Take this sinking boat and point it home, we still have time

7 Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, ‘ Falling Slowly’

Music and film is a tough act to pull off; almost as tough as football and film (name one movie about football that stars football greats, has a great storyline, and acting to match! You can’t can you, because - there aren’t any).

Here are the ingredients for a great film about music – musicians who play themselves in the movie (or at least play creditable musicians), great songs played throughout the movie, a creditable storyline. Not much to ask for? I can only think of three movies that meet that criteria: A Hard Day’s Night, Head (by The Monkees) and Once.

I haven’t seen Slade in Flame but I’ve heard good things about it over the years so it may deserve a place. 200 Motels may also qualify but again, I haven’t seen it. And that’s it! Lame musicals can’t qualify. Neither rock documentaries nor music concerts qualify because they’re not fictional. Prince’s films (even Purple Rain) miss out on the storyline front. Elvis? You’ve got to be kidding.

That leaves my stand alone three, and Head is a distant third (debateable musicianship and the plot doesn’t bare scrutiny). What makes Once so great is partly that section when Glen (the guy) is teaching Marketa (the girl) Falling Slowly in the music shop. Clearly a set up (no one learns a song that fast do they?) but believable all the same. The song, of course, is awesome and I fall in love with Marketa every time I see her. Her ‘acting’ is unbelievably great. The first time I watched it in a state of ignorance. Naturally, I loved the film and watched the credits as is my wont. I did a check of the film’s music and realised the actors had written and sung the songs. Of course, it’s the other way ‘round, musicians were acting, but that’s how good the acting is.

The song itself, Falling Slowly, builds to those stretched out vocal sections (on 'time', 'now' and 'along') and has a neat series of changes as Glen points out. The lyrics are about a love that is fragile but there is hope in the song. I prefer love songs like this one to lead me away from despair. The sinking boat in the song can make it home because, ‘We still have time’. Hurrah! The boat is half...erm...empty.

Sha da do wop, da shaman do way, We like birdland.

6 Dave Brubeck, ‘Take Five’; 7 Charlie Parker ‘Romance without finance’

I dabble in jazz. I have all the biggies – Coltrane, Rollins, Davis, Parker, Hancock, Getz, Byrd, MacLean, and Monk – and I genuinely enjoy listening to them, but I know I don’t get jazz like jazz lovers do. Otherwise I’d have a lot more in my collection. The Brubeck and Parker songs are two that I can hum for you and they are significant for very different reasons.

There was no avoiding jazz in my house. My father, God bless him, played it a lot and LOUD! He especially liked Dave Brubeck. I can remember thumbing through his albums and the Brubeck covers always stood out. I wasn’t sure about Dave though. He didn’t look much like a hip musician with those heavy black horn-rimmed glasses, short hair and suit. He looked like my dad!! Jazz guys were supposed to look hip, cool, and …well…black. Dave wasn’t. He reeked of whiteness. And geekhood - he played piano! I studied that Time Out cover a lot. It was sharp lines, edges and semi-circular shapes. No squares, but there should have been. The back cover talked about time signatures and other esoteric stuff like the emancipation of jazz that bored me rigid. Music is about feeling, right? Nevertheless I found myself playing the album from time to time and falling for the charms of Take Five. It began to take on a cool all of its own – even though played by the Bill Haley of the jazz world, and has now become a kind of shorthand for those fabulous fifties. Go figure.

Charlie Parker, on the other hand, was, to me, the epitome of cool when I started out on my own jazz collection, and the real deal. It helped he was black and played sax. On the Encores album that started me off, he was multi-hued with eyes closed, feeling his music. Recorded in 1944, Romance Without Finance, with vocals, was the first jazz song I could hang my hat on. Accessible, funny and with a side order of rude! When the lyric goes, “mama mama please give up that gold”, you know he ain’t about money!! In short, living in Birdland was nothing like Dave Brubeckville! But I love them both.



[No film of Parker doing this song as far as I can see.]

Would you…let me rock, let me rock?

5 Rory Gallagher, ‘Cradle Rock’

I love guitars. I love LOUD ROCK guitars. I love playing my air guitar to LOUD ROCK guitars.

My crisis in the eighties/nineties was about the dirth of guitars and the prevalence of synthesizers in music. Even Nirvana, while I love both Nevermind and Bleach albums, weren’t about guitars. Pearl Jam eventually restored my faith in rock guitars but Rory Gallagher was and always will be MY mainman! Rory was mine!

