenchmen - or "fur henchmen", I believe it was - to 'forty million' in order to crowbar it into his pun). I explained that this was the title of a popular song of the 1920s, perhaps best known in this version by the great comic songstress Sophie Tucker (no video, I'm afraid).

On looking it up, I was reminded (I'd heard it somewhere in my childhood) that it is quite a rousing little singalong number. I've only recently been restored to access to YouTube, and my Great Drinking Songs series has been in abeyance since last summer - but this seems like a suitable number to get it going again.

There's quite a bit more of Ms Tucker on YouTube, including this typically idiosyncratic rendition of Some Of These Days (no video, but once again some still photographs of the lady), a very rare clip of a live performance of No-One But The Right Man Can Do Me Wrong on a stage somewhere in London circa 1930, entertaining the troops in 1944's patriotic morale-booster Follow The Boys (which apparently had everyone who was anyone in it), and singing You Can't Sew A Button On A Heart in the musical film Sensations of 1945.

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Big Rock Candy Mountains won a new audience when it was included in the soundtrack of the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou? a decade ago, but I'd known it from childhood - one of those songs that somehow always seemed to be in the background of my earliest memories. I don't think it was part of my parents' large and eccentric - if mostly very middlebrow - record collection, so I guess I must have been hearing it on the radio. There was a Saturday morning show "for kids" on BBC Radio 2 (I think) which we used to listen to a lot, and which had a tiny repertoire of songs that used to get endlessly repeated: Three Wheels On My Wagon, Wonderful Toy, My Brother Sylvest, Three Little Fishes, Lily The Pink, Two Little Boys. These are all indelibly hardwired into my brain, with (mostly) fond memories; and a few more of them might find their way into the 'Great Songs' series eventually.

Big Rock Candy Mountains was really a rather inappropriate song for a children's show, since it's a 1930s fantasy of a hobo heaven ("where the handouts grow on trees"), and thus contains a number of uncomfortable - if mostly fairly oblique - references to the poverty, hardship, and violence encountered in that way of life. Beneath the jauntiness of the tune and the playful inventiveness of the lyrics, there's a deep vein of sadness, a sense of desperate self-delusion. It's similar in some ways to that other great hobo-ing song - possibly my favourite song of all time - Roger Miller's King of the Road, but its apparent buoyancy and optimism is more superficial, less convincing. It's got some great lines in it, though; how can you not love "where the little streams of alcohol come trickling down the rocks"?

Here's some scratchy archive footage of the song's composer Harry "Haywire Mac" McClintock.

[Wikipedia tells me that Harry was included in a set of trading cards on 'Heroes of Old Time Country Music' by the cartoonist Robert Crumb, but unfortunately I can't find that picture anywhere on the Internet.]

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Well, the pessimists say we're as good as out already, after two uninspiring draws; but Slovenia really shouldn't be that much of an obstacle.... and, if by chance we should get our act together and give them a sound spanking at the end of the week, it will be refreshing to exchange - for a few short days, at least - our (probably well-founded) pessimism for a renewed dose of false optimism.

This is the latest re-tread of England's Euro 96 song, Three Lions - surely the best football song ever (possibly the only good football song ever?). It perfectly captures the wistfulness of the England football fan's aspirations, the passionate but unconvinced optimism with which we anxiously approach every big game. (And the accompanying fan video includes a much better selection - and better picture quality, too - of the England team's greatest moments than the 'Top 10 Goals' I posted on Froogville last week.)

[I had wanted to do a 'Great Love Songs' post for the beginning of the World Cup - but the two songs I'd wanted to use were both unavailable. Neil Innes' One Thang On Your Mind (an hilarious Country & Western parody which uses football metaphors to describe the progress of a romantic relationship, and makes fun of the fact that, when single, women disingenuously complain that men tend to be only interested in sex, but, when in a relationship, are reminded, to their great disgruntlement, that most men are actually far more interested in watching sport on TV than in sex) seems to be about the only one of his songs from his superb Innes Book Of Records series that has not been uploaded to YouTube (It eventually showed up a couple of years later!). And my favourite Thomas Dolby song, Close But No Cigar (the marvellous chugging guitar at the beginning is by Eddie van Halen, who guested on a number of tracks on the early-90s Astronauts and Heretics album), which also draws on the imagery of sporting disappointments as a parallel to romantic failure, is barred from embedding. It's a very clever video - worth clicking on the link.]