There is something great that happens when you think you and maybe ten other people in the world know and love YOUR band. When I saw Rory on a grainy black and white film playing Cradle Rock on my TV in 1974, it was love at first sight. And better yet, none of my friends knew of him. I immediately had to have the Irish Tour ’74 album and cut out all the articles on him in the music magazines that I read. The audience on the record didn’t count as people who knew about Rory. They were in Cork, in Ireland! Might as well have been on a moon orbiting Jupiter as far as I was concerned. I was on the other side of the planet.

The best concert I’ve ever seen was in 1980, the Top Priority tour, Auckland Town Hall. Rory Gallagher. Imagine my surprise that the Town Hall was FULL. This audience I could relate to. They were like me – middle class, white, male, Aucklanders. Maybe it was more than 10 then. I was similarly shocked when I went to a Streettalk gig at the old (and now torn down) His Majesty’s Theatre, with Mike and Greg and Hammond Gamble played a ripping version of Rory’s A Million Miles Away. Nick Hornby also confesses a love affair with the long haired Irish god in his 31 Songs. Could it be Nick, Hammond and I weren’t alone?

Something happens after you find out that others share your passion for an artist. Actually a few things happen. Your creative instinct is partly vindicated – I wasn’t alone in my good taste; a warm glow of community is felt - those solitary guitar sessions in your bedroom were shared by thousands of other pimply boys; you, paradoxically, sense a need to share your good fortune with your friends; but also, like the Cavern’s Beatle fans – there is a sense of loss as well. That, maybe, shock horror, they weren’t really yours after all. But that’s okay – you move onto the next group/singer/guitarist that no one else knows much about and you spread the gospel. Have you heard Silent Alliance?

But now and then I find myself, Thinkin' of the days

3 The Carpenters, ‘Rainy days and Mondays’; 4 Jim Croce, ‘Alabama Rain’

The significance is not in the rain that links these two songs, but in the emotional memories they trigger for me.

There are no other songs in this list that I can link specifically to people. For instance – Jacky and I do not have ‘our song’, although I can link some songs to the time we started going out together – U2’s War album, Human League’s Dare and the Four Tops form something of an eclectic soundtrack but it’s all in the background.

When it comes to my mother and her mother, it’s another matter altogether. The Carpenters’ song will forever remind me of my much missed mum, no matter how many times I watch About a Boy. She loved the song when it came out and I bought the single for her in 1971 (I have it now and it never leaves my collection!). I thought it was soppy and I probably, kinda guiltily, explained to the shop assistant that it was for my mother when I bought it.

I’m not sure why she liked it…actually I’m not even sure she liked it that much. Maybe it was a way of connecting to me and my love of music at that time. That would make sense because she knew me like no one else. The fact is she didn’t really like pop music that much. Her era had been the jazz of Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee style singers. Curiously – even though she’d worked in record stores before meeting my father, she never played much music around the house, unlike my dad and me. My brother shares her taste and disinterest in music which is interesting.

When I hear it now, I don’t feel any particular sadness. It’s been 26 years since she died and I miss her everyday anyway, without needing a song to do it for me. Listening to it now I can hear the quality in Karen's voice and that smoothness may have reminded mum of Peggy Lee, but I'll never know now.

Alabama Rain, however, is another story. The wistful tones of Jim Croce’s song always, always, make me think about my grandmother and the relationship we had. It was a very strong bond, we had, and the song somehow touches on that bond. I’ve never been to Alabama so it can’t be that. I’ve lived even longer without her (she died ten years earlier than my mum, in 1973). Somehow.

Curious, isn’t it, how music can do this. Even more curious is that these are the only two songs in all the thousands I own, and millions I’ve heard, that can broadside me in this way.



[no video of Jim doing Alabama Rain that I could find - some weak covers only that don't do the song justice.]

Sun melting the fake smile away

2 Eels, ‘Grace Kelly Blues’.

This list comprises songs that have a particular significance for me. Many songs have come and gone since I started listening to the radio in the sixties and collecting records in the seventies. Many have been important songs but they haven’t been significant for me.

For instance, the punk years happened when I was finishing at Mount Albert Grammar (age 19 – a late bloomer) in 1976 and starting at Auckland University age 20, in 1977. Theoretically then, I should have a punk song in the list and it should be God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols, right? Sure enough I bought the single, and Pretty Vacant when it followed. But it was merely a great rock and roll song for me (in a picture sleeve) – not of any lasting significance. Maybe if I’d been living in Britain…I don’t know. Instead I was very comfortable, living at home in New Zealand suburbia. I had a very advantaged home life so I had nothing in particular to rebel against. I was finally finished with school and loving being in my self-indulgent university years.

God Save the Queen sounded like a great guitar driven song – the lyrics slightly comical and Johnny Rotten’s sneer was great but in a vauda-villain way I wasn’t taking him seriously. When I saw them on TV, one of the band had a knotted handkerchief on his head – like a Benny Hill parody of the English at the beach. My suspicions were confirmed. Besides I LOVED progressive bands like Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Jethro Tull, and Pink Floyd. I certainly didn’t want to replace them with the bratty punk bands I read about in Sounds magazine.

What I did understand in 1977, though, was the need from time to time to have a kind of musical purge of the old. No one, least of all me, can absolve Yes’ Tales of Topographic Oceans double album from blame. I’ve tried to love it and the first side is good but then it just spins around in meaningless babble. So the punk thrash enema did do some good (even Yes came up with the great Going for the One as a result).

Fast forward…during the late eighties and nineties I felt increasingly disillusioned with music. Aside from the grunge excitement of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, all I seemed to be hearing was drums and bass, techno, house music with no soul. Even worse my beloved pop music had been taken over by the excreable Kylie Minogue. Stock Aitken and Waterman and their mindless computer beats signified processed cheese for me. I hated it!

One day in 1999 I was staying with the Marbeck family for some reason, and my friend Roger put on the Elton John album and song Madman Across the Water. I remember going into a rant/moan about the kinds of music available these days and that there was no quality like the Madman song anymore. Roger said, ‘Listen to this’, and put on Eels album Daises of the Galaxy. First track was Grace Kelly Blues and an all around moment of epiphany. Someone was, joy o joy, still writing meaningful music that was great to listen to.

The brass band opening immediately got my attention, then those fantastic acoustic guitar strums start up and wash away in moments all those haunted years of synth hell. I knew at that moment what the Pistols had meant to those who got it in 1977. God bless you, Mr E.

Forty-nine reasons, all in a line, all of them good ones

1 The Beatles ‘Don’t Let Me Down’.

I read Nick Hornby's 31 Songs book from time to time. It may be the book I've read most often actually - next contenders would be Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig and Giles Smith’s Lost in Music. Mostly I dip into all three from time to time and I've read them completely 3 or 4 times each. So I thought - why not - if it's good enough for Nick, it's good enough for me. The Steve Stills lyric flashed into my head next (I've left out the third line 'all of them lies' for obvious reasons) so, instead of 31 I'll try for 49!

Nick starts his journey with the song he's heard the most often in his life - Springsteen's Thunder Road. I'm not sure how he came to that conclusion though. Trying to quantify the number of times you've heard a single song is pretty tough isn't it? Well actually, no, it's not. This is what makes someone a music lover: an answer to the question – what’s the song you’ve heard most often? Non music lovers (who wouldn’t be reading this blog anyway) would shrug and go, ‘I dunno – why do you even care?’

For me the answer is The Beatles’ relatively obscure b-side to the Get Back single – Don’t Let Me Down. Nothing else comes close? The rest of the Beatles catalogue is up there fersure but Don’t Let Me Down has entered my DNA.

My first hearing was in 1970, on the Hey Jude compilation. I was way too young to understand, at that time, the intensity of feeling that love has, I was 13, and it wouldn’t be for another 13 years that I would fall in love for the first time. But I could connect with the intensity and passion of the repeated don’t let me downs that Lennon sings with such singular warning. It’s an extraordinary statement really – on one hand he is firm that ‘dontcha know it’s gonna last’ and then the hedged bet plea to Yoko – not to let him down. In the years since I’ve always come back to this song – easily my favourite Beatle/Lennon song – and thrilled to George’s recurring guitar riff, Billy’s electric piano, Macca’s fluid bass, Ringo’s inventive drumming and Lennon’s unique vocal. As I’ve alluded to, in 1983 I met Jacky and the song made a whole new sense to me. I got the insecurity and dread that the lyric holds in a real way at that time. The way Lennon repeats each lyric by heaping on the expression and volume is really real, basic and primal, and true!