Come on, England!!!

My football discussion thread is gathering momentum: chip in your thoughts here.

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I notice that my Great Love Songs selections have fallen rather behind my Great Drinking Songs this year. I hope this isn't indicative of the relative importance of these two activities in my life! (Yeah, OK, it probably is.)

Anyway, to start redressing the balance, here's one of my favourite bits of Ella, You'll Never Know, written by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon in the early 1940s (I learn from Wikipedia that Gordon supposedly based the lyrics on a poem written by a young war bride, Dorothy Fern Norris).

That Wikipedia article led me to go checking on Alice Faye, who first performed the song in the 1943 musical, Hello Frisco, Hello, winning the Oscar for Best Song that year (she sang it again in the USO morale-booster Four Jills in a Jeep the following year; a better rendition of the song, but the video is only a montage of stills of the actress). I don't recall seeing it on the American Film Institute's 100 Best Movie Songs list that I discussed over on Froogville earlier this year (no, indeed it was not: a shocking oversight!). Strangely, she never released it as a record, and so the song eventually became more associated with other artists. This is an entertaining clip of the song from Hello Frisco, Hello: a rather muted performance, in rehearsal; but it's cute how all the theatre staff stop what they're doing to listen to her, and almost start tearing up - such is the power of this song.

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Crikey, we haven't had a Great Drinking Song in nearly 7 months! So, obviously, we've got to have one today - St Patrick's Day. (It's also the 100th post under my 'Great Songs' tag, so I'd better pick something extra GOOD...)

How have I not nominated this before? Well, better late than never - here's Phil Lynott and Thin Lizzy doing their classic version of the traditional Irish song Whiskey In the Jar.

And here's Gary Moore and a number of other former Thin Lizzy members performing it at a 2005 tribute to Lynott (on 20th August, which would have been his 56th birthday).

And here's a more traditional version from The Dubliners. (I have just learned that they also sang this with The Pogues; the Youtube post of this has good sound quality, but, unfortunately, a still photo only).

I also just turned up some intriguing oddities: versions by The Grateful Dead (a folksy rendition, with particularly bright mandolin), Smokie (of whom I'd never heard before: a moderately successful Yorkshire rock band of the '60s and '70s, their take on the song is quite similar to Thin Lizzy's), Metallica (a 'tribute' to Thin Lizzy that it might have been more respectful to omit), and.... Elvis (well, not really, no; it's an Irish Elvis impersonator called Jim Brown).

I've also posted some versions of The Wild Rover over on Froogville today. Double happiness!

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After making mention the other day of that great rollicking Northern Irish folk song, The Belle of Belfast City (also known as Tell Me Ma), I couldn't resist posting it as this month's 'Great Drinking Song'.

This is a version by the late Kirsty MacColl (no video, unfortunately). It's quite rare to find it performed by a woman - odd since the song, in part at least, takes the woman's (young girl's!) perspective.

And here's another version by the band Gaelic Storm. I'm pretty sure the Dubliners have done this too, and I think Van Morrison recorded it with The Chieftains, but I haven't been able to find those versions yet on YouTube.

Aha, further investigations have turned up this charming (but rather brief) very early clip of The Dubliners performing it - and cheekily changing the lyric from Belfast to Dublin.

And this is a lovely (though sadly incomplete) performance from The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem.

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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.

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Well, I'm not sure that this is a great drinking song, as such - not in the rollicking singalong ("And let's have another one while we're at it!") sense. But it does at least mention booze, and it is a damn fine, gruff, bluesy song. This is He Got All The Whiskey, from the wonderful - though largely unknown - British singer-songwriter, John Martyn, and his band. This is well-buried on YouTube; I only happened upon it at all because this version has the lovely Eddi Reader on backing vocals (and it's on about the 4th or 5th page of search results for her).

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Exhaustive histories of popular songs are a blog speciality of my friend JES, and I couldn't possibly hope to emulate the thoroughness of his superb What's In A Song? series. So, instead I'll just rely on Wikipedia, which tells us....