I never get bored with this song – it has enough twists and turns in it to always hold my interest and it’s simple enough and raw enough to never lose its novelty. Somehow (somehow) it always sounds new – I’m in love for the first time! Such a simple statement, such a complex statement – I’m sure he did actually love his Aunt Mimi, his mother Julia and the other sisters, I’m sure he loved Cynthia – the letters he wrote to her bare all. But his love for Yoko was another girl, another planet. It was a new and first time.

I love Lennon’s music, I love The Beatles, but I love this one, and I’ve listened to this one, the most!

My body is shaking, anticipating, the call of the black footed crow...

Still sick and still listening to those albums I wrote about in the last post in case you're wondering. When I went to my collection to suss out if I had any other tortured genius albums I noticed that I own way too many Deep Purple albums. Maybe I should do a cull...

Here's my list to choose from (and apologies right now if you're a DP completist pish-poshing the lack of Shades of Deep Purple etc - I just said I had a lot of their albums - not every one):

Fireball (CD)
Deep Purple In Rock (CD)
Machine Head (vinyl/CD)
Deep Purple Singles A's and B's (vinyl)
Made in Japan (vinyl/CD)
Deep Purple In Concert (vinyl)
Who Do We Think We Are? (CD)
Burn (CD)
Stormbringer (CD)
Made in Europe (vinyl/CD)
California Jamming - Live 1974 (CD)
Come Taste The Band (CD)
Knebworth '85 (CD)
Purpendicular (CD)
Abandon (CD)
Perfect Strangers (CD)
Live At The Olympia '96 (CD)
The House Of Blue Light (CD)
Deep Purple (CD)
Bananas (CD)
Live At Montreaux 2006 (CD)

My top 5 from this lot are pictured throughout this post. The picture is of my favourite Mark II Purple line up.

The love affair began with In Rock and the cover of Fireball. 1971, my first year at Mt Albert Grammar School, and, man - am I naive. I have no idea that Black Sabbath's Sweetleaf is actually a love song to cannabis. I have no idea The Who's Pictures of Lily is about masturbation. I have no idea period. Drug and sex references woosh over my head and will do for the next few years of teenage boy fog until I get to University and see phallic symbols everywhere. Who knew? Well not me, not then. I do remember seeing the Fireball cover in a Woolworths' record rack. It looked cool and made an impression - all that hair! But it wasn't until I took a punt on In Rock from the RCA Record Club monthly catalogue that I discovered the raging rock behemoth that was mark II Purple. Machine Head and Made in Japan followed - the vinyl copies becoming prized possessions.

So - what is non-essential in my list?

Clearly the albums fall into the distinct Mark I, II, III... groups. The Deep Purple double is an oddball collection containing a recent live reworking of their Concerto for Group and Orchestra on one CD and career spanning songs on the other. It's not essential but it only cost me $2 (it's on a budget Dutch company imprint) and it's decent enough. With the singles collection, it's the only other link to Mark I Purple that I own so I'll hang onto those. It's not my favourite period as you can see.


Mark II however, now that's a different story. Classic Purple obviously with Ritchie Blackmore as rock guitar god defining this period. Ian Gillan's best period for vocals and the dynamic rhythm section of Paice and Glover also at their best. Clearly it's all essential? Well, a qualified 'yes' - except for the '85 Knebworth reunion artifact (bizarrely subtitled 'In the absence of pink') that is pretty shambolic with Jon Lord the worst offender and Gillan's stoopid between song banter grating immediately. Lord was clearly having a off day with some of the worst keyboard sounds to be found anywhere. This one may have to go! Perfect Strangers, however is the reunion album and is my top 5 so I can't let that one go - even though it's not up to the peaks of their 70's output.

Mark III is the Coverdale/Hughes period which is also absolutely essential. Made in Europe is no Made in Japan but it's great in its own way. Coverdale's Mistreated vocal is awesome.

Mark IV (with Tommy Bolin replacing Blackmore) is the shortest lived period but also essential. I like the change to a funkier sound, but it's not really Purple as we know them.

Mark V (with Steve Morse) has been at it a while now and even though Ian Paice is the only original member left in the band from 1968, they are still unmistakeably Deep Purple and Steve Morse, while not a god, is a fantastic guitarist. But essential? Well, no - to be honest. But there is enough hard rock bravado going on for me to hesitate parting with any. If pushed I'd abandon Abandon but it has some good moments - just a little samey is all. Bananas is surprisingly good, despite the weird cover, and almost made my top 5.

If you only have time and money for one - Machine Head is king!