"Those Were the Days a song is credited to Gene Raskin, who put English lyrics to the Russian gypsy song Dorogoi dlinnoyu (Дорогой длинною, lit. By the long road) written by Boris Fomin (1900-1948) with words by the poet Konstantin Podrevskii [of whom, it would seem, nothing else is known - Froog]. . It deals with reminiscence upon youth and romantic idealism. The first known recording of the song was by Alexander Vertinsky in the 1920s. The song is best remembered for Mary Hopkin's 1968 recording, which was a top-ten hit in both the U.S. and the U.K."

(In fact, it made No. 1 in the UK, and on the 'Adult Contemporary' chart in the US, although it stuck at No. 2 on the 'Billboard Hot 100'.)

1968?! Christ - I was three years old! I think this is the first song I can remember hearing on the radio. It was a HUGE hit that summer (well, I fancy I remember it from the summer - the background to sunshiney south coast holidays with my German grandmother in Brixham). Hmm, it seems the single's official release date was 30th August, but I suppose it would have been getting extensive airplay for at least a week or two prior to that.

I don't have any conscious recollection of seeing the sweet-voiced and extremely pretty Mary Hopkin back then, but I imagine I probably must have done; pop music TV shows and primitive 'videos' (like the first one below) were just starting to become popular then. She might have been responsible for embedding in my psyche a deep-seated and unsuspected weakness for 'the Scandinavian look' (I am, in general, rather blonde-averse - but there are rare exceptions who disprove the rule quite powerfully!).

Here's the lovely Mary way back in 1968 (black & white, of course; and with karaoke subtitles, just in case you don't know the words):

There's another vintage version by her on YouTube here, with an extensive note on what's been happening in her career more recently. I hadn't realised that she was so young when she got her big break, only just turning 18. It'll be her 60th birthday in a couple of months, so I expect we can look forward to lots more nostalgic re-releases of her best-loved songs. And here's a live performance (no video) from Osaka in 1970. I've also just learned that she did a version in French (known as Le Temps des Fleurs) - which has a very different feel to it, sexy as hell. What is it about the French (language)??!! Gosh, she released versions in Italian, Spanish, and German as well. (So did Sandie Shaw, and Matt Monro. I'm beginning to think I might have to have a follow-up post just on the Spanish recordings of this.) Not that I'm any expert or anything, but to me her French and Spanish pronunciation sound pretty damned good - quite the polished linguist!

Of course, since Mary, this song has been covered by everyone and his dog. There is, for example, this quite nice instrumental version by Vietnamese(?) guitarist Sonphumai and a violinist friend (ah, the wonders of YouTube!). And then, according to your taste, you can take your pick from.... Dolly Parton (no video, stills only), Bonnie Tyler (live TV performance, very good... I sometimes used to wonder in the 70s, when Mary Hopkin disappeared, if the poor girl hadn't had some terrible problems with throat nodules and then reinvented herself as Bonnie Tyler: same age, same look, same Welshness), Sandie Shaw (her version came out shortly after Mary's and failed to take off), or Engelbert Humperdinck (who in fact first recorded this the year before Mary, but never released it as a single - a much fuller arrangement, with horns), or.... well, I could have sworn I'd heard a good rock version of this somewhere, but there's nothing on YouTube. (On further reflection, I think it was a band that opened for The Pogues at one of their Wembley Arena shows in the 80s, but I can't now remember their name.) Well, there is this somewhat anodyne version by Europop duo Bad Boys Blue (just to show that I try to cater for every taste); actually, this is one of those songs that's so good it's almost impossible to do a really bad version of it. Then there's this version by an unidentified Chinese hamonica quartet, and this by Greek bouzouki master Johnny Sporos. And finally, to prove that I really do cater for every taste, here's another very sweet instrumental... by a German ukulele enthusiast (no, really, check this out - very good).

But the pick of the crop is surely this, the Leningrad Cowboys ripping it up live (in Moscow, I assume; or maybe Helsinki - no details posted with the clip) backed by the whole vast wonderfulness of the Red Army Choir (well, more accurately The Alexandrov Ensemble - and yes, it is Helsinki, from a 1993 concert film by Aki Kaurismäki called Total Balalaika Show):

I think this is probably the greatest Drinking Song of them all. There's something about those lilting melodies of Eastern European folk music - on the surface rousingly jaunty, yet underpinned by a painful wistfulness. There's something about the balalaika too; that instrument works like a cheesegrater on the heart. There aren't many songs that can be either triumphantly happy or devastatingly melancholic, according to your mood. There are even fewer that can manage to be both at the same time. This is one of them. And the additional overlay of nostalgia for lost childhood - this is the first pop song I can remember - makes this an emotional frag-grenade for me. So what if it isn't Irish? I can't think of a better raucous, maudlin, misty-eyed singalong for St Patrick's Day.

So here, as a final offering, to get us all in the mood for the revelries later in the day, is a live performance by Liam Clancy (last survivor of the marvellous Clancy Brothers, who passed on just at the end of last year), who opens by reminiscing about his acquaintance with Gene Raskin, who wrote the new English lyrics for the song, and had been a regular drinking companion in Manhattan's famous White Horse Tavern in the early 1960s.

Have a great day, everyone. And remember: Drink Irresponsibly.


[There's a short clip of the original Russian folk song here. There's also this rendition by Belgian super-crooner Helmut Lotti. And if you hang out in Beijing's sleazy Russian quarter, you might recognise this - a breathy, Latino-pop version by the indecently sexy Dessy Dobreva (who is, it seems, Bulgarian, but enjoys a huge following across the whole of Eastern Europe - and Canada too).

Most of the Leningrad Cowboys' Total Balalaika! concert appears to be available on YouTube - check some of it out. However, Wikipedia informs me that the show featured a massed balalaika version of Stairway To Heaven which was not included on the CD or DVD - now there's a rarity I'd like to track down!

The most intriguing nugget of information in the rather spare Wikipedia bio of lyricist Gene Raskin is that he presented this 1960s short film in praise of New York's urban design, How To Live In A City (which definitely deserves a post all of its own).

I think this must surely set a new record for my most cross-linked post: well over 30 references and 3 embeds! Because of the crappiness of my Net connection, and the particularly slow and glitchy downloads I'm suffering from YouTube, and the fact that Internet Explorer inexplicably crashed on me 3 or 4 times while I was preparing this.... well, instead of an hour or so, it took me the best part of five hours! But I think it was well worth it. I hope you will too.

And it's not like I had anything else to do. It's been snowing like the clappers all day. (This post was 'pre-cooked' on Sunday 14th.)]

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And another Unsuitable Role Model, too - we haven't had one for a while! Ah, Dino.... He could sing, he could act, he could dance, he could do comedy, he could pull the girls...... and he could do it all while drunk. Well, in truth, I rather think he was just very good at acting drunk on stage, which is something rarely pulled off well. I don't doubt that he was a pretty dedicated drinker offstage, but I like to think that he had it well under control. His public persona always seemed admirably unruffled and serene, and nicely self-mocking, too. And he dressed so damn sharp!

I grew up on all those crazy comedies he made with Jerry Lewis back in the '50s, and then a little later developed a great weakness for the Matt Helm series of spy spoofs in the late '60s (I hasten to point out that this is when they appeared on British TV in the '70s and the '80s!): he was cooler than Bond, funnier than Flint, and he had more and better eye-candy than either of them. Happy memories!

Anyway, here's the great man in later life (1983, I believe) performing his 'theme song', Little Ole Wine Drinker Me. I believe that was one of the many classic middle-of-the-road singles in my parents' record collection, with which I spent many, many happy hours as a small child - I wonder how that may have influenced my subsequent development?? [Alas, that video got pulled from YouTube; but here's Dino's original recording, accompanied by a montage of stills from his many drinking moments in the movies.]

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My blog-friend JES first introduced me to The Jolly Boys a year or so ago, and recently reminded me of them again by posting their superb version of Iggy Pop's The Passenger. They are often described as a Jamaican equivalent of Cuba's 'Buena Vista Social Club' musicians: the core members of the group are now all in their 70s or 80s, and have been playing together since the early 1950s (their name is said to have been given to them by legendary Hollywood rake Errol Flynn, who made his home in Jamaica for much of the last decade of his life). They are exponents of mento, a Jamaican dancehall style of music which originated in the 1940s and 1950s, a precursor to the better-known ska and reggae genres which began to blossom from the 1960s onwards. Although they had apparently gained some international recognition in the 'world music' community during the 1990s, they have suddenly achieved massive worldwide attention with the release of their 2010 album Great Expectation, a collection of brilliant cover versions of classic rock and pop hits (find out more about the creation of this marvellous record on the band's own website): their interpretations of Blue Monday, I Fought The Law, Riders On The Storm, and Hanging On The Telephone (imaginatively teamed with the cartoon magpies, Heckle and Jeckle!) are not to be missed. But.... for a 'Drinking Song' selection, I think I have to go with this gently swinging rendition of Amy Winehouse's signature hit, Rehab.

For more cool old geezer goodness, check them out performing this live last September on the long-running BBC music show Later... with Jools Holland. We would all wish to be as agile (and as charismatic!) as their frontman Albert Minott at the age of... erm, 40-something, never mind 78!!  (I would love to see them play live one day on their home turf - apparently, they are still the 'house band' at GeeJam, a hotel bar in Port Antonio, a picturesque little town on the north-east coast of Jamaica.)

There's also this great video introduction to the band (including some snatches of their more traditional material) on their YouTube channel. [Warning: you could easily spend half a day on this!]

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One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer is a very fine drinking song, and a favourite, I believe, of my buddy, The British Cowboy. And it seems a particularly appropriate choice this week, since I got so outrageously lashed chasing beer with whiskeys on Thursday night (and Friday morning).

Here is the original version by the great John Lee Hooker.

The Cowboy may well object that George Thorogood's cover of the song is even better. It certainly boasts some kick-arse guitar, I grant you that. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a decent version of it on YouTube - well, only a couple of live performances with dreadful sound, and this (just the song, no video).

Therefore, to keep the cranky Cowboy and all you other Thorogood fans out there (do I have any readers in Delaware??) happy, here is the video for his second greatest drinking song, I Drink Alone. Double delight for you this week. I spoil you.

The greatest little boozer.... [Great Drinking Songs (27)]

Aaah, that time of year is upon us once again - St Patrick's Day, possibly now the largest single excuse for a piss-up worldwide.

What better way to celebrate than with a classic bit of The Pogues, Sally MacLennane, from their Rum, Sodomy, and The Lash album (which I played to death during my second year at university... until I discovered their even better debut album Red Roses For Me, which has been one of my favourite late-night melancholy indulgences ever since).

This is a performance from the great, much-missed BBC2 music show The Old Grey Whistle Test, a seminal influence on my 1970s childhood. (Apparently, they've been doing re-runs of this on the 'new' BBC4 channel over the last few years, so a lot of high-quality clips are starting to appear on YouTube. They also seem to have begun issuing 'Best of...' compilation DVDs, but so far I've only managed to find one of these in Beijing... I am constantly on the lookout for more.)  It's a good performance, but, unfortunately, it is cut slightly short at the end. (And it pains me to reflect that this must have been 27 years ago!!!)

There's another good live version here, from a 1988 concert in Japan (YouTube user Cosmotype seems to have uploaded that entire concert film: well worth a look); and this one perhaps best captures the infectious drunken bounciness of the tune (from a gig at the Barrowlands in Glasgow in 1987; without video).

This song provided one of my favourite excuses for missing a tutorial (a one-to-one interrogation by a senior member of faculty, which is how they like to do most of the 'teaching' at Oxford) in my student days: I'd been singing it - and a load of other Pogues songs, and a few AC/DC numbers like Highway to Hell and Touch Too Much - so riotously with my mates at an end-of-term party the night before that I completely lost my voice (my cynical head tutor insisted that I show up for 5 minutes to demonstrate as much). That left me free for an extended hair-of-the-dog lunchtime session with the same bunch of mates, at the end of which we really did have to escort one of our number - barely able to walk unaided - to the railway station to put him on his train home. It was one of the happiest moments of my life (ah, the world without responsibilities!); and, as a result, this song is always a little apt to get me tearing up.

Have a WILD St. Pat's, everyone!!

[By the by, that Wikipedia link on the OGWT offers an explanation of the name I'd never heard before.  Ostensibly, it was an expression from the old days of tin pan alley, when music companies would try out their latest songs on the grey-uniformed doormen of Manhattan's upscale hotels and apartment buildings. The thinking was that any tune the 'old greys' could remember and start whistling after just one or two hearings was a guaranteed hit. This explanation is attributed to the show's notoriously low-talking presenter 'Whispering' Bob Harris - part of the inspiration for John Thomson's Louis Balfour character in the 'Jazz Club' segments of The Fast Show. I note that the same idea - testing new song ideas on their obliging but tone-deaf doorman - was used in the wonderful Hugh Grant/Drew Barrymore rom-com Music and Lyrics.]

A delayed St Patrick's Day treat (Great Drinking Songs [4])

I had wanted to post some classic Irish drinking songs for the big day last Monday, but YouTube was blocked in China for 9 days because of the recent unrest. Today (amazingly, mystifyingly!) it is restored to us, so.......

Here's an amusing homemade video to accompany The Dubliners' version of The Seven Drunken Nights.

Here's another video with the same version of the song, a stop-frame animation - not bad. And here's another version (not The Dubliners, but I'm not sure who the singer is) that has no pictures but does provide the lyrics.

And here's a marvellous vintage clip (from a Pete Seeger TV show of the early 1960s) of The Clancy Brothers performing perhaps the ultimate pissed singalong number, The Wild Rover. (Alas, I couldn't find The Pogues' version I mentioned last week.)

If you'd rather have The Dubliners singing it, they are here. And this is rather a fun clip of American Paddy band the Dropkick Murphys doing the song in a pub on St Pat's a year or two ago.

Ah, YouTube - it's good to have you back. Please don't go away again.

Something for the weekend!

I don't think this can be a candidate for my 'Great Love Songs' strand, because, frankly, I have no idea what it's about; the lyrics are too dark and weird for me to decipher. It's not quite a 'Great Drinking Song' either (although it was first introduced to me by Best-Barman-In-The-World-Ever, Big Nige, last year, and has been a popular fixture in our 12 Square Metres playlist ever since). It has an incantatory aspect to it that's very powerful; but it's just not singalong stuff. Well, apart from that groaning na-na-na-nah-naah chorus, maybe. But no, it doesn't have that rollicking, get-you-in-the-mood-for-another-round quality about it. Yet it is a great song.

I love this band, one of my favourite discoveries of the past year or so. I believe they provide potent support for my theory that great bands tend to have great band names (and vice versa). Black Rebel Motorcycle Club is surely one of the coolest band names ever (it's the name of Marlon Brando's biker gang in The Wild One), and on first hearing of them, I feared that they would struggle to live up to it. But they've got a stripped-down, grungy blues-rock sound that's right up my street, and they've come up with a number of hauntingly memorable songs.

Plus, of course, their drummer is dead sexy.

And they're playing in Beijing this weekend, headlining the Intercity Music Festival in Chaoyang Park on Sunday. Wild horses couldn't keep me away (although I suppose really bad weather or a dose of the laduzi might).

Here, then, is probably their best-known song, our 12 Square Metres favourite, Beat The Devil's Tattoo. The sound's not great in this version, but it is a very cool b&w performance video.

Here's another good version, performed for Santa Monica's KCRW.

[Another great performance from a show in Seattle last year here (but the video's not very good), an interesting acoustic session recorded for Paste magazine here, and the original video (which is a bit of a non-event) here.]

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.

Great Drinking Songs (33)

We haven't had one for a while, and this - despite my not knowing any of the lyrics, much less what they might mean - has all the requisite elements of a great stomp-along pub tune (with occasional burbling, gurgling, and shouting in lieu of being able to join in with the words): catchy tune, boisterous attitude, and competitive acceleration towards the end. As far as I know, it is just called 'Drinking Song', and it is a traditional Mongolian party tune which has become the regular showstopper for Beijing-based Mongol folk-rockers Hanggai.

Does this mean I am getting nostalgic for The Jing? Well, maybe just a little. I'm not in any rush to get back for another month or so, though; not until after the shitty summer weather - the stifling humidity, the choking smogs, the torrential downpours - has begun yielding to the clearer skies and less intense heat of early autumn.

And here's an even better version, in which they are accompanied by the Catalan band La Pegatina, who visited Beijing last year.